Chomsky On Power, Memory, And Media

We weigh the stories nations tell about themselves against the record of wars, sanctions, and deterrence, and test whether intentions matter less than outcomes. From Vietnam to Venezuela, NATO to North Korea, we press for clearer language, broader history, and fewer illusions.

• Emerson and Hawthorne as mirrors of intellectual courage and conformity
• Vietnam’s legacy, media limits, and moral judgment versus “mistake” framing
• NATO at Russia’s border, ABM systems, and Cold War lessons revived
• Sanctions in Venezuela and Iran as civilian punishment, not reform
• China, innovation, and the politics of intellectual property
• Korean-led steps toward deescalation and deterrence realities
• Trump’s media strategy, party capture, and fear as a political tool
• Climate risk, nuclear posture, and the real election interference: money
• Syria’s devastation, Kurdish safety, and difficult tradeoffs
• Israel, the Golan Heights, and shifting U.S. support coalitions

Patreon subscribers can find the full video of this program immediately at patreon.com/OriginsPodcast

Chapters

• 0:00 Opening And Chomsky’s Intellectual Lineage
• 3:30 Emerson, Hawthorne, And The Role Of Intellectuals
• 7:51 Vietnam War Memory And Media Boundaries
• 19:08 American Exceptionalism And NATO At Russia’s Border
• 27:03 Cuba, Missiles, And Lessons That Rhyme
• 33:53 Sanctions, Venezuela, Iran, And Doing “Good”
• 40:08 China, IP, And Kicking Away The Ladder
• 46:48 North Korea, Deterrence, And Letting Koreas Lead
• 53:03 Trump’s Media Grip And Party Realignment
• 1:01:18 Fear Politics, Gun Culture, And Social Fragility
• 1:07:58 Climate Risk, Oligarchy, And Real Election Interference
• 1:15:18 Syria’s Rubble, Kurds’ Safety, And Hard Tradeoffs

Transcript

SPEAKER_01: 0:46

And welcome to the Origins Podcast on Lawrence Krauss. What's left to say about Noam Chomsky? He's known throughout the world as perhaps the most important living public intellectual, and his writing has been cited more than almost any author in the arts and humanities over recent decades. And he's literally the father of modern linguistics. Noam served as a role model for me since I took a class from him in US foreign policy while doing my PhD in physics at MIT. And I watched him speak throughout Cambridge with generosity and intelligence. We did a dialogue on stage three years ago for the Origins Project, and we discussed a host of things from language and consciousness to politics. That was before Donald Trump and Brexit and all that, however, and I was happy to have the opportunity to update our dialogue. As always, he was incisive, informative, provocative, and brilliant, as well as providing a unique treatment of issues one simply does not hear discussed in the US media, making it incredibly important to hear from him today. Patreon subscribers can find the full video of this program immediately at patreon.com slash Origins Podcast. I hope you enjoy the show. Noam, it's great to have you back here. We you and I had one of my favorite conversations before the public, I think three years ago now. It's three years. I think it seems uh it's hard to believe. Um, but I I I time it by knowing that it was before Trump was elected. So I because it seems that's what what's amazing in three short years, it seems like so much has happened in so many weeks. BT and B A T A T. That's right, exactly. And uh but that's not just all Trump. It I mean, all the things that happened. There's what's happened in North Korea and Syria and Israel and Venezuela, Brazil. It's just amazing that what seems to have happened in those three years, and it even in our own countries. There's there's free speech debates, there's all sorts of things, and I'll want to talk about some of that. But at the same time, the more things change, the more they remain the same. So there's all sorts of new issues, but but the underlying causes and impact may not be so different. I wanted to, and you know, when I was thinking about that, I I for I was looking at what we said to each other, and then I was reminded of a book I had been reading uh recently, which is an old book from the 1960s, by Richard Hofstadter called Anti-Intellectualism in America. And and it was interesting for me to read that because it was written in response to McCarthyism. It was written in 1961 or so. And I thought I'd begin to put this in context in a quote at the beginning of that book from 1961, where he quoted Emerson, who wrote, Let us honestly state the facts. Our America has a bad name for superficialness. Great men, great nations have not been bolsters and buffoons, but perceivers of the terror of life and have manned themselves to face it. So I thought I'd ask you to comment on that on that, and then and then we can move into recent politics.

SPEAKER_00: 4:04

Well, uh Emerson was a very interesting thinker, but uh in many respects he uh unfortunately uh illustrated the things that he's criticizing. I agree. So take, for example, uh to something not irrelevant today, his attitude toward the Civil War. At the very beginning he was a pacifist. In fact, he was uh, in a sense, in favor of the war. He thought it would break down the state, it would break down state power, so maybe it would be beneficial. Uh after the Battle of Bull Run, he became uh uh enthusiastic uh superpatriate, uh, very much the way intellectuals do all the time. As soon as the conflict begins, we're enthusiastic for our own side. In fact, if you look back at the transcendentalists, his group, uh some of the most distinguished intellectuals uh in the United States, certainly, maybe anywhere, uh one uh didn't go along with the tide. Uh Nathaniel Hawthorne. Uh-huh. And he was kind of uh excluded. In fact, there's a very interesting article you might want to read if you have it in the uh Atlantic Monthly. Uh Hawthorne, towards the end of the war, about 1964. Um, decided to uh just travel through the South to see, by then the outcome of the war was reasonably clear. And uh he wrote an article which was uh supportive of the North, uh, you know, uh but skeptical. For example, he interviewed uh prison southern prisoners of war in a fairly sympathetic way. He said, look, these are just rural farmers, uh uh they're not war criminals, they were uh brought up uh to defend their homes and so on. We should treat them decently. Anyway, the interesting thing about the article is not only his commentary, which is interesting, but the interpolations. Uh the editors agreed to have it published, but only if they were allowed, and this is a liberal the liberal intellectual journal, if they were allowed to interpolate comments uh criticizing what he wrote along the way. So there you have Hawthorne's moderately sympathetic view to people who are defeated and suffering, and the liberal intellectuals interpolating, so no, you have to be a superpatriot. You can't say these things. It's very instructive about uh intellectual history in many ways. In fact, if you look at the history of intellectuals, it works very much like this. So shortly after this period came uh the Dreyfus trial, uh which actually is the first time that the word intellectual starts being used in its modern sense. And uh it's very interesting that we w today we honor the Dreyfus arts, Emil Zoli and so on. Sure. Not then. They were bitterly attacked by the uh immortals of the Academie Française. Uh uh how dare you, uh mere writers and artists uh criticize our grand institutions, you know, the state, uh so on. Uh fast for uh Zola actually had to flee the country. Yes, sure. Let's go forward to not long before we met, late 60s, uh 66, 67, roughly then. Uh McGeorge Bundy, uh former Harvard Dean, uh leading intellectual, national security advisor for uh uh Kennedy and Johnson, had an article in Foreign Affairs, the main establishment journal, in which he uh said he discussed the criticism of the Vietnam War. He said, yes, there are legitimate criticisms uh about the tactics and so on. And then there are what he called the wild men in the wings, uh people like uh Hawthorne and Zola, who are not only criticizing the tactics, but are raising questions about our motives. I assume you were one of the wild men in the wings, though. Absolutely, very far out in the wings. And this is a theme that runs through basically all of history. You go back to classical Greece, uh, who drank the Hemlock, uh, the guy who was corrupting the youth of Athens by asking too many questions. Yeah. Uh right up to the present. It's uh and so it's interesting to raise the question of Emerson, who was a very distinguished, uh, honorable figure, but not immune.

