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May 9, 2014 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

24:11

2690 World War 3: The Death of America - Russia, Crimea and Ukraine

Stefan Molyneux speaks with Dr. Paul Craig Roberts the death of the constitutional American republic, what can be learned from the situation in Crimea and Ukraine, the United States showdown with Russia, the German response to Edward Snowden, the rise of the Wolfowitz doctrine and the failure of United States intelligence before 9/11.

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	Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Main Radio.
	Hope you're doing well.
	We have back with us Dr.
	Paul Craig Roberts, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy under Reagan, a former Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal and the author of The Failure of Laissez-Faire Capitalism.
	And, Dr.
	Roberts, you have a new book out.
	I wonder if you could mention that.
	Yes, How America Was Lost.
	It's a story of how we went from a constitutional democracy to a I did a speech in Amsterdam recently where I said that when you study history, it's the same damn story over and over again, just with different costumes.
	And we do have this sort of imperial Caligula style presidency that is going on.
	I wonder if you could help some of my younger listeners to understand the degree to which the idea of the constitutional limited republic has fallen from grace and where we are now and some of the major milestones along the way.
	Yes.
	All right.
	Well, it began with the Civil War.
	They call the Civil War, and the people in the South call it the War of Northern Aggression, which is what it was.
	And it was really about empire.
	It wasn't about freeing the slaves.
	It was about empire.
	And that essentially destroyed the voluntary nature of the Union.
	In which power rested in the states rather than in Washington.
	And then, of course, with the Great Depression, we had the New Deal, and it was a lot of emergency stuff.
	And the big transformation then was that Congress ceased to write the laws.
	Previously, every law had been written in great Close detail by Congress, they crossed every T, they dotted every I, but under all of the haste and emergency and so forth, laws passed by Congress became authorization vehicles for federal bureaucrats to implement by writing the regulations.
	So, in effect, the laws are written by the federal agencies Under whose jurisdiction any particular bill passed by Congress falls.
	So this sort of stripped Congress of the control over law.
	And what has happened in the 21st century with the War of Terror, they've used the make-believe situation of this great war to strip the population of civil liberties.
	The Constitution essentially no longer exists.
	It's not defended by the federal judiciary or by the Supreme Court.
	It's not defended by the Congress.
	And it's not acknowledged by the executive branch as being a constraint on its powers.
	So the Bill of Rights has simply been totally destroyed.
	Habeas corpus, for example, that you cannot Arrest a person, throw them in the dungeon, and never give any accounting to a court of why they're there.
	We also now have the president exercising the power to murder American citizens without a trial, without charges, a trial, or conviction.
	So the entire due process of civil liberties no longer exists in the United States.
	There's no longer any privacy.
	The National Stasi Agency now illegally and unconstitutionally spies on everybody.
	So the whole structure of the American constitutional democracy, it used to be a constitutional republic.
	That got transformed into a constitutional democracy, and now it's a police state in which the executive branch is not any longer accountable to law.
	So it only took roughly the 200 years that Thomas Jefferson said it would take before the United States degenerated into tyranny.
	It is one of the great tragedies of history that one pattern that I've noticed is that great empires are always preceded by some measure of free trade, which creates a lot of wealth in a society that wealth is then used as collateral to borrow against to wage wars without having to raise taxes.
	And then when the bill comes due, there's a massive fragmentation within society.
	Now you've talked about, and we talked about this last time on the show, the degree to which Crimea and the way that the great powers are maneuvering around Crimea has for you some echoes and parallels to 1913 to 1914 to the opening of hostilities in the First World War.
	I wonder if you could talk a little bit about those and how people understand the patterns that are re-emerging.
	Well, they're not only re-emerging, they've gotten worse.
	Because we now have a situation where Washington and the NATO puppet states simply lie, and the news media simply parrots the lies.
	So the understanding that's given of events bears no relationship whatsoever to the actual happenings.
	And Washington has learned that if you can control the explanation with the media, you can control The situation and all of the crimes you commit can be blamed on some other party.
	And that's what the Russian government is experiencing.
	The Russian government and Putin are blamed for the chaos and essentially the destruction of the Ukraine by the United States and the European Union.
	And they've created a situation Where anything that Putin does or doesn't do, anything he says or doesn't say, is turned into a demonization of him as evidence of further crimes.
	In other words, they've gone far beyond the allegation that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.
	They've gone beyond the allegation that Assad used sarin gas against Syrian rebels.
	Now they can demonize somebody even without a charge.
	And it's all repeated.
	So what we have now is a situation where the American installed government In Kyiv is fomenting violence against the protesting Russian populations in eastern and southern Ukraine, who have seen the words and deeds of the Kyiv government, feel threatened, and don't want anything to do with it.
	And they've set up their own governments in these areas and They want to hold referendums.
	They want to do like Crimea and go back to Russia, or at least some of them do.
	And so they are now experiencing violence.
	We had that awful thing where the building was burned down.
