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Feb. 7, 2023 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
29:26
McAdams Classic: How Not To Be A CIA Propagandist

Ron Paul is speaking at Anarchapulco. The Liberty Report will return on Wednesday. Please enjoy this classic speech from Daniel McAdams at Mises, Lake Jackson, in 2019.

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Time Text
Fall of the Berlin Wall 00:05:33
All right, ladies and gentlemen, I would like to introduce our next speaker.
Someone I think most of you are familiar with already.
Daniel McAdams, of course, heads up the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity.
He worked for Dr. Paul in the foreign policy arena for several years on Capitol Hill.
Dr. Paul was on the International Relations Committee, which was Daniel's purview.
But the interesting thing about the Ron Paul Institute and the effort that Ron and Daniel and Chris Rossini and Adam Dick have made since Ron retired from Congress is that it's actually, it's a lot easier to raise money for politics, you know, a political campaign, or even for economics at the Mises Institute.
People understand those issues and they feel like they have a self-interest in perhaps advancing the cause of Marcus.
And of course, it's very easy to raise money for war.
There's a whole industry in the northern Virginia suburbs, which is devoted to that very cause, and they managed to be very well funded when it comes to their lobbying efforts.
So they're at Roos Chris today up in DC having lunch while we're having this much more important meeting.
But Daniel and Ron have nonetheless managed to raise money and they have created what I consider the most hardcore pro-peace organization in the country.
So please, a round of applause for Daniel McAdams.
Hello, everyone.
It's great to see you here in Lake Jackson, Dr. Paul in my hometown now.
So I want to start by saying, and Scott touched on it, but today is an important day.
Today is the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Really one of the fundamental points in our history, certainly the fundamental point in our remembered history, unless we're quite elderly.
But what's interesting about the fall of the wall is it didn't happen the way we think it happened.
It wasn't a dramatic event that we think it was.
We have misremembered history.
I always joke with some friends of mine who study history that 89 needs an 89.
There needs to be a revision of the history.
And this sort of fundamental, I just realized this this morning that I wanted to start with this, but it's sort of fundamental to what I wanted to say, which is that revolutions don't really happen the way you think they happen.
We all remember late in November when they were sitting on the wall chipping away at it, and we thought, that's the end of communism.
Look, what's happening right now?
This is people power, people in the streets.
That really isn't what happened.
What really happened was earlier in the summer of 1989, on the border of Hungary and Austria, there was a picnic.
The fall of the Berlin Wall really was built around a picnic, a picnic called the Pan-European Picnic.
It was organized by the Hungarian Democratic Forum, which was an opposition anti-communist, pro-traditionalist party in Hungary.
They were a sponsor.
Otto von Habsburg was a sponsor because he was the head of the Pan-European Union, the son of the last emperor of Austria-Hungary.
And Imre Pozhgai, who nobody has heard of in this room, who anyone has, I'll buy you a drink.
But he was a top member of the Communist Party at the time.
The three of them got together and launched this pan-European picnic on the border of Austria.
We didn't know at the time, but word had already been given to Miklos Nemet and Jul Horn, who were the top communists in Hungary.
Word had already come from Gorbachev that we're not going to come get you if you ease things up.
So it already came from on high.
The drama was really not what we saw.
What happened is, you know, in East Germany, it wasn't super happy in those times.
A lot of people in the summer, they went to Lake Balaton in Hungary, which is the largest freshwater lake in Europe.
I lived in Hungary for a long time.
And they went there to meet their relatives in the West.
That's the one place where East and West Germans could meet, eat a lot of bad food, greasy food, drink a lot of beer, show off their big bellies in the lake.
But it was an important way for families to get together.
On that particular summer of 1989, with the pan-European picnic, something amazing happened, which is that the East Germans didn't go back to East Germany as they were supposed to, as they did every year.
What they did is they went into Austria, and from Austria, they went into West Germany.
And that was the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Just a bunch of people eating bad fish and drinking beer on Lake Balaton.
It wasn't the people you see on the wall when we remember the fall of 89.
So this is important.
This is how revolutions happen.