SPEAKER_01: 10:44

Well, no, and I I I I like that quote because of the many-sided aspects of it, because of his background, and also this notion, of course, great nations have not been boasters and buffoons, which sort of resonates in some ways in the current times. But this and this idea of whether anti-intellectualism it has been prevalent and to what extent it's good or bad. Um It's a good question. And yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 11:07

So for example, the there are several kinds of intellectuals. There's the wild men in the wings, and there are the what are sometimes called the stenographers of power. Yeah. And uh one has to make up one's own mind, but I think you can certainly have different attitudes towards them.

SPEAKER_01: 11:25

Well, you know, I uh we were talking about lunch that I learned uh uh from you when the first time we met, when which was when I was sitting in a course in American foreign policy when I was a student at MIT. Um a shocking fact, which to me just surprised me because I'd always kind of revered academia and I've it's been a part of my life ever since. But the realization that in some ways during the Vietnam War, the last group to accept the immorality of that war was were the academics, which which I always thought, maybe because I knew of you, but I I'd always thought somehow the academics were leading it. But it was the students, it was the public. You maybe you can go into a little bit.

SPEAKER_00: 12:04

Oh, I would broaden it beyond academics to the general intellectual community, uh, with some exceptions. There always are the Mel Zolos and the Nathaniel Hawthorne and others. But uh by and large it's true. In fact, uh you get a kind of a vivid picture of it. Well uh first of all, remember that opposition to the war was very late in coming. Uh the uh the war actually started in the early 50s. Uh by 1960, maybe um 60 or 70,000 people had been killed in South Vietnam just by repress the repressive government we were supporting. Uh, Kennedy escalated the war in 1961 and 1962. He uh authorized the U.S. Air Force to start uh bombing rural South Vietnam under South Vietnamese markings, but nobody was fooled. Uh authorized Napom uh began, and this was very serious, uh, chemical warfare to destroy crops and livestock to try to drive the uh rural population into concentrated areas, what are called strategic hamlets where they were being protected against the guerrillas who uh the US government knew very well they were supporting, we know this from internal documents that have been released, uh was no protest, none. Uh uh in fact, just to give you an example, when uh uh 1965, I guess, I was uh sixty-four-sixty-five, uh, I happened to be spending a year at Harvard as a visiting fellow on Cognitive Science Center. Uh uh February 1965, uh the war against South Vietnam had already half destroyed the country, but the U.S. escalated the war to the north. And the individual who was primarily responsible for this was McGeorge Bundy, nationalist you recall after Pliku and so on.

SPEAKER_02: 14:05

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 14:05

Uh a couple of students. Uh uh Bundy was being uh invited, had been invited, to be the commencement speaker at the June uh commencement for Harvard. And a couple of students uh initiated a very mild petition asking whether it's right to invite someone who's just uh launched the war against another country without provocation. Uh since I was there, they asked me to see if I could get some faculty signatures. Virtually impossible. That was 1965. By that time the war was already far advanced. Uh sh uh in fact, in October 1965, uh there was uh an international day of protest. You were probably in elementary school at the time, so you didn't know about it.

SPEAKER_01: 14:59

Yeah, we're still in elementary school. And in Canada, that was also made it. But it wasn't International Day of Protest. It's interesting because you uh you know, so this was 65. Yeah, because one thinks of the protests as being later, of course, but already and maybe the American meet it, maybe you're gonna get Well, what what happened is interesting.

SPEAKER_00: 15:17

I'm talking about Boston, maybe the most liberal city in the country. Yeah. Uh we decided to try to have a demonstration in Boston to join the international demonstrations. Uh we went to the Boston Common, you know, the startered place where I was supposed to be one of the speakers. Totally broken up by counter-demonstrators, mostly students, incidentally, coming to smash up this demonstration. Uh, the Boston Globe, maybe the most liberal paper in the country. You look at the front page the next day, it was denouncing the demonstrators. How dare you uh uh very much like the uh mortals of the Academy of Française, how dare you uh attack our noble institutions and so on. This is October 1965. Uh by then uh there was another International Day of Protest in May, in uh March, I think, 1966. We decided we can't have a public meeting, we'll have a meeting in the church, Arlington Street Church, church was attacked. At that time, Vietnam had literally almost been destroyed. At that, just to give in, uh Bernard Fohl, who was the most respected uh military historian, Vietnam expert, uh no dove, incidentally, but cared about the Vietnamese. Uh, he wrote at that time uh that uh he doubted that Vietnam would survive as a cultural and historical entity under the most serious attack that had ever been launched against an area that size, were words roughly like that. And that was at the point when we in the liberal city of Boston, we couldn't have a demonstration in a church without it being attacked. Well, after that, finally, uh uh uh an opposition movement developed, mostly young people, students, and so on. But let's fast forward up to 1975 when the war ended. Uh as soon as the war formally ended, of course everyone had to write about it. Yeah, yeah. What what did it mean? And uh you look across the spectrum of public opinion uh expressions, public media, major media, and uh they kind of break up into the hawks and the doves. So roughly the hawks saying uh we were stabbed in the back, uh we didn't fight hard enough, uh if we'd fought harder we could have won, and so on. Uh the doves are always much more interesting. They set the kind of limits of uh possible thought this far, but not a millimeter farther. So you go way to the end, say Anthony Lewis, the New York Times, strong critic of the war, libertarian, a very interesting article. He uh said uh the war began, he said, with blundering efforts to do good. Uh blundering because it didn't work, uh to do good because that's a tautology. You don't give arguments for that. That's kind of like saying two plus two equals four. Yeah. He's not a wild man in the wings. Yeah. He said by nineteen sixty-nine it was clear that it was a disaster. Uh we could not bring democracy to Vietnam at a cost acceptable to ourselves. So it was really a terrible mistake. Now, up to the present, about as far as you can go to the critical side is to say it was a mistake. Very interestingly, at that point, uh public opinion was being carefully sampled. Chicago Council on Foreign Relations does extensive studies of public opinion, very scholarly. Uh their nineteen sixty-five, sixty-six, roughly then. Their report uh also, of course, asked questions about what do you think about the Vietnam War and the answers were interesting. Uh about seventy percent of the population said it was not a mistake. It was fundamentally wrong and immoral. Now that question kept being asked for another fifteen years or so, up to about roughly nineteen ninety. The answers were all approximately the same. Uh they stopped asking it after a while. Yeah. The last time they asked it, the uh distinguished social scientist, serious social scientist who was in charge of the surveys, uh, John Reeley, asked the question in the comments, uh, what do people mean when they say this? And he said, Well, what they mean is uh too many American lives were being lost. Well, that's possible. Yeah. Would have been possible to find out to ask another question. Exactly. But the other possible answer, namely they meant what they were saying, is just on the totally discounted. You know, this is the history of intellectuals.

