Tuesday, September 05, 2017

What Once Was

THE ABSURD TIMES




The following is a version from only four years ago.  It seems more timely today.  These days, it is clear that almost nobody out there is capable of even READING IT; that they would understand it is even less likely, and agreement is out of the question.

That's one reason no more of this.

Science v. Religion

I

            I put these two terms together as if there is some essential war between them, or at least an antagonistic relationship, but both, we shall see, can be oppressive and dominating. In fact, in some sense, the German word "Verhältnis," meaning not only relationship but also love affair is more appropriate here -- both share the love of truth and liberation, but both have been used for domination and oppression.

II

That, in short, is what a quote remembered from Nietzsche means, although it seems to have disappeared entirely as no one has been able to locate it.   Still, the quote, as translated, is "Science has saved us from Religion; now what will save us from Science?" Few, if any can locate that quotation, a few can at least understand it, but the three aphorisms from Adorno reprinted below explain it in sufficient detail. I have eliminated the first sentence of the second aphorism as it unintentionally restricts the scope of the commentary and also shows the danger of referring to specific current even in philosophical discussions.   To be fair, I am placing the sentence at the end of this entire post as a footnote.[i]   Another statement by Nietzsche is "God is Dead," but it is repeated all too often by those who have no idea of what it means, where it came from, and who have never read Nietzsche at all. They merely quote what someone else had quoted. I will soon post my own version of his quote, along with the context, and explain not only that God died, but how He died (which I have not seen discussed elsewhere).

III

For centuries religion has served to subjugate individuality and free thought, one reason why Marx called it the "Opiate of the Masses."   To some extent, the Scientific Revolution, or Cognitive Revolution, of the 17th Century liberated man as it relegated God to the role of some cosmic clockmaker who put things together, wound them up, and then left. At least the ominous warning that "God is watching" lost much of its authority amongst individualists and freethinkers.

IV

However, Science soon banished value from life and favored quantification. In many ways, the old barter system, which is still employed daily by many without awareness of it, was far more equitable as it was more concrete, less abstract. People traded services and objects based on their individual values, not on the basis on some abstract decimal system of valuation. When we hear the term "value" used today, almost always with refers to some monetary sum "owned" in one way or another by some person. Who, ultimately, has any meaning left when he says that one person is "worth" more than another? This is a subjective value judgment best left to each individual in relation to another.

V

We can see this rampant and manipulative quantification being used daily to manipulate the masses who have absolutely no concept of what is being done to them. In fact, some wealthy ideologues hand-pick their own statisticians to justify their own greed and economic elitism and actually wind up believing their own lies and are surprised when things do not transpire as their bribed soothsayers predict. The whole idea behind hiring these hacks was to fool the people, but the force of quantification was so great that the employers were actually convinced by their own lies.

VI

The brainwashing of the modern concept of science also banishes imagination or inspiration from the world, or discipline. Capra discusses this in his Tao of Physics.   Allow me one small example: It is clear that electrons, orbiting a nucleus, can only be a specific, quantifiable defined, orbits, or energy states, or only so far from the nucleus. However, any electron may move from one state to another. The question is, where is it between one state and another?   How does it travel from one level to another since there are no levels inbetween? Doesn't this mean that time itself is quantum? These is no smooth time, but simply intervals of time between which time does not exist? If so, what exists when time is moving from one interval to another? No physicist even considers these questions lest he loose any chance of grant money or reputation. Imagination is banished from the universe. In fact, such imagination has long since been sucked from his system.

VII

            The ignorant and willfully blind will stick to their preconceived notions, however, as they have their entire life invested in this ignorance. To them, rising up and above this stupidity would cost them too much and they will remain content in their chains of ignorance which perpetuate their domination by the unseen "Thou Shalt," which will persist until they system itself destroys any chance of its own continuance. It is well on it's way with what is called "climate change," and uses religion, faith, patriotism, pseudo-science, and more simply to maximize its short-term profits while its long-term existence has already been self-assured. Perhaps in the 70s of the past century strong action could have prevented this, but that time has long passed. Here are Adorno's reflections from a safer past:

79

Intellectus sacrificium intellectus. [Latin: Intellectuals sacrifice to intellectuals]. To presume that thinking would profit from the decline of the emotions through increasing objectivity, or that it would remain indifferent to such, is itself an expression of the process of dumbing down. The social division of labor recoils on human beings, however much the former may facilitate the accomplishments required of the latter. The faculties, which develop through reciprocal effect, shrivel once when they are torn from each other. Nietzsche's aphorism, "The degree and kind of sexuality of human beings reaches into the furthest peak of their Spirit [Geistes]" strikes at more than just a psychological state of affairs. Because even the most distant objectifications of thought are nourished by the drives, to destroy the latter is to destroy the former's own condition. Isn't memory inseparable from the love, which wants to preserve, what nevertheless passes away? Doesn't every impulse of the imagination arise from the wish, which transcends the existent in all fidelity, by displacing its elements? Indeed isn't the simplest perception modeled on the fear of what is perceived, or the desire for such? It is true that the objective meaning of cognitions has, with the objectification of the world, separated itself ever further from the basis of the drives; it is true that cognition fails, where its objectified achievement remains under the baleful spell of the wishes. However if the drives are not at the same time sublated in the thought, which escapes such a baleful spell, then there can be no cognition anymore, and the thought which kills the wish, its father, will be overtaken by the revenge of stupidity. Memory is tabooed as uncalculable, unreliable, irrational. The intellectual asthma which results from this, which culminates in the breakdown of the historical dimension of consciousness, immediately debases the synthetic apperception which, according to Kant, is not to be separated from the "reproduction in the imagination," from commemoration. Imagination, today attributed to the realm of the unconscious and defamed in cognition as a childish, injudicious rudiment, creates alone that indispensable relation between objects, out of which all judgment originates: if it is driven out, then the judgment, the actual act of cognition, is exorcised as well. The castration of perception, however, by a controlling authority, which refuses it any desiring anticipation, thereby compels it into the schema of the powerless repetition of what is already familiar. That nothing more is actually allowed to be seen, amounts to the sacrifice of the intellect. Just as, under the unrestrained primacy of the production process, the wherefore of reason disappears, until it degenerates into the fetishism of itself and of externalized power, so too does it reduce itself down to an instrument and comes to resemble its functionaries, whose thought-apparatus only serves the purpose, of hindering thought. Once the final emotional trace is effaced, what solely remains of thinking is absolute tautology. The utterly pure reason of those who have completely divested themself of the capacity "to imagine an object even without its presence," converges with pure unconsciousness, with idiocy in the most literal sense, for measured by the overweening realistic ideal of a category-free actuality, every cognition is false, and true only if the question of true or false is inapplicable. That this is a question of wide-ranging tendencies, is evident at every step of the scientific enterprise, which is on the point of subjugating the rest of the world, like so many defenseless ruins.