They're not the dramatic people power that you see in the streets that the media loves to focus on.
It's something very different from that.
And I think it's important to know.
So that brings me to really the point I want to get across in my talk.
And it's a subject that I think is a little bit more controversial than it should be, even among libertarians and non-interventionists.
How Revolutions Really Happen 00:15:45
And we can agree, we can all agree on part of it, which is that for war to start, you have to, and Jeff has touched on this as well, you have to have a real long run-up of war propaganda.
And war propaganda takes a lot of different forms.
It uses a lot of different hosts and mediums to convey different conveyor belts across all layers of society.
It's not just the neocons who do it.
But you have to establish a pro-war narrative in order for a war, which most people don't want, as we know, to be waged.
And it may not be a bomb-dropping war.
It may just be sanctions.
You may just kill a few thousand innocent people with sanctions.
But you have to prepare the intelligence preparation for battlefield.
You have to prepare the minds of Americans for what's going to happen.
And so I have a few points I want to make on this particular line.
Propaganda and lies are the lifeblood of U.S. interventionism.
Every U.S. intervention that we've had is all based on lies.
There's never been an honest one.
Even Pearl Harbor, okay?
Pro-interventionist narrative must be established and it must be accepted.
Americans must accept the narrative.
It's all about narratives.
The U.S. mainstream, this is the third point, the U.S. mainstream media speaks with one voice, as in the old Soviet Union, when it comes to the interventionist narrative.
They all support the interventionist narrative.
Now, there are a couple of exceptions who are noted by the fact that they are exceptions.
But does anyone remember a little show called Buchanan in Press on MSNBC at the beginning of the Iraq War?
We used to watch it in Dr. Paul's office.
We had it on the TV in the back.
It was better than C-SPAN because they were actually talking about the war and how dumb it was in the lead-up.
Well, they were pretty quick when things started.
And we have some good stuff from Tucker Carlson, who I don't watch a lot of TV news, but I know that he says some good things about not attacking Iran.
So there are some exceptions, but they just prove the rule.
Okay, media establish narrative pro-intervention.
Counter-narratives, no matter how seemingly insignificant they are, must be quashed.
You know, this is the Ron Paul rule.
They never asked the 434 why they voted yes.
They always called up Jeff and said, why did he vote no?
You know, so this is any counter-narrative must be completely crushed.
And that's why you see the war in the social media of all things.
People tweeting.
The counter-narrative is crushed.
You have the Atlantic Council.
You have the German Marshall Fund.
All these organizations who are making sure that you don't get to challenge the narrative.
And it's not, you know, unfortunately, a lot of the Trump people say, oh, they're just hassling conservatives on the social.
No, that's not it.
They're hassling people who challenge the narratives from left, right, beyond, neither.
So that's the other thing.
The pro-intervention narrative can be maintained and spread by those who claim to oppose military action overseas.
This is getting a little conspiratorial.
But if you take part in endorsing the promotion, the establishment, the conveying of the counter-narrative, you are taking part in promoting the interventionism.
This is where it starts getting more controversial, I guess, unfortunately.
The pro-intervention narrative and conveying and being a conveyor belt to it includes participating in the demonization of a foreign leader or a foreign nation who is designated by the CIA, the deep state, whatever you want to call it, the empire, who is designated by these entities as the bad guy of the week, the bad guy of the month, participating in the demonization of the people that the neocons and CIA want to have a regime change with.
Right?
So the real anti-interventionists, the purists, the hardcore ones, always adhere steadfastly to what I call the Rockwell rule, named after one of my great mentors, Lou Rockwell.
The Lou Rockwell rule is simple and it's very easy to digest and it's very easy to follow.
Never participate in any way in the demonization of any country or leader the CIA wants to overthrow.
Full stop.
That's it.
That's the Rockwell rule.
So we have the idea of war propaganda used to promote wars.
And we understand a lot of it.
We know what happened in the run-up to the First Iraq War, some of us were a little older, and the Second Iraq War.
The lies feed the war machine.
Iraq in 1990 was a great ally in the 80s when we wanted them to send a bunch of chemical weapons and kill a million Iranians.