SPEAKER_01: 20:12

Well, you know, okay, well, we'll and we'll come back to that because I want to circle around to that eventually in a different context. But let let's and one of the reasons I was happy to start with historical perspective is of course it's always it's always good to to look at the present in that context. I was just reading uh uh what is now one of my favorite quotes of Mark Twain who said that history may not repeat itself, but it sure rhymes a lot. And uh um I want to talk about the in that context what's happening around the world, uh both what's really happening and the perceptions of what's really happening, from domestically uh to foreign wars. We could I mean we could talk for hours about that, but we'll see if we can limit this. Okay. But let's pick, let's pick what's going on. Um, you pick your favorite. We could start with uh you know Venezuela, we could start with North Korea, we could start with Israel or Trump. I want to I want to sort of sort of go through these and see what what uh what we're hearing and and and what's really there. Because this notion of American exceptionalism, which just seems to be so prevalent, part of it is the notion, which which again brings me back to when I when I first met you, to this notion that somehow the United States is different because we always want to do good. Other countries have been imperial powers, but their intentions were not to do good. And I remember US saying at the time that if you asked a five-year-old, is it likely that America's foreign policy is governed by anything different than anyone else throughout all of history, they'd say it's unlikely. But somehow the perception is that intentionality is that the United States really is altruistic and the and its interventions around the world, which may have been hadn't had bad consequences, were really well intended, but they were misplaced. And I and I kind of still get I still kind of see that in in the interpretation of what's much of what's going on. So well, blundering efforts to do good.

SPEAKER_00: 21:57

Yeah, yeah. And uh notice that the five-year-old uh who you invented agreed with uh 70% of the population at the end of the Vietnam War. So so let's take today's newspaper. Yeah, okay. Uh there's a article by uh David Sankar in the New York Times, the leading one of the leading uh uh security analysts. Yeah. It was an article about how to deal with uh the Russian uh uh aggression, the new new forms of Russian aggression and intervention. And uh there's some interesting lines in it. So for example, that there's a sentence uh not just somewhere in the middle, nothing special, saying uh it's about time for he's quoting somebody correct positively as saying uh it's time for NATO to enhance its defensive capacities at the Russian border. Does that strike anyone as funny? I mean, is the Warsaw Pact uh enhancing its defensive uh actions at the Mexico border? Yeah, yeah. Well, no, we're exceptional. If we happen to have forces uh at the uh Russian border, that's because it's defensive. Uh if we have uh ABM installations at the Russian border, which do actually have dual-use capacities. Of course. And uh the article in the Bullet and the Atomic Scientist, the lead article by Theodore Postel recently pointing that out. Yes. Even if they're defensive, that's a first strike weapon. Of course. I mean it's one of the concerns, yeah, is being possible. So that's fine. That's weapon concerns. And we have them there, as President Obama said, uh, in order to protect Europe from Iranian missiles which don't exist. Exactly.

SPEAKER_01: 23:47

That always amazed me about this notion that we are protecting Europe from missiles that don't exist. Or is it just so happens that we're all defensive notes at the Russian border. At the Russian border. They it so happens they're they're pointing at the potentially at the at the Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_00: 24:00

If I were and but uh you won't see a comment about this, I'm sure, because it's it's kind of common sense.

SPEAKER_01: 24:06

It's uh And then well, I mean, you know, at the first when you say that, of course, one thinks about whether whether whether maybe putting missiles in Cuba might have been defensive. Well, in fact it was.

SPEAKER_00: 24:15

We there's very good scholarship on this by now. And it's pretty well agreed by mainstream scholarship what the reasons were for Khrushchev to make this uh very reckless move. Uh there were basically two. Uh one was just what you said uh the United States was carrying out a major terrorist war. Against Cuba. Very serious terrorist war. Sure. And if the Russians may not have known the details, but they certainly roughly knew what was going on. Certainly Cuba did. In uh August 1962, uh Kennedy uh issued a national security memorandum, which called on the terrorist operations, Operation Mongoose, to be enhanced, leading to an effort to create an insurrection in Cuba, which would lead to U.S. intervention in October 1962. Well, that's when the missiles went in. I don't think Castro and Khrushchev read the internal documents, but you could see what was happening on the ground. That's one reason. There was another. Uh in uh Khrushchev, when he took took office, uh recognized something pretty obvious that uh uh uh that Russia could not compete economically with the United States. In fact, Western Europe alone counterbalanced Russia easily, let alone the United States and Canada. Uh so what he urged was uh a uh reduction, uh a mutual reduction in offensive weapons, uh uh uh in order to allow Russia to move towards economic development. The Kennedy administration considered this, rejected it, and instead, although they knew they were way ahead militarily, launched the biggest uh arms buildup in history. Yeah, it was a very big thing. And uh uh shortly after this, uh uh uh uh one of the reasons for Khrushchev's uh placing the missiles in Cuba was to try to somehow minimally balance this. Uh notice incidentally that there was a crucial issue that almost led to the nuclear war. Uh the United States had uh was surrounding Russia with uh missiles with nuclear weapons, of course. That's like our defensive uh behavior at the Russian border, yeah. Uh including uh missiles in Turkey, uh pol um the Jupiter missiles in Turkey. And uh Kennedy actually didn't know about this. Uh he made some comment uh to McBundy saying it was it's as if we had missiles in Turkey, and McBundy said, Well, Mr. President, turned out they were obsolete missiles. Uh-huh. A withdrawal order was already in process because they were being replaced by essentially invulnerable Polaris uh submarines. So much more lethal and invulnerable. So they were being replaced, they're obsolete. Uh Hershev put missiles in Cuba to sort of try to nowhere near a balance, but to compensate slightly for the overwhelming US advantage and its refusal to uh not only refusal to go along with this offer to reduce missiles but uh weapons, but even enhancing them. Uh through the crisis, as you recall, this issue of the missiles in Turkey became critical. Yeah. October 27th, uh, peak moment of the crisis, uh Khrushchev uh actually wrote a letter to Kennedy saying, let's get out of this before we blow the world up. Uh we'll remove the missiles from Cuba, you remove the missiles from Turkey, we'll do it publicly, and it'll all be over. Uh at that time, Kennedy's subjective estimate of the probability of nuclear war was reported to be about a half, a third to a half, you know, not utterly outlandish.

