The Rude Guy Podcast #76 February 15, 2011
[War is a Lie]
Rich Zubaty here to tell you that war is a lie. War never works, at any time, for any thing. It never does what it’s supposed to do. It never makes peace. It only makes more war.
What about World War Two? There never would have been a World War Two if there hadn’t been a World War One. And World War One wouldn’t have ended up creating such a ticking time bomb of unrealistic reparations against Germany, waiting to re-explode into World War Two, if Woodrow Wilson had kept his campaign promise to stay out of it – which promise got him elected in the first place. Lying Presidents, have a long long history of causing war.
James Polk lying to get us into war with Mexico. William McKinley lying to get us into war with Spain, so we could grab Cuba, the Philippines and Puerto Rico. Woodrow Wilson lying us into World War One. Franklin Roosevelt manipulating us into World War Two by embargoing Japan and inviting it to attack us. Truman and Eisenhower lying us into the Cold War, by grossly overestimating Soviet military strength. Kennedy and Nixon lying us into Vietnam and Cambodia, to prevent all of Southeast Asia from collapsing to the communists according to the domino theory – an Alice in Wonderland hookah-smoking fantasy, some State Department nerd pulled out of his ass. Then lo and behold, without any effort on our part, NONE, The Soviet Union collapses and suddenly we’re in the Drug War, which was not a war against drugs but a way to funnel military hardware to South American dictators sitting on huge deposits of gas and oil, who wanted to annihilate homegrown revolutionaries – until Hugo Chavez got wise and turned the whole continent against us. But by then Bush One and Two had lied us into invading Iraq once…and again…bracketing Bill Clinton’s cruise missile attacks on tents in Afghanistan, and a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan, and his invasion of Kosovo, to protect an oil pipeline project. And then there’s Obama, running as the anti-war candidate, getting elected, then sticking with, and most likely extending, George Bush’s withdrawal schedule for Iraq…and escalating the war in Afhganistan. Liars one and all.
[bird]
I have an ongoing dispute with a family member about stopping war. My relative claims that wars are fought for oil and that by developing alternative energy we will eliminate the cause of war. Much as I admire his alternative energy development work, I think his analysis is disproved by history.
My belief is that wars are fought for money. And that the war-makers will use any excuse to induce us slaves to pay for, and fight in, any war, because they make money whether we win or lose. Win or lose! If we got off of petroleum tomorrow, within a month we would be beating the war drums over water, or copper, or even polluted air drifting to California from China. The way to stop war is to stop the war makers. Period. There is no such thing as stopping the cause of war. The cause of war is greed, and we are never going to cure the human race of greed, so we have to keep the greedy bastards from getting their hands on the weapons. If we spent as much money on food as we do on bombs the world would love us.
Both Henry Ford and Thomas Edison felt that the USA should have a carbohydrate economy, not a petro carbon economy. They were the original food not bombs guys.
As I started out saying, wars never work. Wars never succeed. Alexander the Great fought all the way to Egypt and India. And what happened? Nothing. It was a pointless raid to nowhere.
1500 years later Genghis Khan fought all the way from China to Czechoslovakia…killed 40 million people…and what changed? Some of my Slovak ancestors got slanty eyes, that was it.
The Spaniards stole tons of gold from South America, and married the locals, and then the mixed breeds became Catholics and kicked the Spanish government out.
Napoleon took northern Europe, then gave it back! Hitler…same. The Soviets…same. Delusions of conquest run on and on, like chipmunks on a treadmill. But foreign conquest never works. Never.
[bird]
Here’s an important thing to understand. If you understand this, everything that’s happening in the Middle East will suddenly, finally, make sense.
There are 190 countries in the world and the USA has military bases in 130 of them. Our CLOSEST international ally is Israel. So where are the U.S. bases in Israel? There aren’t any. NONE! You know why?