In fact, we gave them the chemical weapons.
Back when I was working for Dr. Paul, I uncovered some friends helped me uncover some documents from the old banking committee, which were the literal receipts for the chemical weapons we sent to Iraq.
I linked it to Bob Novak at the time, and he did a great column on it.
We sent them this stuff, okay?
But propaganda is important.
I'll read you a good quote.
This is something I just came across from the Christian Size Monitor, September 6, 2002, the run-up to Iraq War II.
Listen to this.
This is just a paragraph.
Okay.
More than 10 years, remember, going back to Iraq War, more than 10 years later, I can still recall my brother Sean's face.
It was a bright red.
It was bright red, furious.
Not one given to fits of temper.
Sean was in an uproar.
He was a father and had just heard that Iraqi soldiers had taken scores of babies out of incubators in Kuwait City and left them to die.
The Iraqis had shipped the incubators back to Baghdad.
A pacifist by nature, my brother was not in a peaceful mood that day.
Quote, we've got to go and get Saddam Hussein now, he said passionately.
So that's how war propaganda works.
And as we know, of course, it was all a lie.
Naira was a young gal who was testifying before Congress.
The whole thing was cooked up.
She was not a poor Kuwaiti girl coming to tell us about the horrors in her country.
She was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to Washington.
She was coached by Hill and Knowlton, who had been hired by an NGO.
NGOs, here we go.
Citizens for a free Kuwait.
Sounds great.
Who wouldn't support that?
Which one of you wouldn't want to free Kuwait?
They spent 12 million bucks, hired Hill and Knowlton.
They coached this young woman on how to tell this story.
Tom Lantos was in on it, by the way, the late Tom Lantos.
He knew what was going on.
I'm sure plenty of others did.
And the other NGOs played their role too.
Amnesty International, they corroborated the story.
Yep, indeed.
They sure did.
Of course, it was all a lie.
It was all cooked up.
The same thing happened in the 03 Iraq War.
We all know about it.
Saddam had to be yet again demonized.
Iraq was a threat, an existential threat.
Chemical weapons were going to be loaded onto little planes, you know, and floated over New York.
Anyone questioning the propaganda, and it happened a lot to Dr. Paul, Saddam lover, unpatriotic Americans.
I think the National Review had a cover story, unpatriotic conservatives.
So the narrative, the false narrative, had to be established.
And just for fun, let's look at some history, was what they were saying.
This is great.
This is how they established the lies.
Ken Edelman, 2002, February 13th.
I believe demolishing Saddam Hussein's military power and liberating Iraq would be a cakewalk.
We remember that one.
Here's Bill Kristol, who I think Scott's going to meet up with here in a few months.
Here's Bill, having defeated and then occupied Iraq.
Democratizing the country should be not too tall of an order for the world's sole superpower.
Easy.
Here's Paul Wolfowitz, who is an honest guy in his own way.
I'm reasonably certain they will greet us as liberators, and that will help us keep troop requirements down.
We can say with reasonable confidence that the notion of hundreds of thousands of American troops is way off the mark, wildly off the mark.
What about casualties?
Here's W talking to Pat Robertson.
Oh no, we're not going to have any casualties.
And I'm going to say, these are great.
This is from Huffington Post, believe it or not, in 08.
But here's a final one, even though I could go on all day.
I love this one.
Michael Ledean, who freaked out once when Dr. Paul mentioned his name on the floor of the house for writing a book on how wonderful war is.
Here's Michael Ledin just before the invasion, 325-03.
I think the level of casualties is secondary.
All the great scholars who have studied American character have come to the conclusion that we are a warlike people and that we love war.
What we hate is not casualties, but losing, says Michael Ledin, who smokes a stogie in his American Enterprise Institute office and wouldn't know war if it bit him where.
So this is the war narrative.
It's used to establish regime change, wars of regime change, and operations of regime change.
We talked a little bit about Ukraine.
Ukraine is central right now to what we're looking at in the U.S.
The Ukraine gate, whatever you want to call it.
What did it have in common?