SPEAKER_02: 28:29

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 28:29

He refused. Um this is considered his and then Khrushchev basically backed down. Yeah. So they made a kind of a secret agreement, but nothing public. Yeah, we have a secret agreement. The meaning is we have a right to keep in on the Russian border obsolete missiles, which we're replacing by even more lethal ones, but they don't have a right to have anything anywhere near us. Uh very similar to today. So uh we have the right to enhance our defensive uh capabilities on the Russian border, which are already enormous. But if the Russians dare to send anything to Venezuela, we're gonna blow the world up. History rhymes. Exactly.

SPEAKER_01: 29:15

And it's it's useful to think about it. Yeah, well, get in fact, I was it's a nice segue. I'm glad you, because I was gonna go to Venezuela. But at the same time, I uh it's also worth mentioning that um in terms that the United States also was very uh by that point it we it it it I think it had it had subsided. But the United States, especially during the period of extreme military superiority, were very seriously considered first strikes as a uh in order to never renounced first strikes. Yeah, we've never renounced first strikes. Most people don't realize that we still have that. We've never said we won't strike first. Uh um uh uh but what we've but at the time there were serious discussions of a real first strike in order to before Russia uh or the Soviet then Soviet Union was able to catch up. And uh Well these Dan Ellsberg's book, which I'm sure you've read. Well that's later on my list. Yeah, yeah. In fact, I read it because of you, so I want to come back to that. So we'll come back. But I think you made the perfect segue because I wanted to hit Venezuela. In this concept, I mean, here we are doing trying to quote unquote, at least if you read the papers, do good in Venezuela. We're we're and and uh whether it's blundering or not. So so I would like to hear your perspective of our uh doing goodness in Venezuela.

SPEAKER_00: 30:27

Well, what we're doing in Venezuela is uh imposing extraordinarily harsh sanctions, uh, which are cutting off virtually the entire income of the country and strangling the population. Oh, the population's opposed to the sanctions. Uh, the leading uh uh economist of the opposition, a serious economist, uh Francisco Rodriguez, one of the most serious commentators on this, uh, he's opposed to the sanctions. He says they're turning a serious problem into an utter catastrophe. But we keep doing it because we're trying to do good. Uh we want to put into power our own guy, uh Guaido. Nothing much is known about him except that uh he's a strong supporter of uh the neofascist uh Bolsonaro who was just installed next door. That's another story. Uh so uh all kinds of criticism of the Maduro government, uh which are quite legitimate.

SPEAKER_01: 31:30

Yeah, I was gonna say one should criticize.

SPEAKER_00: 31:31

I mean, that government isn't is not. I think it's very repressive. It's carrying out horrible economic policies, a lot wrong with it. But uh why do we have the right to uh impose uh the government of our choice by strangling the population into uh submission? Well, there's nothing new there.

SPEAKER_01: 31:47

I mean we try that's what we try and do in Iran, right? I mean and doing the same thing in Iran. I mean the idea is the po who's getting hurt by by sanctions in Iran?

SPEAKER_00: 31:54

Well, the population. But what again, what right do we have to do that? In fact, you could ask the same question about China. Uh it's taken for granted across the board, I can't find an exception, that it's legitimate for the United States and Europe, in fact, mostly the United States, to try to impede China's economic development. Uh they're moving forward, they're trying to move forward with a particular form of economic development. Uh say we don't like the way they're doing it, so we'll try to block their economic development. Is that legitimate? In fact, there are other questions. The sticking point in the negotiations right now, according to Trump, is uh intellectual property rights. Uh they are uh not observing uh intellectual property rights. What that means is uh exorbitant uh patent restrictions radically uh opposed to free trade built into the World Trade Organization system to protect U.S. corporations. So we want Bill Gates to be the richest man in the world, so therefore there's a essentially monopoly for Windows. Uh pharmaceutical prices have to go out of sight, so therefore this huge patent uh c uh restrictions on uh for pharmaceuticals. Suppose China decided not to observe them. Who suffers? Well, Bill Gates will have a little less money. Uh users of uh computers will be able to find better programs than Windows. Uh pharmaceutical corporations, instead of having f you know trillions of dollars, will only have a few trillions. Uh uh people will be able to buy cheaper drugs. Uh I mean it's argued that this would cut back innovation. But if you look into it, that's not the way innovation takes place. Uh take, say, Windows. I mean, I don't have to tell you the development of computers, software, internet, and so on, that was all at taxpay most of it at taxpayer expense for decades. In fact, the same with pharmaceuticals. There's a good reason why if you walk around MIT, uh you see uh uh pharmacy you see Pfizer, uh you know, artists, they're all there kind of feeding off the uh uh the creative uh scientific work done at the laboratories, uh mostly at government expense. If you'd gone back there uh 50 years ago, you would have seen Raytheon and my twenty. Why would it student there? And that's because electronics was kind of the cutting edge of the economy, yeah. Now it's biology. So and this is at every research university in the country, not just MIT. Sure. So so going back to China and the intellectual property, why should they uh observe the intellectual property rights which were rammed through by uh the United States and other rich countries? Now let's look at a little history. How did England develop by stealing technology from more advanced countries like India or the Low Countries, even Ireland? Uh how'd the United States developed by stealing technology from India from uh England. Uh that's why we got a textile industry, steel industry, and so on. Of course, it wasn't called stealing then, it was just uh that's the way it developed. Uh every single developed country is developed that way. Uh, then comes something that uh economic historians call uh kicking away the ladder. First you climb the ladder, then you kick it away so nobody else can do it. Well, that's kind of what lies behind all of this lies behind the uh effort to try to impede Chinese economic development by things like demanding uh intellectual property rights. Do you see any discussion of this? I not in the mainstream media that I can do. Of course you can find some. Yeah. Yeah. Dean Baker, yeah, good economist, he writes about it. But uh it's basically out of off the agenda.

SPEAKER_01: 36:05

Now I it's since one would assume that since American isn't exceptional, except sometimes maybe exceptionally bad in certain cases, but but um well, what's happened, but um is that is the reverse happening? I mean, and is and how does the United States respond to I mean, I assume uh other countries are trying to do the same thing in the United States, impede economic progress in the United States is rational.

SPEAKER_00: 36:29

There's a couple of things wrong with the concept of American exceptionalism. One is the facts, you know. Yeah, okay. The other is it's not American. Yeah. Every great power has had the same exceptionalism. Uh Britain, when it was virtually genocidal all over the world, was praising itself on its magnificence. Sure. I mean it's France had the civilized mission while the uh French minister of war was calling on the army to exterminate the population of Algeria. Uh, if we had records from Mattila the Hun, he would probably be just uh over overwhelmed with uh good good.

SPEAKER_01: 37:09

The fact that every country's thought that they've been the unique source of goodness and uh because of their powers. But there's nothing exceptional about America exceptional. Well, but since it isn't exceptional, what about is the reverse? You give me examples. Are are other countries I mean, other countries are trying to assume at least impede American economic progress, and what's the response here?

SPEAKER_00: 37:29

How can they impede American economic progress?