80

Diagnosis. – A humanity is secretly emerging, which hungers for the compulsion and restriction, which the nonsensical continuation of domination imposes. These human beings however have, favored by the objective social arrangement, seized hold of the functions which by rights ought to generate dissonance against the pre-established harmony. Among all the cashiered slogans, one stands out: "pressure produces counter-pressure" – yet if the former becomes powerful enough, then the latter disappears, and society appears to want to contribute considerably to entropy, by a deadly equilibrium of tensions. The scientific enterprise has its exact equivalent in the kind of minds [Geistesart], which it harnesses: they need hardly do any violence to themselves, proving eager and willing administrators of their own selves. Even when they prove to be quite humane and reasonable beings outside of the enterprise, they freeze into pathic stupidity the moment they think professionally. Far from perceiving such prohibitions on thought as something hostile, the candidates – and all scientists are candidates – feel relieved. Because thinking burdens them with a subjective responsibility, which their objective position in the production-process prevents them from fulfilling, they renounce it, shake a bit and run over to the other side. The displeasure of thinking soon turns into the incapacity to think at all: people who effortlessly invent the most refined statistical objections, when it is a question of sabotaging a cognition, are not capable of making the simplest predictions of content ex cathedra [Latin: from the chair, e.g. Papal decision]. They lash out at the speculation and in it kill common sense. The more intelligent of them have an inkling of what ails their mental faculties, because the symptoms are not universal, but appear in the organs, whose service they sell. Many still wait in fear and shame, at being caught with their defect. All however find it raised publicly to a moral service and see themselves being recognized for a scientific asceticism, which is nothing of the sort, but the secret contour of their weakness. Their resentment is socially rationalized under the formula: thinking is unscientific. Their intellectual energy is thereby amplified in many dimensions to the utmost by the mechanism of control. The collective stupidity of research technicians is not simply the absence or regression of intellectual capacities, but an overgrowth of the capacity of thought itself, which eats away at the latter with its own energy. The masochistic malice [Bosheit] of young intellectuals derives from the malevolence [Bösartigkeit] of their illness.

81

Large and small. – One of the most disastrous transfers from the realm of economic planning into that of theory, which is actually no longer distinguished from the architectonic of the whole, is the belief that intellectual labor can be administered according to the criteria of whether what one is working on is necessary or reasonable. A ranking hierarchy of urgency is established. But to rob thought of the moment of involuntariness, is precisely to cashier its necessity. It reduces itself to detachable, interchangeable dispositions. Just as in the war economy, where priorities are decided in the distribution of raw materials, in the production of this or that type of weapon, so too is a hierarchy of importance creeping into the construction of theory, with a preference given for especially up to date or especially relevant themes, and disregard or indulgent toleration for what is secondary, which may pass merely as padding of the basic facts, as finesse. The notion of what is relevant is produced according to an organizational point of view, that of contemporaneity measured by the objectively most powerful tendency of the day. The schematization into important and subsidiary subscribes to the form of the value-order of ruling praxis, even when it contradicts such as content. In the origins of progressive philosophy, in Bacon and Descartes, the cult of the important is already at work. In the end, however, this latter reveals something unfree, something regressive. Importance is represented by the dog on a walk, which spends minutes sniffing at some random spot, unyielding, earnest, reluctant, and then satisfies its bodily needs, scrapes the ground with its feet and runs along, as if nothing had happened. In prehistoric times life and death may have depended on this; after millennia of domestication it has turned into a nutty ritual. Who is not reminded of this, when watching a serious committee determining the urgency of problems, before the staff of coworkers is given a carefully designated and time-tabled list of tasks. Everything of importance has something of such anachronistic obstinacy, and as a criterium of thought, it is tantamount to the latter's ensorceled fixation, to the renunciation of self-constitution. The great themes however are nothing other than the primordial odors, which cause the animal to hold still, and where possible to produce them once more. This does not mean that the hierarchy of importance is to be ignored. Just as its philistinery mirrors that of the system, so too is it saturated with all the latter's violence and stringency. However thought should not repeat it, but dissolve it through its completion. The division of the world into primary and subsidiary matters, which has always served only to neutralize the key phenomena of the most extreme social injustice as mere exceptions, should be followed to the point that it is convicted of its own untruth. It, which turns everything into objects, must itself become the object of thought, instead of steering the latter. The great themes will also appear, though scarcely in the traditional "thematic" sense, but rather refractedly and eccentrically. The barbarism of immediate magnitude [Grösse] remains philosophy's legacy of its earlier alliance with administrators and mathematicians: what does not bear the stamp of the overinflated world-historical bustle, is consigned to the procedures of the positive sciences. Philosophy behaves therein like bad painting, which imagines that the dignity of a work and the fame which it garners, depend on the dignity of the painted object; a picture of the Battle of Leipzig would be worth more than a chair in oblique perspective. The difference between the conceptual medium and the artistic one changes nothing in this bad naïvété. If the process of abstraction strikes all conceptual formation with the delusion of magnitude [Grösse], then what is also preserved in this, through the distance of the action-object, through reflection and transparency, is the antidote: the self-critique of reason is its ownmost ethics [eigenste Moral]. Its opposite in the most recent phase of a thought which disposes over itself is nothing other than the abolition of the subject. The gesture of theoretical labor, which arranges themes according to their importance, neglects those doing the laboring. The development of an increasingly smaller number of technical capacities is supposed to suffice, to adequately equip them to deal with every assigned task. The thinking subjectivity is however exactly what does not let itself be fitted into a heteronomous set of tasks arranged from above: it is adequate to the latter only insofar as it does not belong to such, and its existence is thereby the prerequisite of every objectively binding truth. The sovereign matter-of-factness, which sacrifices the subject to the investigation of truth, rejects at once truth and objectivity itself.

[i] That the world has meanwhile turned into the system which the Nazis unjustly berated as the lax Weimar Republic, is evident in the pre-established harmony between institutions and those who they serve.

Monday, August 14, 2017

Our World Today


THE ABSURD TIMES








Time for a break.



Let us sum it up.  We should start where we are, in medias rea, and then go back a bit.  How far back is a difficult choice, but we will make it, somehow.