Well, Saddam didn't play ball.
That's why he had to go.
He was an independent person in the Middle East.
He wasn't playing ball with us.
After we gave him a bunch of stuff, he wouldn't stay bought.
Same thing happened with Ukraine.
Remember the Orange Revolution?
I think Scott thankfully mentioned that.
This is back in 04, 05.
They were not in the U.S. orbit.
They happened to be, unfortunately, right next to Russia, their major trading partner.
Half of the country at least considered itself Russian-speaking and Russian by origin.
They wanted to trade with their neighbors.
So they weren't in our orbit.
We tried it once.
We kicked out Yanukovych once.
Remember, the Orange Revolution deposed and elected President Yanukovych.
As soon as the Ukrainians could go back to the polls, they voted him back in.
They said, oh, we got to fix this.
So we fixed it again.
We kicked him out again.
This is Obama.
And what were we hearing in the propaganda realm?
We got to support the people.
The people who are on the streets.
They're fighting for their freedom.
They're fighting against corruption.
If you don't support this, if you don't support Victoria Newland handing out her cookies and getting on the phone with Jeff Pyatt, the ambassador, and picking, literally hand-picking the next government, well, you hate democracy.
What's wrong with you?
So, you know, by the way, Newland, the cookie lady, she worked closely.
We're finding out what we can't even say his name.
I'll whisper it.
Jaramela, you know, the whistleblower.
She worked with him closely on Ukraine stuff.
So it all comes around fighting corruption.
That's why we had to overthrow the government in Korean.
And how many people, even a lot of libertarians, hey, you know, these people want the freedom.
How dare we got to praise them?
We got to be all for it.
We fought corruption there.
Immediately after we defeated corruption there, Joe Biden sent his son in there for a $60,000 a month job in the most one of the most corrupt countries in the world.
It's still the poorest country in Europe after being liberated for how many of these years.
Corruption is endemic.
They have not done a thing to solve the corruption problem in Ukraine.
And Ukraine is now, again, as I mentioned, at the center of ironically, our regime change in Ukraine is at the heart of the attempted regime change in Washington.
And you have the same players.
The people who are responsible for the attempted regime change against Trump, regardless of what you think about him, are the same people who engineered the regime change in Ukraine.
And I spent a lot of time in the 90s monitoring elections in the first round of colored revolutions.
And to Scott's list, I would add Slovakia in 98 and Albania in 96 and all the different places I was at.
That was the model that served.
And we always thought that it would someday come to our shores.
And that's exactly what's happened.
Chirello and Vindman, they were both, they were the guys who were doing it.
They were the second and third tier in the NSC staff who were coordinating the overthrow of the governor of Ukraine.
Well, they were holdovers.
And thanks to Trump's boneheadedness, he brought in McMaster.
McMaster, I think, brought Vindman back.
He was out to do Ukraine stuff.
These people did not agree with Trump saying we should get along with Russia.
And he's not that enthusiastic about regime change in Ukraine.
What's in it for us?
What's the point?
They would not let go of this.
And that's why they wanted to get rid of him.
So what do we get for it?
Okay, the Russians were going to give him $20 billion.
Hey, here's some money.
He wants some money and everything.
And we freaked out and said, no, we want them.
We want them.
And so now we're giving them billions of dollars.
So, I mean, are we happier that that's happened?
Do we feel better that we're throwing our money?
Let the Russians throw their money at the Ukrainians.
But that's not what happened.
Okay, Venezuela, getting more controversial.
Okay, what's up with Maduro?
What's up with Venezuela?
It doesn't matter what you think about Chavez Maduro.
They're not in the CIA-US orbit.
They're one of the countries in Latin America that are not toeing the line.
They're not listening to Pompeo.
They weren't listening to Hillary when she was the Secretary of State.
So what do you have?
The narrative comes out: corrupt enriching himself.
Maybe true.
I don't know.
Withholding aid right on his border.
Well, that was a lie.
That wasn't true.
And the S-word, socialism.
It's all about socialism.
We have got to support a regime change in Venezuela because we have to defeat socialism.
And even libertarians will say that.