	People were either burned up or when they escaped, they were strangled and murdered by hand.
	And all the Western press has to say is it was some kind of a tragedy.
	It didn't have anything to do with the West or the groups that the West are supporting this tragedy.
	And there's no explanation of it.
	And the implication is it's really all Russia's fault because they're somehow stirring up these protests.
	And if Russia wasn't stirring up these protests, then this tragedy that Russia had nothing to do with would never have happened.
	Well, of course, if the Russian troops had gone in, they would have prevented the tragedy.
	So they've kind of got Putin caught whether he's, you know, if he doesn't do anything, then he's kind of damned by Russians.
	How come you're not sticking up for our fellows?
	If he does do something, then it's proof.
	He's an aggressor.
	He's invading.
	So the situation is very bad.
	Now, the Russian government has put out this white book, or white book, I think they call it, and they document how bad the situation is, and they say that really, you know, the world needs to bring a quick end to this, because it's fraught with all kinds of devastating consequences, to quote, for peace, stability, democratic development in Europe.
	And it's absolutely necessary to prevent further escalation of the situation.
	Well, of course, Europe and the U.S. don't hear their death.
	They don't want it resolved because whatever the deaths that Ukrainians will go through, whatever the deterioration in the political arena, the economy, they don't care because it can be used to embarrass Putin, perhaps to weaken him, And so there you see the great moral West destroying Ukraine in order to embarrass Putin.
	Now, this is part of, as is written about on your website, what's called the Wolfowitz Doctrine.
	And most people look at these things at the tail end.
	They just look at what the U.S. is doing currently, and they generally fail to realize, or maybe they're sort of dimly aware of it, the degree to which it is part of a larger strategy of preventing the rise of any other power.
	So I wonder if you could help people to understand the Wolfowitz Doctrine and its effects on U.S. foreign policy, as you've talked about in Venezuela and in Crimea.
	Well, the Wolfowitz Doctrine, that's Paul Wolfowitz, who was the Deputy Secretary of Defense in the George W. Bush regime, and he reformed American defense policy in the absence of the Soviet Union.
	There was no real constraint on American power in the world, and he said, we have to keep it that way.
	We can't let some new restraint grow up that was able to block us in some ways the way the Soviet Union did.
	And so we will prevent the rise of Russia or any other power anywhere that has the capability of being able to encompass enough territory, enough resources, In order to be a regional or global power, so that we simply not going to tolerate any other country rising to a position of influence.
	So that's the Wolfowitz Doctrine, and it's stated explicitly in terms of Russia, but it does say any other power, any other territory.
	So it also applies to China.
	So what the U.S. Foreign policy and military policy is, and has been now for 10 years, maybe longer, is to be sure that Russia and China do not obtain an economic and military status that can effectively block American purposes in the world.
	And that's the Wolfowitz Doctrine.
	It is, of course, fraught with war, because what it says, unless If Russia and China are willing to essentially acquiesce to the United States, there'll be a war.
	Right.
	And this, of course, is occurring in South America.
	I think recently U.S. Foreign Policy has basically said, once we deal with Russia, once we can contain China, we'll turn our attention back to the traditional American playground of imperialism, which is Central and South America.
	How do you think these policies are going to play out there as well?
	Yes, they'll overthrow the Venezuelan, Ecuadorian, Bolivian presidents.
	Who are indigenous.
	They are indigenous peoples.
	They're not part of the Spanish elite that have ruled those territories ever since the Spanish showed up.
	And who try to represent the actual indigenous people instead of American corporate and financial interests.
	The United States has an alliance with the small Spanish rich elites.
	Who always operate those countries when they're in power in the interest of Washington.
	They provide military bases.
	They let the American financial institutions have precedence over their own.
	They let the American corporations have a free hand.
	And so the countries essentially are looted, but the Spanish elites share in the looting.
	And the indigenous peoples are simply cut out.
	And so, as I said, we had Chavez, Morales, and what's the other one's name, but the three countries, Venezuela and Bolivia.
	In Ecuador, somehow indigenous people got the presidency.
	And so they restructured the way The country operates, the economy operates, the government operates, and are trying to include the population and not just have a situation that can be looted by Western interests and a few Spanish elites.
	So they'll go.
	They'll turn those over.
	They'll get rid of those.
	In fact, they're already trying it in Venezuela with the riots.
	And Brazil will probably also have some difficulties with the United States.
	I'm not quite sure what they'll do there, because it's such a large country, but clearly the expressions of dissent from the Brazilian government has made about Washington's spy policy, its economic policy.
	You know, Brazil is now a member of the BRICS, Brazil, India, Russia, China, South Africa.
	Washington sees these countries as hostile because they're talking about leaving the dollar payment system, operating independently of Washington's control of the international financial arrangements.
	So, they will be targeted.
	All of those countries will be targeted.
	Right.
	Now, one last point I'd like to touch on, which is something that you wrote recently on your website about 9-11.
	I mean, 9-11 in American history, of course, is a massively pivotal moment.
	The foundation of the Patriot Act and a series of invasions and aggressive foreign policy initiatives.
	Of course, now the war on terror is claimed to have been won.
	Troops are being withdrawn out of Iraq at least.
	At least on the surface, they're being withdrawn from Afghanistan.