SPEAKER_01: 37:31

Well, well, I guess though I mean uh let me let me just uh let me give you I'm I'm not an economist, my ignorance is going to show here, but I'm assuming you should have. Yeah, I know exactly. But um I mean to some extent, China can impede American progress by being able to produce the same goods and services much more cheaply.

SPEAKER_00: 37:49

Trevor Burrus, Jr. Who's producing them in China? U.S. corporations who want to function work in China. If U.S. corporations don't like Chinese rules, they can invest somewhere else.

SPEAKER_01: 38:00

Um if anybody by the way, there's an article in today's uh New York Times that said exactly that, right? It was the response to some of the pressure from Trump, one might say is it I don't know if you saw this article, but it was basically saying there's some impact to what's going on, and some companies are are stopping having made things in China, but what they're doing is not bringing back to the United States, they're just finding another place to do it. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 38:22

Which is But uh but the idea that it's unfair for China to impose uh technology transfer restrictions or partial ownership restrictions on, say, Boeing, uh, is it's not a question of national policy. If Boeing doesn't like that, nobody's forcing them to invest there. Yeah. Okay. So what right do we have to punish them for trying to do that? Quite apart from the fact that the whole history that's how we developed, how England developed, how everybody developed.

SPEAKER_01: 38:54

Okay, let's hit some other hot button issues. Well, but we won't spend the whole time on foreign policy because I want to I want to as in our last dialogue, I want to cover a broad area. Okay, and I want to do it around books, actually. So I started with uh Emerson just for for fun. But um but let's hit North Korea. I'd I think I'd like to talk about North Korea, Syria a little bit, and maybe Brazil, because we're talking about it. It's and interestingly enough, I think, because it's something that I haven't read about uh uh before, and so uh that may be my ignorance. But anyway, so what about North Korea?

SPEAKER_00: 39:22

Well, actually, uh uh Trump is not my favorite person, as you know. Yeah. But on North Korea, basically I think he's doing the right things. And he's attacked for it on all sides. Whenever he does something more or less right, why, I don't know. Maybe he's shooting arrows randomly and some of the door. Every now and then they get it right. Whatever the reasons are. But uh let's take a look at North Korea on uh uh just the recent history. Uh April 27th, I think it was, 2017, uh the two Koreas met and issue uh negotiated and issued a very serious document, a historic document, Panmin Jong declaration. Very serious. Uh it in fact a good article about it in foreign affairs of all places. Uh for the first time, they not only made uh rhetorical commitments towards denuclearization, towards uh integration, and uh as foreign affairs pointed out, made concrete proposals here. We'll do it step by step. And then it said uh the two Koreas will do this on their own accord, crucially. Yeah on their own accord, meaning leave us alone. Uh we know who they're talking to. Yeah. Okay. Uh uh Trump is the one leading figure, for whatever reason, who's more or less observed this uh the uh Singapore uh uh summit for which Trump was bitterly denounced by the liberals, uh the con conservatives, by everyone. He basically said, Well, you guys go ahead on your own accord. Well yeah, I mean uh even uh took steps towards uh reducing what he recognized to be uh provocative military uh operations, American military operations in South Korea. Remember what's going on. And these operations, the U.S. is flying uh nuclear-capable uh uh aircraft bombers uh right at the border of a country that the U.S. wiped out, literally wiped out back in the early 50s. I mean, by the time the war settled into a kind of a stalemate, uh what was happening was the U.S. is bombing massively. They couldn't find any more targets. You read the official Air Force history, they describe how, well, we nothing to bomb, we'll just bomb the dams, which is a huge war crime. Yeah. And then it discusses how it's interesting to read how euphoric they were about bombing this huge dam and a massive flood of waters uh swamping uh uh all this area and Asians uh little bit of racism that depend on rice and where they're fleeing and they're screaming and so on. This is the country that we're now flying nuclear bombers right on their border. So, yes, it is provocative. And uh Trump said, well, let's let's cut back some of this.

SPEAKER_01: 42:35

I mean, I'm not saying what he said was wonderful, but we except what he says and what he does are not always exactly the same. I mean, and and the you know, the one thing it's interesting to me that after all this bluster, the foreign policy is somewhat coming back to what might have been considered more realistic. I mean, there's still the the the last the last dialogue broke off because once again the United States said, unless you totally disarm, we're not gonna we're not gonna uh reduce actions, which is just seems to me to be completely unrealistic.

SPEAKER_00: 43:06

Well, that's I think, you know, I don't know the inside story, but it looks like Pompeo and Bolton. Yeah. Um it seems as if Trump's instinct was to say, well, go ahead. He was kind of pushed. And remember, he's under attack from all sides. Yeah. The liberals attack him even more sharply than as sharply as the Hawks. But uh, as I say, of all the major political actors here, he seems on this issue to be the one who's closest to being what I would regard as taking the same position, letting the two Koreas proceed on their own accord as they've asked to.

SPEAKER_01: 43:44

And I think that that's what's gonna drive my own opinion, I guess, agree, is that that's what if it's gonna if this quote unquote crisis is gonna resolve itself, it's gonna happen to some extent internally if we if we allow it to be the case. That's the way to that's the only hope.

SPEAKER_00: 43:56

North Korea's powers cannot help.

SPEAKER_01: 43:58

Yeah, and North Korea, I think, real recognizes that a greater alliances with South Korea will be beneficial to it, and South Korea.

SPEAKER_00: 44:05

Well, I think President Moon is following a pretty reasonable path.

SPEAKER_01: 44:10

Well, let's say okay, since we since you mentioned the the T-word, um let's let's talk let's we'll come back foreign, but let's talk about Trump because of course that's all anyone seems to talk about. And uh discussions of Trump dominate all uh everything else. We don't hear about any other issues. And I wonder well, we maybe we can talk about that a little bit.