Israel IS the base. Israel is America. America is Israel. Israel is our army and our air force in the Middle East, plopped down in the middle of all those oil-rich Muslims. Israel is our proxy army and they’ll do anything we ask them to do. Bomb Iran. Fire up the F-16s! Blockade Gaza. Whatever you say boss.
Israelis have made a pact with the devil. And the devil is American conservative warmonger politicians. American conservative warmonger politicians get their money from munitions contractors. Here’s how that works.
Some Pentagon asshole tells congress that Israel, or Egypt or Poland, needs “foreign aid”. “Foreign aid” is a code-phrase that means: planes, tanks and bombs, bought from U.S. military contractors, with money taken from U. S. taxpayers, and given to foreign countries. Next, sell-out politicians approve munitions contracts with, say, Boeing and Lockheed, for a billion dollars. Boeing and Lockheed turn around and dish out ten million dollars in campaign contributions to the corrupt politicians who escorted their foreign aid munitions contracts, through Congress. This we call, “lobbying”. Fucking Lobbying! It’s an under-the-table pay off, out of sight of the American public, using the taxpayers’ money. It’s bribery. And it is illegal in civilized countries. But we call it lobbying. This’s only business-as-usual in banana republics like Honduras and the United States of America.
So…the taxpayers are paying the money that’s used to corrupt our politicians, to pass bills, so the contractors can steal even more money from the taxpayers. We’re paying to get ourselves ripped off. How many years do ya think that can last?
And…to Boeing and Lockheed? Ten million is nothing. It’s one percent of what they stole. It’s a tip. But not even a good tip. Waitresses get at least ten to fifteen percent. Our political whores get one percent of the money they helped steal.
So from now on, when you think of Israel, do not think of it as a sovereign nation. Israel is not a sovereign nation. Zbigniew Brzezkinski says Israel would last only five to ten years without US support. That’s not the definition of a sovereign nation – life expectancy five to ten years max, without another nation propping it up.
Israel is an American territory. Like Samoa. Just like Samoa. Our military outpost in the South Pacific.
And this is why there can never be Middle East Peace, the way things are now. Because WE don’t want it. What if Israel actually made peace with its neighbors? What if Israel could survive without us? They’d kick us the hell out of there overnight. Our big Aircraft carrier at the far end of the Mediterranean would, thenceforward, be off limits. We wouldn’t be able to do whatever the hell we want to do, out there. Israel would be interested in keeping peace with its neighbors, so it would not allow us to use their country as a de facto aircraft carrier and military base against the Muslim world.
So the USA must continue to foment war between Israelis and Arabs, so that Israel stays dependent on us.
Keep this in mind. If you look at anything that happens in Middle East politics through this lens, suddenly you will see that Israel is a Trojan Horse for US intentions. For fucks sakes. Look at a typical UN vote. 159 nations FOR. US, Israel and the Marshall Islands AGAINST.
Israel is a leg of US imperialism. A proxy army. Not a sovereign nation. But the US warmongers can’t stand up in the Senate and announce that we need to pound the shit out of the Arabs. No, that would expose their poker hand to the ragheads who have the oil. So they stand up and say, we need to “defend Israel” and all domestic opposition to Middle East war folds. I never in my life heard such a deafening silence from American Jews, as in the run up to the Iraq war. It split my eardrums, the sounds of silence.
War is an evil demon that possesses people, and nations, and shape-shifts like an evolving virus, from one to another. It’s a sure-fire way to manufacture patriotism and justify outrages. The Germans got possessed by Nazism, and slaughtered millions of people, including lots of Jews. The remaining Jews fled to Israel, their mythic homeland. And as soon as they got there, they started slaughtering innocent Palestinians. It was no great psychic leap. They had become soul-dead to genocide, possessed by the Demon War. The Jews considered it payback for the Nazis. But the Palestinians weren’t the Nazis. They were British allies. And they’d been living there for 2000 years. They’re one of the Lost Tribes! It’s their fucking homeland too! Always has been.