So, right now, we have an adult with the attitude of a puberty-ridden teenager as President of the United States.   Let us think of it this way: Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust is 1,250,000 words long and consumes four to six volumes.  No body that has ever read the entire thing has any real criticism of it.  After all, if you sat down and read that many words of one work, you would look very foolish in saying it was bad.  Well, I can confidently say one thing: it is a much more pleasant task than contemplating current events today, especially here in the United States, and we will return to Proust eventually.   What has happened is similar to what would have happened if Barry Goldwater had been elected in 1964 instead of LBJ, and it should well known what happened with LBJ.  At that time, Hillary Clinton was a "Goldwater Girl," complete with cheerleader's costume, coming as she did from a politically retarded area of Chicago (Park Ridge).



Many voted for LBJ because he said "I don't think American boys should be fighting a was that it is the job of Asian boys to do."  After he had resigned, he said he did not lie.  In an interview with Walter Cronkite he said "Now, Walter, I said SHOULD, not that they WOULDN'T".  Goldwater, on the other had, promised to "Bomb North Vietnam into the stone age."  Many people who voted for LBJ felt somehow responsible for the war in Viet Nam because it was turned into a wild slaughterhouse on the basis of a resolution that LBJ had in his coat pocket for 6 months before the Golf of Tonkin occurred.  Never again.



The election of FDR was an easy choice after the Republican Herbert Hoover and the Great Depression.  No promise was made concerning Europe and its war, predicted after the treaty Germany was forced to accept after WWI.  Henry Wallace was his Vice President until FDR was sick and dying and big business put pressure on him and he did not have the energy to keep him as Vice President.  Truman was chosen as more acceptable to business, used the A-Bomb on Japan, and allowed the creation of Israel.  All of this led to Eisenhower who left with a warning about the "Military Industrial Complex."



The next election was Kennedy vs. Nixon.  Nixon was perfectly hateful and hating, paranoid and vicious, sneaky and persistent.  Since JFK was an Irish Catholic, had a sense of humor, a Democrat, and a wife who looked good, he was elected.  A great deal was done in Chicago to keep the paranoid who saw communism under every leaf from every tree and Kennedy won.  The illustration gives you an idea of what happened to him.  John Foster Dulles, Secretary of State, and his brother Allan Dulles, Director of the CIA, set in motion many power plays around the world.  To make things short, the so-called Warren Report should be called the "Dulles Report" as he was the panel, essentially, investigation the death of JFK about a year after he was fired by JFK.  Our illustration explains why he had to be terminated.



At one time, during JFK''s Presidency, he held a dinner party with such people as Arthur Miller (Death of a Salesman), Tennessee Williams (Streetcar named Desire), Leonard Bernstein (New York Philharmonic, and others.  He reportedly said "This is the greatest assemblage of minds to dine here since Thomas Jefferson dined here alone."  Who would we find at a Trump dinner?



A major force behind Barry Goldwater was the John Birch Society, financed by Koch, the father of the founders of the "Tea Party."  The Tea Party made Trump possible -- given Trump's manipulation of the mass media.   The other choice in the last election was Hillary Clinton.  Many women favored her because she was a female and that was all.  Wall Street favored her because she cultivated relations with them.  Furthermore, the only opposition, Bernie Sanders, was popular and threatened single-payer health insurance (surely a Communist plot to subvert Capitalism).  Still, Trump and Sanders both appealed to most votesr who quite correctly thought they were getting screwed.  Sanders had to go.



We were given an unacceptable situation.  The choice once again, or this time, was Hillary or Trump.  This time, many followed Thoreau's advice, and I paraphrase as closely as I can, "If you can not take direct action against a government's unjust activity, the very least you can do is to have nothing to do with it."  In other words, we were not again going to choose between LBJ and Barry Goldwater.  The decision not to endorse these two in no way means an endorsement of the winner.  Vietnam was painful for many who voted for LBJ based on his promises, but they will not accept that responsibility again.  That would be illogical. 



Ignorance rules the press, as well as the oligarchy.  We are now hearing a great deal of bellicosity and fear-mongering over nuclear weapons.  Are the North Korean Weapons Fission or Fusion?  Makes a big difference.  Also, have they been using enriched Uranium or Plutonium?  I would like to know, but then the question has never occurred to any of our media. 



Domestic terrorism is rising.  While the focus continues to be anywhere else, hate groups, some of them, and only a few, are members of the law enforcement community.  More than likely, they will be called upon to contain such groups.  Some of them call themselves American Nazis, the press calls them neo-Nazis, and the white house put out a statement for a short time calling them "nephew Nazis," apparently some clerical mistake, or at least one hopes so.  President 45 has refused to label them as such as the neo-KKK is also involved, as well as some rather insane low-level-IQ anti-abortionists that seems to target white focused clinics and scream "save the babies," as if these guys cared.  So as as the so-called Nazis are concerned, any comparison between them and the fascist party of mid-century Germany is certainly misplaced.  Simply ask even one of them who their favorite Valkyrie is (daughter of Wotan, you know), or to distinguish between Teutonic and Frank and see how how you get.  A dangerous voice is that of David Duke (who would be able to answer all of those questions and more.  He is far too intelligent and knowledgeable to simply dismiss.  He is able to manipulate people and one suspects that he influences 45 to some degree as well.  One example is when he was interviewed by Wolf Blitzer and introduced as a FORMER GRAND WIZARD OF THE KKK.  Duke asked why do that unless you point our that your are a former lobbyist for AIPAC?  The problem is that most of these low lives feel liberated by 45 and will act accordingly. 



Speaking of Proust, and attempting, woefully short of any hope of conveying the actual impact of his prolix and elliptical style, which has at best been described as both complex and periodic, so much so, in fact, that a favorite party game in French literary circles would, as the current situation is not established, be to attempt to diagram one of his involved sentences, it is necessary, perhaps that is not the proper word, appropriate might fit better at this point, to attempt to discuss his rather nebulous attitude towards sexual relations as there is a great deal of militancy today about LGBTQ issues, without any definite idea of what the "Q" stands for (although a usually reliable source tells me that it means "queer," thus making the word politically correct once more, and his reputed and, indeed avowed, sense of what is called homosexuality, although he never uses that term in his work, even in the section called Sodom and Gomorrah, with Sodom representing relations between men and men and Gomorrah between women, and since all of the sexual encounters he discusses are between himself and one of two women, in both cases attempting to recapture attitudes of feelings he had when he was much younger, although he does at one point describe observing secretly a sado-masochistic encounter between one man and another with several observers and one between two what he calls girls as they are youthful at the time, maintaining throughout an intense interest in painting or art without any real expression of overt sexuality, although one easily suspects that he is plagued by the thought of these two women having affairs with other women is a bit easier to understand in these terms, describing himself at one point as being an "invert," meaning having a woman's mind or soul, if you will, inside of a man's body, remembering all the while not disclosing this one bit to his mother or his beloved grandmother, for we should remember that he wrote at the beginning of the last century while attitudes are quite different at the beginning of this century. 