Well, libertarians who can't even defeat socialism at home somehow think that thousands of miles away, oh, we got it.
We're going to fix it here.
You know, so this is what it is.
Got to support the people.
Well, who are the people?
Who are the people in the streets?
One-tenth of one percent of the population.
What about all the other people who don't want to have a regime change in their country?
Because they've seen everywhere else that they've had a regime change, and it's really been a pretty crappy thing, right?
Name one place where it's turned out better when we've changed the regime.
I'd like to hear it.
So, who are the people?
Who are the people?
Who gets to count?
Well, unfortunately, from our safe purchase here, a lot of people think they have the right to tell them who counts and who doesn't count.
It turns out now, you know, we're paying the salaries, literally, of these people that the CIA wants to put into office.
And it really is interesting being lectured about socialism by Pompeo, Bolton, and Abrams, you know, who've lived their entire lives in socialism and pushing military socialism, military Keynesianism.
So, Hong Kong, what does that have in common?
Well, it's China's weak underbelly.
We've got to deal with the Chinese.
We've got to take down the Chikoms, right?
So, they're fighting for their freedoms in the streets of Hong Kong.
Who are they?
You know, maybe they have a good cause.
Who are they?
Each one of the leaders of the anti-China parties is literally on the U.S. payroll.
They roll into town and they have a visit with Mike Pompeo.
You know, with who does that happen?
So, this is the propaganda line.
It's for the people.
Syria, the people rose up against Assad.
It was peaceful and he mowed them down.
Syria And Propaganda 00:05:42
Untrue.
2005, Christian Amampour interviewed Assad and said, You know, you're going.
This regime change thing is coming for you, and you're going down.
Okay, that was under G.W. Bush.
That's when Ambassador Peter Ford started undermining the government there.
Interesting that the yellow vests are never fighting for their freedom.
You ever hear about those guys, right?
Zero sympathetic coverage in the media.
None.
So, what do they have in common?
All the people that we are supposed to say are just fighting for their freedom, and you damn well better support them unless you're a terrible person.
They all happen to live in countries where the CIA, the empire, or whatever wants to change the regime.
Maybe that's a massive coincidence.
Who knows?
But it is very interesting nonetheless.
So, how should libertarians and non-interventionists of all stripes view these regime change operations?
Skepticism.
Default is it's fake.
That's my default.
You don't have to take my default.
It's fake.
I don't believe it.
I want to see the receipts.
We've seen the receipts from Venezuela and Hong Kong, from USAID, National Endowment for Democracy.
I want to see the receipts.
You know, I had a little run-in with an organization, otherwise a good organization, but they put out a video about Iran.
And the whole video was: it was a person who had been born in Iran or what have you.
And the whole video was, well, everything that's wrong with Iran is socialism.
If we just get rid of socialism there, it'll be fine.
And of course, that's ridiculous.
It's absurd.
But it transmits the regime change narrative.
Why, in all times in history, now would you focus on that?
Right when the regime, when our regime wants to change their regime so much, you could talk about a million other places where socialism is a problem.
Let me DC, maybe everywhere, maybe Austin, maybe Sacramento.
No, but you focus on it right at that point.
All of a sudden in Venezuela, it became a nation of Venezuela experts here.
We knew exactly what their problems were and how to fix them.
And as non-interventionism, we resist that temptation, and naturally, when it comes to our neighbor.
I don't like the church he goes to.
I don't like what he's smoking.
I don't like how he's raising his kids.
We would never think of doing that.
But somehow we have this amazing wisdom to understand what the people want and should need and get it good and hard, as Jeff might say, thousands of miles away.
I don't buy that.
I just don't buy it.
So what do we do?
I mean, what do we do if we do have a sense that people should be free overseas and should live better lives?
There are places that aren't that good.
And I'm not under any illusions that Venezuela is a paradise.
Don't get me wrong.
What do we do?
Oppose socialism and forced collectivism here at home.
That's one thing we can do.
We have a pretty good sense of what's going on.
We can follow the news.
We understand the language.
We know what's happening to half our money or not more.