SPEAKER_00: 44:33

Well, Trump is a very effective con man. He's uh doing uh gotta praise him for his achievements. Yeah, narrow set of skills, but he's using them very effectively. He's got the major media completely uh wrapped around his little finger. He manipulates them totally. Uh one crazy thing after another, they talk about that, uh, then they say it doesn't make any sense, and everybody's forgotten because he's on to the next one. So one day it's uh let's eliminate the whole health system, uh, everybody attacks that, and uh two days later he says let's stop all traffic across the Mexican border, which of course would shut down the economy. Everyone points that out, and then the next day it'll be something else. Uh meanwhile, he's carrying out a very effective job. You probably saw the uh article in the New York Times a couple days ago about how uh he's totally taken over the Republican Party from top to bottom. It's now his party. And remember, uh two years ago uh the Republican establishment hated him. Yeah. Okay, now he's taken over the whole party. And he's carrying he's carrying out something pretty s first of all, this should not be much of a surprise. If you look back the last ten or fifteen years, uh even a little beyond, uh during the neoliberal period since basically Reagan, uh both parties have shifted to the right. Uh the Democrats are kind of what used to be called moderate Republicans. Uh the Republicans have just gone off the edge. Yeah, yeah. Uh the Norman Ornstein, Thomas Mann of American Enterprise Institute uh described them plausibly as a a radical insurgency which has given up parliamentary politics. Yeah, I mean the healthcare plan that now is what in Reagan's time would have been really. Like if you read Eisenhower now, he sounds like Bernie Sanders almost. I mean, we've gone so far to literally Okay, so what what's happened? So the Republicans are so I mean, both parties are essentially business parties, but the Republicans just with abject subordination to wealth and corporate power can't get votes that way. So they've been forced to try to mobilize constituencies, which in the past weren't really major political constituencies, and to try to get them to be the base of the party on what are called ridiculously cultural issues. So gun rights, uh abortion, uh religious fanaticism, uh xenophobia, whatever it may be. And if and this has been showing up in the primaries uh for quite a while. So over the past years, in every Republican primary, when somebody comes up from the base, they're out of you know, they're way out of the outfield. Uh Michelle Bachman, uh Rick Santorum, uh and and the establishment has been able to crush them, get their Mitt Romney types. The difference in 2016 was they couldn't crush him. This time the crazy guy from the outfield got in. Now the base he's got the base behind him, uh, and he's controlling them. And he's carrying out a very effective policy. How much he understands what he's doing, I have no idea. Maybe it's just megalomania. But uh he's got two constituencies, he's got to keep uh supporting him. The primary constituency is the one of the Republican Party. Uh the very rich, uh the corporate sector. Uh so okay, we hand that task over to Mitch McConnell, uh, Paul Ryan, um ram through the legislation which uh stuffs pockets with even more dollars and shafts everyone else and so on. That's going beautifully. Uh, the rich and the the corporations have profits, uh, zooming, they don't know what to do with them, trillions of dollars they can't spend. The wealthy are doing magnificently the the tax scam, the one legislative achievement. We don't have to talk about it. Yeah. So that's one constituency. Meanwhile, you've got to control the voting base. How do you do that? Throw a little red meat, uh, build a wall, uh, keep out the rapists and murderers, uh uh shift uh you know, love Israel, uh shift the embassy for the evangelicals, uh one thing after another. He's carrying it off the base, adores him while they're getting shafted.

SPEAKER_01: 49:24

I mean that's always been the remarkable thing, is how people can always vote against their own.

SPEAKER_00: 49:28

But it's it's doing very well. And what are the Democrats doing? Helping him. Uh like the focus on the Miller investigation, which was tactically crazy. Um, it was obvious from the beginning that if anything's gonna come out of that, it'll be that Trump was buying trying to build a hotel in the Red Square or something, some minor corruption.

SPEAKER_02: 49:52

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 49:53

I'm not saying that in retrospect, I've been saying it for a long time. Uh what they've done now is probably maybe even hand Trump the 2020 election by just uh instead of the real issues, like, hey, you're destroying the uh environment for uh for future life. Uh you're building up your your nuclear posture review is greatly extending the likelihood of total catastrophe. Uh you're pouring money into the pockets of the super rich and uh destroy and issuing uh regulations and uh executive orders and legislation which is harming the working class and everyone else. Instead of that, uh Trump is gonna sh uh Muller's gonna show that the Russians interfered with the election and you helped. You know, the Russians couldn't it I mean, if the Russians interfered with the elections, it was undetectable. I mean, it's trivial. Um there is, after all, massive interference with the elections. Yeah. Like they're bought. Yeah. Okay. Uh you can predict the outcome of Tom Ferguson's work as the the main work on this. You can't do it. Showing you there's a show. What he called the investment theory of politics with remarkable precision way back right through 2016, you can predict electability for the executive and Congress simply with the single variable of campaign spending, and that's just the beginning, you know. Is that interference with elections? Well, yeah, it means that uh as for good work in the academic political science shows uh most of the population is literally unrepresented. Uh their own representatives pay no attention to their preferences. They listen to other voices.

SPEAKER_01: 51:45

Do you think the Supreme Court decision in that regard in terms of uh in terms of money spent on elections was significantly changed or not?

SPEAKER_00: 51:52

It's changed, but it's changed something that already existed. Yeah, it's a meaning. You go back to uh 1895. Uh Mark Hanna, who was the famous campaign manager, was asked once uh, what does it take to run an effective campaign? He said there are two things. Uh the first thing is money, and I've forgotten what the second one is. That was 1895. Of course, uh, you know, uh the recent decisions, Buckley Valley and Citizens United, have enhanced that enormously, but it's goes way back.

SPEAKER_01: 52:27

Well, the other thing that so if you're talking about history and statements, and I forget whether it was Goering or Goebbels who said that if you want to if you want to get people to do what you want them to do, it doesn't matter whether you have a democra democracy or dictatorship, just make them afraid. And and that seems to also, in some sense, being being effective. This whole notion of immigrants being being the greatest danger facing the United States, the opposite of most of American history, in fact, uh is is I'm I'm finding it kind of amazing to see how effective works.

SPEAKER_00: 52:55

It works. I mean, uh and again, there's a long history. Uh Hofstetter talked about anti-intellectualism. Yeah. Another kind of striking feature of American culture from way back is that uh although this is the most secure country in the world by any objective standard, lucky to have oceans around. It's a very frightened country. Uh, that lies behind partly there's a lot more, but it's one of the things that lies behind this kind of incrazed gun culture. Why do you have to have uh 25 assault rifles in your closet? They're coming after me. You know, I gotta protect myself.

SPEAKER_01: 53:36

Yeah, well, and it it comes, and again, it's an issue that I hope we're gonna cut get when we come back in some sense that uh, but you know, that this recent book by John Hayde and others about the coddling of the American mind have argued that that level of being frightened it it affects people's behavior on a on a micro scale as well. The notion that every time your kids leave the house, they're in danger, and they should never be in danger and never be in risk somehow comes into the notion that they should never be uncomfortable, they shouldn't be uncomfortable in school, they shouldn't hear ideas, they don't want to, everything is a threat. And it is true, I think, that I remember when when I'm I spent a year in in uh in Switzerland when when uh at the at CERN when my daughter was younger, she was my daughter was our member at eight or nine or ten, and she was really afraid of going outside the house on her own in l living where we lived at the time. And it was remarkable to see when she was in Switzerland that you know I I would drive my car and I'd suddenly see her and her friends downtown. And and so this notion of every time you leave the house, the world is terrifying really does seem to be an American kind of And it's it's recent.

SPEAKER_00: 54:39

I mean when I was a kid in the 30s and early 40s, when I was I lived in Philadelphia, yeah, when I was uh maybe twelve years old, uh I used to take the train by myself to New York and spend the day walking around uh anarchist bookstores, and my parents didn't know what to do. That was the problem. That was very safe. They just controlled the case. But it was not considered anything like that.

SPEAKER_01: 55:03

Well, I I grew up in Canada, but it was still the same for me. In Toronto, I used to take the the the the subway car down to Tennessee baseball games.