Every other advanced society has universal health care, except the U.S.  The people are overwhelmingly in favor of it if they are asked about the Affordable Care Act (ACA).  However, the same people who benefit most, are opposed to Obamacare which is the name given by the rich to subvert it.  Right now, Trump is subverting it as best he can.  Many will now have much higher rates simply because of Trump's withholding of funds and many will die or face bankruptcy.  Many Republican Representatives have gone home to face angry crowds, and many of them say those are outside agitators.  Elections may make a difference for once.  These other countries also have more than two established political parties.  Short of armed rebellion, urged by Jefferson, we will always have only two.  There will be no armed rebellion.  So, it is all over.



On occasion, we may post an interview or article that seems important and of interest, but other than that, we need to pay attention to others things.  Where's Proust?



Goodbye, and thanks for all the fish.












Wednesday, August 09, 2017

Hot Damn! War Time!




THE ABSURD TIMES




Illustration: Red state voters: "He's gonna use some them nukes on Co-rea! Dayum! Well, wee doggie, we done whip the Yankees"

The following is remarkably accurate and we distribute it here in, for at least the time being, our penultimate edition. 
Tension between the U.S. and North Korea escalated sharply Tuesday after President Trump suggested he was prepared to start a nuclear war, threatening to unleash "fire and fury" against North Korea. Hours later, North Korea threatened to strike the U.S. territory of Guam in the western Pacific. Guam is home to 163,000 people as well as major U.S. military bases. For more, we speak with longtime investigative journalist Allan Nairn.


Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: We begin today's show looking at North Korea. Tension between the U.S. and North Korea escalated sharply Tuesday, after President Trump suggested he's preparing to start a nuclear war, threatening to unleash "fire and fury" against North Korea.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: North Korea best not make any more threats to the United States. They will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen. He has been very threatening, beyond a normal statement. And as I said, they will be met with fire, fury and, frankly, power, the likes of which this world has never seen before. Thank you.
AMY GOODMAN: President Trump was speaking from his golf resort in Bedminster, New Jersey, where he's on vacation for 17 days.
Hours after he spoke, North Korea threatened to strike the U.S. territory of Guam in the western Pacific. Guam is home to 163,000 people as well as several major U.S. military bases.
Tension has been rising over North Korea in recent weeks. The U.N. Security Council recently imposed a new round of sanctions against North Korea over its test launches of two intercontinental ballistic missiles last month. The sanctions ban North Korean exports of coal, iron, lead and seafood, which could slash up to one-third of the country's export revenue. Then, on Tuesday, The Washington Post reported U.S. intelligence officials have concluded in a confidential assessment that North Korea has successfully produced a miniaturized nuclear warhead that can fit inside its missiles.
In response to the rising tension, China has called on all sides to de-escalate their rhetoric. Concern is growing that the North Korea crisis might result in a new arms race in Asia. Some conservative politicians in South Korea are now calling for the U.S. to deploy tactical nuclear weapons in the country. In Japan, some senior officials are pushing for the country to acquire long-range cruise missiles and air-to-ground missiles.
We're joined now by longtime, award-winning investigative journalist Allan Nairn, who spends a good deal of time in Asia.
Welcome to Democracy Now!, Allan.
ALLAN NAIRN: Thanks. Good to be with you.
AMY GOODMAN: Your response to "fire and fury," the words of President Trump at his Bedminster golf resort, against North Korea?
ALLAN NAIRN: Well, the U.S. nuclear system was already dangerous, irresponsible, insane, because it's on, most—many of the U.S. weapons are on hair-trigger alert. The missiles in the silos, the missiles on the submarines, they can be fired within minutes, which could easily lead to a mistaken firing. And now there's a president who's on hair trigger.
For years, there was a consensus, a complete consensus, within the U.S. establishment and military, that military action against North Korea was unthinkable, because, just with conventional artillery, North Korea could immediately devastate Seoul, killing more than 100,000, perhaps. But recently, the political culture and discussion around military action against North Korea has shifted. Colonel Guy Roberts, who's a longtime Pentagon and NATO official, last year wrote an article calling for the U.S. to adopt a first-strike nuclear policy, to be willing to use nuclear weapons against a country—and he specifically mentioned North Korea as one—in the event they use conventional weapons. He wrote that last year. This year, Trump nominated him to be the assistant secretary of defense for nuclear policy. John Bolton recently wrote in The Wall Street Journal that the U.S. should consider a ground invasion of North Korea. Lindsey Graham recently quoted Trump as saying that the U.S. should be ready to destroy—
AMY GOODMAN: Let me go to that quote.
ALLAN NAIRN: —North Korea itself.
AMY GOODMAN: Let me go to that quote of Lindsey Graham, the Republican senator from South Carolina, being questioned last week on the Today show by Matt Lauer.
MATT LAUER: Every military expert says there is no good military option.
SENLINDSEY GRAHAM: Well, they're wrong. There is a military option.
MATT LAUER: What's a good one?
SENLINDSEY GRAHAM: To destroy North Korea's program and North Korea itself. He is not going to allow—President Trump—the ability of this madman to have a missile to hit America. If there's going to be a war to stop him, it will be over there. If thousands die, they're going to die over there. They're not going to die here. And he's told me that to my face.
AMY GOODMAN: "He's told me that to my face," he said. President Trump told him, Lindsey Graham. Allan Nairn?
ALLAN NAIRN: Yeah, well, given Trump's comments yesterday, it sounds like Graham was quoting Trump accurately. You know, recently, even Mother Jones ran a column asking, "Well, why shouldn't the U.S. do multiple nuclear strikes on North Korea?" During the campaign, Trump talked about nuclear weapons for South Korea and Japan and said, "Well, if there's a North Korea-Japan war, go for it. Have at it."
And also, this is not something that Trump just stumbled upon. There are really only three substantive issues that Trump has been engaged with throughout his career. One is trade. One is racism. He's for it. He campaigned for the execution of the Central Park Five, who were innocent. But also nuclear weapons. During the Reagan administration, Trump tried to get appointed as a U.S. special envoy to negotiate a nuclear weapons deal with the Soviet Union. He's been thinking about this for decades.
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to turn to recent comments by the commander of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, Admiral Scott Swift. He recently spoke at a security conference in Australia and took questions from the audience.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: If, when you return to your command next week, you were to receive an order from the commander-in-chief, the president of the United States, to make a nuclear attack on China. Would you do it?
ADMSCOTT SWIFT: These—so far, these are yes-or-no answers. The answer would be yes. So, every member of the U.S. military has sworn an oath to defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and to obey the officers and the president of the United States, as the commander-in-chief appointed over us.
AMY GOODMAN: Commander of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, Admiral Scott Swift. The significance of what he's saying, Allan?
ALLAN NAIRN: You know, I had read that quote, but I hadn't seen the tape before. The laughter is interesting, because the establishment is a—it's an organism. It has this clubby ethos. And they discuss nuclear Armageddon very easily, very casually.
What he's talking about is just following the normal authoritarian chain of command that exists within the U.S. executive branch. And he and other officers do indeed swear an oath to carry out orders like that from the top.
In more rational times, what Trump said yesterday would be an article of impeachment. There's been a lot of talk of impeachment from some people up to now, for things like Trump's crimes, like racism, injustice, stupidity, regarding the threat of climate change, all sorts of things. But, in a sense, all of those things fit within the normal parameters of the U.S. presidency. Lots of U.S. presidents, at one time or another, have engaged in talk and activities like that, although none so intensively as Trump. But with what he's doing now, provoking North Korea, risking actual destruction of part of the U.S., he is violating the system's rules on its own terms. He's committing an actual threat against U.S. national security. And you would think that in just pragmatic political terms in Washington, that is the kind of thing that could be grounds for impeachment. But as long as he sits in that chair, it's true, the commanders are obligated to obey his order.
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to turn to Dan Coats, the director of national intelligence. He was speaking at the Aspen Security Forum about the North Korean president, Kim Jong-un.
DAN COATS: Well, he's a very unusual type of person. He's not crazy. And there is some rationale backing his actions, which are survival—survival for his regime, survival for his country. And he has watched, I think, what has happened around the world relative to nations that possess nuclear capabilities and the leverage they have, and seen that having the nuclear card in your pocket results in a lot of deterrence capability. The lessons that we learned out of Libya giving up its nukes and Ukraine giving up its nukes is, unfortunately, if you have nukes, never give them up.
AMY GOODMAN: That's Dan Coats, the director of national intelligence.
ALLAN NAIRN: Yeah, he's got a point. In many ways, Kim Jong-un is—comports himself like a crazy person, as does Trump, but there is an underlying rational incentive for the North Korean regime to get nuclear weapons, as Coats just acknowledged. You know, they always say there are no good options regarding North Korea. Well, there are no good military options. But as part of their goal of regime survival, one thing that the North Korean regime has always said is that they have two principal goals. One is to stop the U.S.-South Korean military exercises, which are provocative. And, two, end the Korean War. There's an armistice now, but the Korean War is not formally over. That's the kind of thing that, if the U.S. were serious, it could sit down on the table and—at the table and negotiate.
AMY GOODMAN: You know, I just was listening to Rex Tillerson, who made a surprise trip today. He went from Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia, a place you have been a good deal, to Guam, where you've also spent time. Both of us returning to and from East Timor covering the Indonesian occupation there, we would go through Guam, a site of several major military installations. And on the plane, he said this was a very good week for the U.S. and the international community. He said this today.
ALLAN NAIRN: Yeah. Well, maybe he's referring to what used to be called the nuclear doctrine, the madman theory, which was something—an idea promoted by Kissinger and Nixon, which was that you had to persuade the potential adversary that you're actually crazy enough to launch the nuclear weapons. And during the—his presidential campaign, Trump said he was ready to use nuclear weapons. And reportedly, in briefings, he would ask, "Well, what's the point of having nukes if you don't use them?" So, maybe by some theory, it's good for Trump's agenda, but it's obviously very, very dangerous for the world.
And this idea that the generals around Trump—Generals Kelly, Mattis and McMaster—will somehow stop him, it doesn't make sense, because that is not their responsibility. Their responsibility is to carry out his orders.
And politically, I think that Trump is just one quick war away from curing most of his political ills. The establishment press has been very critical of Trump. They've given him a lot of heat. But I think part of this is because they want to worship the U.S. presidency. They always do. They want to stand up and salute. But they're very frustrated that Trump doesn't let them because of his comportment, because he acts in a way that undermines the mystique of the U.S. presidency and also the mystique of U.S. power.
AMY GOODMAN: And he attacks them. He attacks the press.
ALLAN NAIRN: Oh, and he attacks the press, as well. And their main critique of Trump has been not the substance and the Republican agenda, but rather the claim that he has failed to efficiently implement it. And they praise General Kelly now, because, they say, "Oh, maybe he'll make it efficient." Well, I certainly hope not.
AMY GOODMAN: As the new chief of staff.
ALLAN NAIRN: Yeah. I certainly hope not, because this is a rightist revolution that is underway. They have—most governments, most new administrations that come in, follow the judicial principle of stare decisis. You accept precedent. You accept what's already—most of what's already in place. Not this group, not Trump and the Republicans, who now control all branches of U.S. government. They are a rollback administration. Their agenda is to roll back essentially all popular achievements that happened not just during the Obama years, but also back to Franklin Roosevelt and even Teddy Roosevelt. And on the racial justice and civil rights front, what they're looking at is a rollback dating back to pre-Reconstruction, because, in principle—and you look at the statements of someone like Sessions over the years, someone like Bannon—they are looking to eliminate anything in law or regulations that specifically acknowledges rights for African Americans. So they're out to do a massive project of dismantling. It's a revolutionary movement. It hasn't gotten nearly as far as it could, because of Trump's incompetence. But if Kelly succeeds in making it efficient, God help us all.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, you just mentioned history, and before we go to those other issues you raised, I wanted to go back to the words of President Harry Truman. Today marks the 72nd anniversary of the U.S. atomic bombing of the Japanese city of Nagasaki that killed 74,000 people. That came just three days after the U.S. dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, killing over 140 [sic] people. This is President Harry Truman—140,000 people. This is President Harry Truman speaking on August 6, 1945, hours after he bombed Hiroshima.
PRESIDENT HARRY TRUMAN: If they do not now accept our terms, they may expect a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this Earth.
AMY GOODMAN: And you compare that to "fire and fury," the words of President Trump, Allan Nairn.
ALLAN NAIRN: Yeah. Well, for one thing, Truman was speaking—even though it was an act of mass murder that he did to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he was in the midst of a brutal, vicious war against the mass-killing Japanese and Nazi regimes, so it was a different context from now.
But in a sense, it goes back to the point that this is a rollback administration we have. Since Truman spoke, in the years since then, due to pressure from peace and human rights activists, some U.S. standards in foreign policy have changed a little bit. There have some—been some constraints placed on the military, the CIA. Trump is seeking to eliminate those. Since he's been in, civilian casualties as a result of U.S. airstrikes in Syria and Iraq have multiplied fourfold. He's basically told the commanders, "Do what you will." He's rolling back—trying to roll back U.S. foreign policy to—regarding violence, to where it stood many decades before, even back to the years of Teddy Roosevelt. When Teddy Roosevelt used to speak about the glory of war, the glory of violence and killing, and how that was essential to both the national character and personal character, that's the kind of thing Trump is evoking today.
AMY GOODMAN: We're going to continue this discussion after break. We're speaking with George Polk Award-winning, award-winning, longtime investigative journalist Allan Nairn. Stay with us.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: "Wichita Lineman" by Glen Campbell. Glen Campbell passed away Tuesday at the age of 81. He suffered from Alzheimer's.
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As tensions escalate between the United States and North Korea, the U.S. government is particularly ill-equipped to carry out effective diplomacy, thanks to the Trump administration's efforts to dismantle the State Department. The U.S. currently has no ambassador to South Korea, no secretary of Asian Pacific affairs and no secretary of East Asian affairs. For more on the dismantling of the U.S. government, we speak to longtime journalist and activist Allan Nairn.


Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. Our guest for the hour is the longtime investigative journalist Allan Nairn. Allan, you were talking about a rightist revolution that is taking place right now. While President Trump speaks from his vacation home, his golf resort in Bedminster, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is flying to Guam, making a surprise trip there. He said this was a very good week for the U.S. and the international community. As the tension with North Korea escalates, there's actually no U.S. ambassador to South Korea, there's no secretary of Asian Pacific affairs, there's no secretary of East Asian affairs. Can you talk about the significance of this?
ALLAN NAIRN: Well, Trump says—and he's said it repeatedly—that the world is exploiting the U.S., rather than the other way around. And maybe he believes that. If he believes that, then it makes sense to dismantle the instruments, the institutions that connect the U.S. to the rest of the world, the instruments of U.S. power and U.S. exploitation, like the State Department. And he is dismantling the State Department to a significant extent. It's remarkable. He's looking to slash their budget by more than a third.
This comes from several places: one, that view of Trump; two, the fact that he is leading, in government, a coalition of various extreme-rightist factions—the Koch brothers types, the Chamber of Commerce types, the racists, the neofascists, all sorts of different groups. One of them is a group that's ideologically descended from the old John Birch Society, which has always viewed the U.N. and the State Department as inherently evil. And they have managed to, in a sense, get control of State Department policy.
And that push dovetails with the efforts of the right-wing deficit hawks who want to slash the U.S. budget overall. Now, they face—the Republicans face a deep problem in Congress, because, on the one hand, they want to slash spending, but, on the other hand, they want to massively expand the Pentagon budget. The solution, up to now—started during the Reagan years—has been to cut domestic discretionary spending and try to slash Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, but that's becoming much more difficult now because of the grassroots activism, which is—which is fighting that. So, the State Department becomes a natural target, and they're gutting it.
And this is one of the things that drives the establishment crazy, because the State Department is an instrument of U.S. power, and Trump is in the process of tearing it up. There's actually—there's a very relevant quote from Edward Gibbon, the historian, in his book The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and he's talking about the empire in the second century. And he says, "They endeavored to convince mankind that their motive was not the temptation of conquest but was actuated by the love of order and justice." You could say the exact same thing about the U.S. today, what the U.S. today says to the world. But Trump comes along and says, "Oh, yeah, it is about conquest. We want to take Iraq's oil. We want to take Afghanistan's minerals." And, you know, that really damages U.S. power, because it upsets people. They talk about the polls, which show a decline in world opinion of the U.S. That's actually world opinion getting more realistic vis-à-vis the U.S. The basic Trump doctrine in international affairs is more violence, less hypocrisy; less talk about democracy, human rights, more straight-up violence. And the world is seeing this. And it makes—it has the long-term effect of potentially making the U.S. less of a player.
AMY GOODMAN: Specifically, what does it mean not to have ambassadors in the world? And interestingly, the role of Rex Tillerson, who sometimes looks like he's the restraining force on President Trump, this former CEO of the largest private oil corporation in the world, ExxonMobil, though he, too—what are his intentions for the State Department?
ALLAN NAIRN: Well, it's kind of remarkable, because he has embraced the White House project of dismantling his own agency, the State Department. Now, there are others, like Pruitt at EPA, who 14 times had filed suit against the EPA and has always been saying publicly he wants to kill it. That's his mission in life. And now Trump gave him the opportunity to go inside and kill it. Tillerson doesn't come from that kind of background. Tillerson, in a sense, had his own private government, when he was running ExxonMobil. But now he's embraced the idea of undermining his own agency. But at the same time, he seems to recognize the aspects of Trump's rhetoric that make it harder for the U.S. to hold its power internationally.
AMY GOODMAN: I mean, is there anything that says—there's a good deal of discussion saying, you know, what many people thought were laws were actually just norms that Trump is violating. That there should be embassies, is there anything to say, in every country? I mean, maybe the next step would be you don't have ambassadors in different places. You know, you just have U.S. corporations acting as U.S. ambassadors in different places. They set their own rules.
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The White House is considering an unprecedented plan to privatize the war in Afghanistan at the urging of Erik Prince, founder of the now-defunct private mercenary firm Blackwater. Prince told USA Today the plan would include sending 5,500 private mercenaries to Afghanistan to advise the Afghan army. It would also include deploying a private air force—with at least 90 aircraft—to carry out the bombing campaign against Taliban insurgents. The plan's consideration comes as a federal appeals court has overturned the prison sentences of former Blackwater contractors who were involved in a 2007 massacre in Nisoor Square in central Baghdad, killing 17 civilians when they opened fire with machine guns and threw grenades into the crowded public space. For more, we speak with longtime investigative journalist and activist Allan Nairn.


Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
ALLAN NAIRN: Well, as you mentioned, Prince, Erik Prince, is proposing for Afghanistan that the U.S., under a viceroy, send him in as a private contractor with a private air force and the ability, using iPads, to call in airstrikes all over Afghanistan. I—
AMY GOODMAN: I want to turn to Erik Prince, so people can hear this, a very interesting discussion earlier this week that the former Blackwater CEO Erik Prince had with CNN's Erin Burnett, talking about his plans, the proposal that he put forward to President Trump for Afghanistan.
ERIK PRINCE: You have to put someone in charge. There has to be a lead federal official, or, in this case, almost a bankruptcy trustee, that rationalizes the U.S. presence, that is in charge of all policy. Second, they have to stay there for a while, so you have that continuity of decision-making.
ERIN BURNETT: OK, so the word you used for that person was "viceroy," was an American viceroy.
ERIK PRINCE: And I mean viceroy. That's a colonial term. The last thing we—
ERIN BURNETT: It is a colonial term.
ERIK PRINCE: Sure. But that colonial term came from—in the British Empire, they had very little communications, and you had to put someone in charge that can make the decisions, absent a ship going back and forth. But in this case, it really means someone that can rationalize the basic mess that has U.S. policy been. Whether it's in Afghanistan or Pakistan, we have gone backwards.
ERIN BURNETT: So, when we use the word, though, obviously—you point out it is a colonial word, right? The definition is a ruler exercising authority in a colony on behalf of a sovereign. In that case, Trump would perhaps be the sovereign, Afghanistan an American colony. I mean—
ERIK PRINCE: Again, I'm—
ERIN BURNETT: —it's a loaded word. I mean, have the Afghans—
ERIK PRINCE: I say that—
ERIN BURNETT: Are they talking to you about this? Are they open to it?
ERIK PRINCE: I've talked to plenty of Afghans about this. When they understand that we're not there to colonize, but merely the—that viceroy, that lead federal official term, is someone that will rationalize, so we don't go through a commander every year, like we have been, or a different ambassador every two years or who—so, there's been a complete fragmentation of unity of command. That has to change.
AMY GOODMAN: So, that's the former Blackwater founder, Erik Prince, speaking with Erin Burnett on CNN, talking about an American viceroy, that he's pushing for, that apparently Bannon supports, and McMaster, the national security adviser, and James Mattis—both generals—are opposed to. So there's a real battle going on, and there's a real defamation campaign going on by extremely conservative forces against H.R. McMaster to push this through. But an American viceroy and an even further privatization of the military, this coming the same week that the sentences for three of four Blackwater guards who opened fire, September 2007, on Iraqi civilians in Nisoor Square happened—the overturning of those sentences, and the fourth one, his murder conviction, overturned.
ALLAN NAIRN: Yeah. A few years ago, I met with President Ghani of Afghanistan, and I doubt that Ghani would be happy about Prince's plan and him personally being put in charge of a private army there, partly because of his own criminal past, Blackwater's criminal past in Iraq and elsewhere. But I think what Prince is talking about with a private corporate war could be the wave of the future, both in terms of Pentagon policy, subcontracting to corporations, but also, as the next stage, corporations having their own private armies. Many already have their own private police forces, dating back to the old Pinkertons and, as you saw at the Dakota Access pipeline, private police forces and paramilitaries. In the eastern Congo, in the mineral region, you have mining corporations making deals with local militias to, in effect, be their private armies. But you don't yet have corporations, like, say, an ExxonMobil, that has its own air force that drops bombs and its own troops that go around with machine guns. But I think that—growing out of the kind of thing that Prince is proposing, I think that could be the wave of the future.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to go on with Prince. The Military Times reported that the Blackwater founder, Erik Prince, lobbied the Afghan government on a plan to assemble a private air force, including fixed-wing aircraft, helicopter gunships, drones, capable of close air support to ground forces. The plan would partly rely on an iPhone app called Safe Strike that soldiers could use to target airstrikes. Allan Nairn?
ALLAN NAIRN: Yeah, it's—you know, Trump has already said, "Don't ask the White House." This is regarding U.S. operations in Iraq and Syria and elsewhere. "Don't ask the White House. Use your own judgment in attacks." And now, what he's talking about is corporations using their own judgment in who to kill from the air, although, he says, under the guidance of a colonial viceroy.
AMY GOODMAN: We're going to break and then come back to this discussion. We're speaking with longtime investigative journalist and activist Allan Nairn. This is Democracy Now! We'll be back in a moment.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: "Mother of Exiles" by Vermont musician Peter Gould. We'll post his whole song on our website at democracynow.org, about the poet Emma Lazarus, her poem "New Colossus," that appears on the base of the Statue of Liberty, that was challenged by President Trump's senior adviser Stephen Miller when he held a White House press briefing last week.
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From Attorney General Jeff Sessions to EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, many of Trump's key administration members are far-right-wing figures who are seeking to dismantle the very agencies that they have been picked to head. For more on this right-wing revolution, we speak with longtime activist and journalist Allan Nairn.


Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I'm Amy Goodman. Our guest for the hour is investigative journalist Allan Nairn. I wanted to play for you, Allan, just a few clips, excerpts of not Fox, but of MSNBC and CNN introducing their guests.
JOY-ANN REID: Joining me now, MSNBC contributor Malcolm Nance and former CIA analyst Fred Fleitz.
ERIN BURNETT: The former CIA counterterrorism official Phil Mudd.
ANA CABRERA: I'm joined by former CIA undercover operative Lindsay Moran.
HALLIE JACKSON: Jeremy Bash, former chief of staff at the CIA and Department of Defense and an MSNBC national security analyst.
AMY GOODMAN: So there you have just a couple people, some of the hosts, introducing their commentators on not Fox, but CNN and MSNBC—FBI, CIA, military, increasingly populating the pundit classes on the airwaves.
ALLAN NAIRN: Yeah, many liberals are relying on authoritarian institutions to save them from the authoritarian, authoritarian institutions like the CIAFBI, Pentagon. If you come from one of those places, you have a better chance of getting on, say, MSNBC than you do if you're an activist.
AMY GOODMAN: So what about what's happening today in the media? What about the coverage that we're seeing and what's happening? You talk about a rightist revolution taking place. The main thrust of CNN and MSNBC, a number of liberals—this is not Fox, which was talking a lot about how much President Trump has accomplished—in the six-month mark that we just passed, they were saying something like that he's tweeted 900-something times, passed no laws and only got one Supreme Court justice, that basically no laws—nothing has happened. He's a do-nothing, speak-everything president. You feel very differently about this.
ALLAN NAIRN: Yeah. First, they have a radical agenda to roll back, essentially, all social progress.
AMY GOODMAN: The Trump administration.
ALLAN NAIRN: Well, the Trump administration and also the very radical Republican Party, which now controls both houses of Congress and 34 governorships and state legislatures. And they've already done a lot. I mean, Trump has an executive order demanding that two regulations, on things like health, safety, labor rights, air pollution, water pollution—everything you can imagine—get revoked for every new one that's put in. They're allowing institutions like Sinclair Broadcasting, which had an actual financial deal, exchange, with the Trump campaign, a radical right-wing outfit, to expand their TV station holdings nationwide to twice the level that would usually be allowed under the regulatory regime.
There's many steps that are being taken that are not going to be rolled back, even if there is a change in administration. Even if you got, you know, a left-wing president, once Sinclair takes over ownership of those stations, they're not going to—there's no piece of paper they can sign to roll that back. Many of these actions they're taking have—are either very difficult to reverse or they are irreversible, like death. You know, the various estimates about the repeal of Obamacare perhaps causing 28,000 deaths, 43,000 deaths, that's not even to mention the amount of deaths that are occurring, the tens of thousands that are occurring, because of our failure, day by day, to implement a full coverage, as under single payer. You know, these consequences are irreversible. And they're not—they haven't achieved nearly as much as they could, because of Trump's craziness. But they are moving.
And they are seeking to take advantage of the fact that the U.S. system is much less democratic than many people realize. There are a series of levers that can be used to overcome democracy, ranging from the Electoral College to a Senate system where a minority of voters have a vast—a large majority of senators, to congressional and state legislative-level gerrymandering, to the possibility of voter suppression, to the House and Senate rules which allow you to block a bill even if it has big support from a majority of the senators or House members. The only way to overcome these structural obstacles is through a mass wave of democratic participation, a grassroots surge. And that's why they're so interested in voter suppression, because they want to block that. They want to shrink the pool of voters to be dominated by their supporters.
AMY GOODMAN: So, if the media were covering these issues—let's talk about what the media is covering. If you turn on MSNBC or you turn on CNN and you go away for an hour or two and you come back, you might think that you had put it on hold and that you just—they were just completing a sentence. And it's invariably about Russia. Talk about the coverage.
ALLAN NAIRN: Yeah, for many months, you've seen like an 80/20 ratio of coverage, Russia/other matters. And I think the fact that the press has done that and that many liberals have let these two commercial outfits, CNN and MSNBC, largely dominate, set their political agenda, that's one reason why Trump's approval rating is as high as it is, you know, in the mid to high thirties.
AMY GOODMAN: You're saying it's high because of their Russia coverage, their contention that—
ALLAN NAIRN: Yeah, I think if the ratio were reversed and you were giving 20 percent coverage to Russia, 80 percent to the actual substantive acts of Trump and the Republican Congress and the Republican governors, I think Trump's rating would be down in the twenties, because the fact—
AMY GOODMAN: Well, now it's only at 33 percent.
ALLAN NAIRN: Yeah, because the facts are so outrageous. But because of the structural levers that the right has—now has control over on every front, because of the structural advantages, I—my own personal guess is if the Trump-Clinton election were rerun today, if the congressional elections were held today, I think Trump would squeak out another win. I think the Republicans would lose seats but narrowly retain control of Congress.
AMY GOODMAN: A lot of people must be shocked when you say this.
ALLAN NAIRN: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: On the hand, when you look at the special elections that have taken place—
ALLAN NAIRN: Look at the predictions before the general election, you know. And Trump, during the general election campaign, Trump's approval ratings were often lower than they are right now. But it shouldn't even be close. If the press were hammering away at the substance of what this rightist revolution is doing, they would be wiped out electorally.
AMY GOODMAN: And what about the fact that they're saying a foreign power intervened in this election to Trump's advantage?
ALLAN NAIRN: Well, the basic allegation is that Russia used U.S.-style election meddling against the U.S. Because that's half of the mission of the CIA since the CIAwas created, to intervene in foreign elections and foreign governments. There was one academic study that cited 81 cases of such intervention just between the end of World War II and the year 2000. Personally, my guess is, yeah, Russia probably did do an intervention like that. But even if the charges are true, even if Russia was the source of the WikiLeaks material and they sent in all the false news through bots, that would have—you could say that that tipped the election, because in such a close Electoral College election, any one of a dozen factors can be said to tip the election. But it would be impossible to make a legitimate case that such Russia intervention had more impact than, say, voter suppression, where, if you look at the voter suppression impact in the swing states that swung it to Trump, those numbers vastly, like in Wisconsin, for example, vastly outweigh Trump's winning margin. So, if instead of that 80 percent of coverage being on Russia, had it been on, say, voter suppression, Kobach and the state—Republican state legislators, who have introduced a hundred voter suppression bills across the country, they wouldn't be able to get away with it. They'd be—they'd be back on their heels.
AMY GOODMAN: We just have two minutes, and I want to go way back in time. I want to ask you about Attorney General Jeff Sessions. During an October 2015 radio interview with Steve Bannon, when he was a radio talk show host, then-Senator Jeff Sessions praised the Immigration Act of 1924, whose chief author in the House once declared it was intended to end indiscriminate acceptance of all races.
SENJEFF SESSIONS: In seven years, we'll have the highest percentage of Americans non-native-born since the founding of the republic. And some people think, well, we've always had these numbers, but it's not so. This is very unusual. It's a radical change. And, in fact, when the numbers reached about this high in 1924, the president and Congress changed the policy, and it slowed down immigration significantly. And we then assimilated through the 1965 and created, really, the solid middle class of America, with assimilated immigrants. And it was good for America. And then we passed this law that went far beyond what anybody realized in 1965, and we're on a path now to surge far past what the situation was in 1924.
AMY GOODMAN: That was Senator Jeff Sessions speaking to Steve Bannon on his radio show in 2015, now attorney general really cracking down on voter rights and immigrants in this country.
ALLAN NAIRN: Right. The Trump immigration policy, as announced by Miller the other day, is inspired by the Immigration Act of 1924 and the white—the old White Australia policy. The 1924 act grew out the U.S. eugenics movement, which was pushed by the top academics at U.S. universities, and it claimed to be based on merit. They were using standardized test results to argue, at that time, in 1924, that Nordics and Aryans were intellectually superior, and the U.S.. had to exclude what they called the inferior races, who at that time they defined as Italians, Eastern Europeans, Africans, Asians and Jews. This led to the passage of the 1924 Immigration Act. And also the eugenics movement inspired things like forced sterilization laws. When the Nazis did their Nuremberg racial laws, they specifically cited these U.S. measures as a large part of their inspiration. I wrote—
AMY GOODMAN: The immigration law of 1924.
ALLAN NAIRN: And the eugenics—the broader eugenics movement. I did a chapter on this in the report I did years ago for Nader on the Educational Testing Service.
AMY GOODMAN: Called The Reign of ETS: The Corporation That...
ALLAN NAIRN: That Makes Up Minds, yeah. And that's what Sessions and Miller and Trump are proposing again. But the key is, as Miller was talking about the other day, he was saying, "Oh, this will be immigration based on merit." That's exactly what they were saying in 1924, because the basic claim is Aryan whites have more merit.
AMY GOODMAN: And Steve Miller—
ALLAN NAIRN: Bogus then, bogus now.
AMY GOODMAN: Now Steve Miller is being considered—Stephen Miller—to be the communications chief.
ALLAN NAIRN: Yeah, well, he does communicate their message, in a sense.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, we want to thank you very much, Allan Nairn, for spending this hour with us. Allan Nairn, award-winning investigative journalist and activist.
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