We know what's happening with truth tellers being thrown in jail.
We know what's happening to people like Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange, and many others.
We know that sanctions are not making these other places better places.
They're not getting people to overthrow their governments and bringing in a libertarian paradise.
What they're doing is causing people to starve and die.
And when they starve and die, they're just as likely to blame America because guess what?
It's America's fault.
We shouldn't be having sanctions.
We shouldn't deny medicine to the Iranian people because we want them to overthrow their regime, their government.
If they want to have a theocracy, it may not be our cup of tea.
But as non-interventionists, we have to accept that the rest of the world may not decide to be exactly like us.
That's the thinking of the Trotskyites and the neocons.
We want a worldwide revolution and everyone's going to be just like us.
It's not going to happen because the only way you can get this to happen is through the use of force.
The use of force to force people to be like you.
And that's an impulse we have to resist.
We have to resist that impulse.
So, no sanctions.
You want to make life better for the Venezuelans?
Fight sanctions here at home.
Let's trade with them.
The Iranians, fight sanctions here at home.
Let's trade with them.
Fight the neocons are telling lies.
Let's travel.
Let's fight for the opportunity to travel to Cuba, which boneheaded Trump has now put restrictions.
One of the only good things Obama did in his entire presidency was open things up to Cuba, and now we've got it back.
So fight for that.
Those are things we can do that we understand.
And I'll read a couple of quotes because Jeff mentioned Caitlin Johnstone, who does great work.
She's not a libertarian yet, but she's great on two things.
First of all, she's great on the war issue.
She's great on the beyond war issue, which is the narrative, which is fighting the narrative they want you to push, to be the conveyor belt.
And she's also good because she wants to make coalitions.
A lot of people on the left hate us because they don't want to have a broad coalition.
They want to own it.
So she's good on that.
But let me just read one thing that she wrote back in February.
And it's kind of funny because I remembered the article as being really, really good.
And I'm not saying anything like this, but I went back to read it again.
And I realized she wrote the whole article because she quoted something that I did on Venezuela.
But this is really, I think this is really worth listening to.
A common refrain is, it's possible to be opposed to U.S. interventionism while also opposing these tyrannical governments, you know, end quote.
Always Think Meme 00:02:25
But it isn't.
Not really.
It's impossible to oppose U.S. interventionism while also helping to advance its propaganda narratives against targeted governments.
And she goes on to say, all U.S.-led military agendas begin with propaganda.
If the public were allowed to see the reality of war with fresh eyes, they would all instantly recoil in horror and adamantly demand its immediate end.
The only reason U.S. centralized empire is able to sow death and destruction around the world without this happening is because of propaganda, which is why Americans, they're not going to want to hear this, are the most aggressively propagandized people in the world.
So, and this is the final thing that she said on this is good.
So, before they can launch missiles, planes, and ships, They launch propaganda.
They launch mass media psyops.
They launch narrative control campaigns to make sure that Americans hate the leader of the targeted nation and want the people of the targeted nation to have freedom and democracy.
At least one of those words Jeff pointed out as being a completely meaningless word.
So, this is my admonition, since everyone is giving so far everyone a task to do, is to fight to resist this inclination to be a conveyor belt of this propaganda.
Does it mean you absolutely must not feel any sympathy for people?
Maybe I'm certainly there are people in Hong Kong who have a more open economic and political system.
That doesn't mean you reject them as all a bunch of dupes, but you have to resist what they want you to do, which is to convey propaganda, which equalizes, which lowers the ground, which makes it easier for regime change.
And whenever I think about this whole thing, maybe it's because I always think about it as a meme.
And a meme is a crazy thing.
It conveys complicated ideas with a picture.
And it's a new phenomenon.
Young people are doing good at it.
But I always think about this meme, and I know you guys have seen it.
It's Batman Slapping Robin.
Have you all seen that one?
And I always think of Robin saying something like, you know, yeah, but I suppose, you know, but I want to support the struggle of freedom.
Batman slaps him upside the head and says, you know, don't be a conveyor belt of propaganda.
So I think I would humbly suggest and request at least consider this option.
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