SPEAKER_00: 55:08

When I uh we moved into the suburbs when my kids were little, uh and uh this place we I mean you can't imagine a place that's more safe. Uh kids were playing in the streets, they'd go into each other's houses and so on. You go to the same neighborhood now, you don't see a child, uh either they're inside looking at video games or they're being driven somewhere for organized activities. Uh kids, it's been in fact studied. Children don't know how to play uh spontaneously. Everything has to be controlled, they have to be watched all the time. If if they're you know, somewhere maybe in uh you know uh Oregon, uh a kid got uh kidnapped, uh everything in the country has to close down. Yeah. I mean the dangers back in the thirties and forties were far greater. But it just wasn't an issue. Yeah, I know it's very interesting. Trump knows what he's doing when he builds up uh fear of the rapists and murderers and Islamic terrorists. And just to give you an example, a couple of weeks ago uh uh Steve Bannon, you know, his kind of uh Rusbutin uh uh uh came down to uh uh uh Arizona where we live in Tucson. And there was a meeting, he ran a meeting at a very luxurious gated community south of Tucson, not too far from the border. You know, guards, gates very rich and so on. Uh the purpose he had a lot of nice people there like Chris Kobach, this guy who's trying to keep people from voting, yeah. Um there was a good report of it in uh kind of an independent Tucson newspaper, Tucson Sentinel, had a reporter there. Uh the goal of the meeting was to try to raise private money to build the wall. Because Congress is run by communists, yeah, they're not gonna do anything. Uh so all these super rich people are pitching in money to build the wall. But the discussions were interesting. Uh, people were describing how frightened they are. I mean, if there's anybody in the world safer than them, I don't know how you'd find them. Yeah. But these are people who are frightened. We've got to protect ourselves. In fact, there was one legislator there who said, I'm not only in favor of the wall. I think we ought to have a wall from the border right along the Arizona border, uh to against California all the way up to the Canadian border, because these people are going to come in from California. You know, we've got to protect ourselves. And not only do we maybe we need an army to protect us around the gated community, but and when Trump talks to the public, at least according to the reports that come up, people resonate.

SPEAKER_01: 58:01

Yeah, no, it's it it really works effectively. I I never know with Trump whether it's an accident or whether he's plan, you know, whether he really knows what he's doing, whether he just latches on by luck to an issue that that seems to resonate and he uses it up and then pick it up. He just tests to the water.

SPEAKER_00: 58:15

But he's doing that very but meanwhile you have to remember that his primary constituency, corporate power, the wealthy, uh, he's serving them with uh uh real uh dedication.

SPEAKER_01: 58:30

Would you say that in terms of, you know, I mean, I don't want to harp on this too much, but it in terms of the greatest danger if there is one of Trump being president, many people feel that the fact that he's loose canon, the fact that he does no no no it no reading, no knowledge about details about the world around him, or certainly doesn't read or listen to his advisors, would you say that's a bigger danger than the fact that effectively he's uh apparently um implementing underneath all the noise uh the the an agenda that that that you worry about or not?

SPEAKER_00: 59:01

I mean, uh there's a lot of dangers with Trump. Uh the worst one, which overwhelms everything else, is the dedication to destroy the environment. Yeah, yeah. I mean, uh that just swamps everything else. That ought to be a screaming headline every day.

SPEAKER_01: 59:17

Well, I'm surprised that if if if if private money wanted to build the wall, 8.6 billion is not a lot of money for that could easily be done. I mean, more than that spent on elections. Uh, but but interestingly enough, when you put it in perspective, talking about the environment and talking about about progress, 8.6 billion, which is what he's asking for the wall, was more is more than the entire amount, the entire budget of the National Science Foundation. I mean, if one talks about what is better for our security in the future, how about the uh subsidies to the fossil fuel industry?

SPEAKER_00: 59:52

Which is much bigger than that. How about the subsidies to the financial institutions? Uh there's some good technical studies, IMF and others, who point out that the financial institutions, which are pretty much predatory, they don't they barely help the economy, they may harm it. And they're a huge part of the economy. They are maintained effectively by public subsidy, by the implicit uh government insurance policy, which raises their credit ratings, gives them access to cheap money. Uh when you count all of that, it's pretty much their profits. Um and compared with this, uh, the Wool and the National Science Foundation aren't even visible.

SPEAKER_01: 1:00:38

Yeah, yeah. No, that's I mean, it's interesting to think about that.

SPEAKER_00: 1:00:40

I mean, and similarly, what when we come to the climate change and and that's the the two things that ought to be emphasized by the political opposition if there were one, are this dedicated commitment to destroy the prospects for organized human life within a short period, and the radical uh intensification of the already extremely dangerous uh uh arms military control.

SPEAKER_01: 1:01:09

I was gonna hit that. That those I think I know that from our discussions, those are two biggest.

SPEAKER_00: 1:01:14

I think there's another danger that we shouldn't forget. I was personally very relieved when the Miller investigation didn't come up with much, because it if they had come up with something that really implicates Trump, we would have been in deep trouble. I mean, he's a narcissistic megalomaniac. He's kind of like the magician behind the curtain and the wizard of oz. He knows that it's a very thin cover. If anything breaks, he could go for broke.

SPEAKER_01: 1:01:48

Uh there's plenty that he could do. Yeah, but I know people are worried about what, you know, what and I don't know who said it, in fact, that that that uh well maybe it's James Cole me, not someone who's I agree with all the time, but that that he was worried that that exactly that would happen and it would lead to some kind of and it would there'd be violence that would be.

SPEAKER_00: 1:02:05

Well, he's he's already indicated his dog whistling is worth listening to. So uh take his uh attacks on John McCain, which people are wondering why why is he attacking John McCain? Well, there's a very good article on this by uh Bruce Franklin, very good analyst, who's also the leading specialist on the uh POW mythology. You know, there's a a lot of the country still believes that uh the North Koreans, uh the North Vietnamese are holding all sorts of American POWs and terrible thing. And McCain is one of their villains, uh, because he's part of the myth is that he's the one who sold people out and helped keep our brave American boys there. Uh Rambo has to go in and rescue them and so on. That's a pretty big thing in a sector of the country. A sector of the country that Trump openly talks to. When he talks about how his uh bikers are tough guys and they're gonna really cause trouble, that's who he's talking to. When he attacks McCain, he's talking to them. He's throwing them the red meat. Uh this is clever politics and very dangerous. This is a very violent country. Um, there are militias all over, probably better armed than the National Guard, you know, a lot of desperate, angry people. Uh people have been hit by the stagnation of the neoliberal period. There's economic distress, uh, there's concern that uh uh somehow the whites that the white population is, as they put it, facing genocide, meaning we might not be a majority in a couple of decades. Uh all of this is very real. And when these uh dog whistling uh attacks on McCain and the uh you know the the hints about uh uh the Mexican rapists overcoming us and destroying us, all of that's talking to a sector of the population that's very real, is under a kind of distress, stem largely back from sort economic policies that right at the top that are creating uh the kinds of uh situation which we now are. There's something similar in Europe. Uh all of this converges. And when you get this, again, narcissistic megalomaniac who's a clever politician sitting right at the top of it and pulling the strings. It's it's a fragile system, but it's working and very dangerous.