	So naturally, of course, the United States is going about dismantling the spy state that it said was necessary for the war on terror, which of course is not happening.
	But you wrote something very interesting.
	And I know it's an area with a lot of controversy, but you said that it seemed impossible that no intelligence agencies were aware of what might have led up to 9-11 in the States.
	I wonder if you could expand a little bit upon that and help my readers or listeners understand that perspective.
	Yes.
	Well, the official story of 9-11 is the most implausible thing anybody could imagine.
	Because what it says is that every agency, every institution of the national security state simultaneously failed at the same time.
	I mean, everything failed.
	Nothing worked.
	This is impossible.
	Nothing like this.
	And not just the American national security state, but all the intelligence agencies of our NATO allies, including Israel's Mossad.
	So, somehow, a handful of Saudi Arabians with no government backing, no intelligence agency backing, they somehow outwitted the entire intelligence Apparatus of the Western world and caused the entire apparatus of the United States national security state to fail simultaneously.
	We had airport security fail four times in one hour on the same morning.
	For the first time in history, the Air Force could not get interceptor jets up, even though the planes were flying around off course for an hour.
	It's known they can get planes in the sky in three minutes.
	The air traffic controllers couldn't find the aircraft.
	The National Security Council didn't know what was going on.
	I mean, it just goes on and on.
	Nothing like this could possibly happen.
	And the other dead giveaway is that if something like this had happened, then the president, the Congress, the media would have been screaming How in the world did the whole national security state fail?
	We've got to find out.
	Let's investigate.
	Somebody's responsible.
	Instead, what did they do?
	They said, no, we won't investigate.
	No investigation.
	None.
	None.
	It took the 9-11 families one year to get the sort of political cover-up, even.
	You know, the 9-11 Commission.
	That didn't start until after a year of agitation by the So-called 9-11 families, the families who had people in the buildings that were killed.
	And what you got was not an investigation.
	You got a collection of politicians sitting, listening to the government's explanation and writing down the government's explanation.
	There was no investigation.
	The only investigations have been done by private entities, private architects and engineers, physicists, chemists.
	Former government officials, these are the people who have spoken out about this, to great hostility from the American media.
	The fact that they would tell such an implausible story shows that Washington has no respect for the intelligence of the population.
	No respect for the integrity of the media, and no respect for the intelligence or integrity of its allies.
	Because nobody could possibly believe the story.
	It's not believable.
	And yet, no one says anything about it.
	They all quietly accept it.
	And you see this every day, Stephan.
	You know, I just read today the German Some parliament or some members of the German government are determined to have Edward Snowden testify about Americans spying on Germany.
	And the Merkel government is blocking it, blocking it, blocking it, saying, no, no, no, you can't do this.
	It will hurt our relations with Washington.
	So Merkel is only interested in her relations with Washington.
	She's not interested in whether the German government and the German people are being constantly spied on by the National Stasi Agency.
	And this was a woman who grew up in East Germany under the Stasi.
	And so here you have the executive branch of the German government doing everything it can to throttle the legislative branch and prevent them from hearing what the United States is doing to them.
	It is truly an outrageous perspective to imagine that more harm is done to a supposedly allied relationship by investigating criminal surveillance than the actual criminal surveillance.
	Like, well, it's looking at the problem that creates the problem, not the problem itself.
	I mean, that's just how far we seem to have drifted from any kind of common sense ethical standpoint.
	That's right.
	And it shows that Washington has an agenda and is going to achieve it.
	By hook or crook, that truth has nothing to do with it, and that as long as they can control the explanation, control the news, as long as the media follows their line, they can do whatever they want, and somebody else will be blamed.
	It's always somebody else's fault.
	Whatever happens, it's somebody else's fault.
	And there is this soft censorship of licensing.
	Rather than direct state control of the outlets of propaganda, there's the licensing.
	And the licenses, of course, are so valuable that you get this aggregation into five or six major media companies, which basically read out government press releases and call themselves journalists.
	And this is, I think, is keeping a huge amount of perspective from the American public.
	That's right.
	It's keeping all information from them.
	And it's also creating journalism schools And journalists who see this as the norm, that their function is to serve the interests of the state.
	And so the whole concept of being a journalist is disappearing in the United States.
	It's simply they don't even think that way.
	They're not supposed to investigate the government.
	Well, thank you, as always, Dr.
	Roberts, for taking the time.
	If you can give people your vital statistics on the web, also to mention your last two books, which I think are well worth a read, I think that'd be very helpful.
	Oh, yes.
	My website is paulcraigroberts.org.
	My most recent book is How America Was Lost, just published, and the one published last year is The Failure of Laissez-Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West.
	And that may be what saves the world from Armageddon, the house of cards that the American policymakers have created in order to save a few banks too big to fail.
	That thing can come down at any time.
	And with it, American power.
	Well, let's hope that we can beat the beast at least back to within its own border.
	So thanks again, Dr.
	Roberts.
	Always a great pleasure.
	Yes.
	Pleased to be with you, Stephen.

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