SPEAKER_01: 1:04:45

Okay, well, since we're on an uplifting area, and let me try and think of um any buttons we haven't pushed yet before we move on. And I think it's we we probably should push this button at least once. So let's talk about Syria and Israel for a little bit and see if we can alienate the part of the public we haven't so far. Um uh so Syria, Israel?

SPEAKER_00: 1:05:07

Well, um, Syria's a total disaster. The country's yeah, it's been virtually destroyed. We can look at the history. But uh uh here again, uh I'm afraid I disagree with many of my friends on the left on this. Uh one of the Trump proposals uh was uh to leave a small contingent of troops in uh uh sector of northern Syria, which is mostly Kurdish. Yeah. I think that's a good idea. Uh s and you know, anti-interventionists just uh uh block out on this. We've gotta take them out. They have no right to be there and so on. But think it through for a second. Uh the Turkish uh army uh uh is uh military is carrying out uh again, it's done worse before, uh serious atrocities against Kurds in Turkey itself and in the areas of Syria that they have occupied recently offering if they move on to uh Ruchaba, the other mostly Kurdish areas, that'll just continue. What's stopping them? Small contingent of US troops which are confined to the Syrian areas and are not intervening elsewhere in Syrian affairs. I don't like US troops to be anywhere. But in this case, I think it's not out of humanitarian goals, whatever the goals may be. It may be helping to avert a serious catastrophe. I think those are things that are worth thinking about, not just kind of an axiom that says get them out, get the troops home. Period. You have to think about what the meaning is. It's not like a justification for humanitarian intervention, which is always a fraud. Yeah. This is a matter of assessing the actual situation that exists. Independent of intentions, whether it has a good interval. Totally nothing to do with intentions. It's uh those we can put aside. Uh the the intentions we know. I mean, up until under Obama, until uh about 2015, uh the US and its allies, incidentally, France, uh England, were uh believed that it would be possible to overthrow the Assad regime and were committed to doing so. Uh finally, I think it was around 2013, 2014, the US uh the CIA sent uh advanced anti-tank missiles to the opposition, which by then is mostly jihadi run, uh, which did stop the Syrian army advance. Uh, predictably the Russians intervened with more force, started sending the Air Force, took out the tow missiles, Salt Army went on. At that point, pretty much the West accepted the fact that, like it or not, this monster, and he is a monster, will probably uh control most of the country. And since then, uh whatever uh uh planning or negotiations are taking place are mostly out of the West's hands. It's uh Russia, Iran, um Syria are pretty much running the show, like it or not. And there's not a lot that no US can do about that. The uh even if it should. But uh with regard to Syria to Israel, it's there's a lot to say about this, but the uh the support what's called the support for Israel here is very reminiscent of old fashioned Stalin, isn't it? It's extraordinary when you look into it. Up to the level of books published by university presses, which are just full of outlandish lies and fabrications, denouncing anybody, me of course, who dares to raise a minor criticism about the Holy State, uh, the level of lying uh is uh spectacular. Uh it could go into examples, but it's not. Well, let me well okay, good go on, but I was. It's not even worth talking about then. But but the uh there's a kind of a desperate effort now on the part of those who supported the call themselves supporters of Israel. I don't think that's the right term. I think they're supporters of Israel's uh moral degeneration and maybe ultimate destruction, but that's another story, who call themselves supporters of Israel since the 1970s have increasingly been finding their backs to the wall because public opinion is changing uh strikingly, especially among younger people. Uh polls are very clear, even uh uh personal experience is very clear. So, like up till uh maybe ten years ago, if I gave a talk about Israel-Palestine at a university, in my own university, I had to have police protection. The police had to follow me out to my car because meetings were broken up, uh, nobody was worrying about uh free speech at universities. Yeah, well we'll get to that. Yeah, you notice. That's changed. That's changed. In fact, among uh people who identify themselves as liberal democrats, uh actually support for Palestinian rights is even higher than Israel at this point. Support for Israel has gone to the most reactionary parts of the population. Uh evangelical Christians, uh xenophobes, uh the Democratic Party used to be the base for support for Israel. It still is, but nothing like the Republicans. They're extreme.

SPEAKER_01: 1:10:41

Trump, of course, is what I mean, but at the same time, when with a recent discussion about, you know, uh the Golan Heights, I I read it and I heard that there was some concern, but then I didn't see any big outcry.

SPEAKER_00: 1:10:52

Well it's pretty interesting. Um in the the Golan Heights have been recognized internationally, including the United States, as occupied territory. The U.S. signed supported uh the Security Council resolution resolutions uh declaring that uh Israeli uh efforts to take over the heights and in particular their annexation of the heights, which they did, is absolutely illegal, has no basis, international law, can't be accepted. That was true up until Trump a couple of weeks ago, he just reversed it. Okay, now they're allowed to take it over. Anybody talking about it?

SPEAKER_01: 1:11:33

No, that's why I was amazed.

SPEAKER_00: 1:11:34

I mean, men people mention it, and then I sort of mention an outcry about it after. You say, well, maybe it's not tactically good, might alienate somebody. Um then the idea is, well, Israel needs this for its defense. This is outlandish. I mean, the Israeli military overwhelms everyone in the area combined, you know. Quite apart from the fact that they have a big nuclear arsenal. But they're the military force in the region. Yeah. One of the major uh the Golan Heights, it's not defense. They want it because it's nice territory. Uh you have uh uh it's economic, it's a it's a very nice area. You have the ski shi ski lobe skis on the Mount Harrimon, uh uh build agricultural communities, a nice place to visit and live. They want it, okay? There's there's no military threat there. Well, people always say I suppose it's a buffer. I mean when people say uh Hezbollah's at their border, yeah can can it Hezbollah is not an insignificant military force. But the only respect in which they're a threat to Israel, the only respect, is if Israel attacks Lebanon, they'll fight back. Now that is a threat to Israel. So in fact, if Israel were to proceed with its occasionally announced plans to attack Iran, probably the first thing they'd do is wipe out Lebanon just to prevent the deterrence of Hezbollah missiles. So, yes, that's a threat, if you like. We might ask the same question about what the Iranian threat is supposed to be. Uh uh, who is Iran threatening? Um, suppose Iran had nuclear weapons. I mean, where's the threat? I mean, if they dared to arm a missile with nuclear weapons, the country'd be wiped out. Yeah, yeah. You know, it's it's uh in fact, U.S. intelligence is pretty clear about this. If you look at their presentations to Congress over many years, they've pointed out that uh the basic picture is that Iran has very low military expenditures by the standards of the region, well alone the United States. But uh it's uh def its strategic posture is defensive, trying to set up to ensure that it can react to aggression sufficiently so diplomacy will take over.