If history is any clue, Israel is not going to work. Either through assimilation or annihilation, the Palestinians will eventually take the place back. Unless two states are established and peace is declared, the Palestinians will just reproduce like rabbits, and take over the parliament, and take the country back. And like I said, the only purpose of any of it is to give the USA a land-based aircraft carrier in the Eastern Mediterranean, until the oil runs out. You wanna die for that? Not me. Not my kids. They’re gonna tear up the LA freeways before I’m gonna die for oil.
[bird]
My heart is in my throat over the Egyptian revolt against Mubarak. It’s the biggest populist uprising since the Polish Solidarity movement kicked out the communists. I hope it has the same domino effect against tyrants throughout the world.
Social media sites made a huge difference in sparking and sustaining the protest. But as soon as Twitter and Facebook were blocked by the government, the mood turned ugly, and Pro-Mubarak undercover cop-thugs began attacking the protesters.
Mubarak could have stepped down earlier to avoid the violence, but no doubt he received support behind the scenes from Israel, The House of Saud, Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, and of course, US.
Yes, ladies and gentlemen. US, the good ole USA. We have been paying the Egyptians over a billion dollars a year for 30 years. For what? Food? No. To equip their vicious police apparatus with everything they need to battle their own people, including tear gas canisters marked “Made in the USA”.
And Obama, after two weeks of licking his finger and holding it up in the wind, saying he supports Mubarak, then saying he supports a “transition of power”, then saying he supports Omar Sulieman, Mubarak’s hand-picked vice president and head of the not-so secret police. After letting foot-in-mouth, Israeli water-boy, Joe Biden, say Mubarak is not a dictator, even though he’s been in office for thirty years and allows no other political parties, and beats and tortures and imprisons and kills political dissenters. After sending our ambassador to Egypt, some faceless powerless woman, to talk to the protesters. After all this Obama sends his personal envoy Frank Wisner – paid Washington lobbyist for the Egyptian government and long-time Mubarak crony. And what does Frank say? Frank goes on TV and says Mubarak has to stay! Then Hillary Clinton goes public and tells Frank to shut the fuck up. Great coordination here by Obama the pragmatist manager, who couldn’t stop a food fight in a kindergarten. Barack Obama is a black guy who can’t dance. Once again he twisted himself into a pretzel taking a stand on nothing and agreeing with everything. Throughout the Arab world he is seen as a weak leader whose words don’t count for anything. In two years he’s gone from enhancing our international prestige to wrecking it. He has no idea how to be a leader.
The root of the confusion is that we have two Foreign Policies. One for public consumption…We support Freedom and democracy. And one for private consumption by warlords and dictators: do our imperial will and we will continue to supply you with teargas and weapons to keep down your population and fight your neighbors. And Barack Obama is the perfect poster boy for this Machiavellian duplicity: smiley, two-faced and brown-skinned. Like most of the rest of the poor people out there. So they fall for it.
Hail to the presidential pretzel. A few months after he took office Obama flew to Cairo and gave a world-stopping speech to Muslim nations, inspiring them onward and upward, to the milk and honey of freedom and democracy. But then, two years later, when democracy hits the fan, he can’t make up his mind about what he really means. It’s all one big woozy fuzzy transition to him. And while the protests raged in Liberation Square, our Defense Department/Pentagon spooks negotiated behind the scenes with the Egyptian army to dump Mubarak, but keep the military/police state apparatus intact…and the U.S. navy is standing by offshore to see that’s exactly what happens. And anyone can GUESS what the spooks said. They said, dump Mubarak or we cut off all your military aid. Get rid of the symbol of oppression, and keep the oppression. Change without change. The Obama Doctrine.
Yes, Americans. We’re getting fucked again. Lied to again by the war makers. Told by our government we’re helping people, when behind the scenes we are actually helping to enslave them. Claiming to escort the people of the planet on a march to freedom and democracy, when we are leading them into the dungeons of the military despots. Betraying them by financing and arming the tyrants who oppress them. In the past 30 years we have spent 30 billion dollars on military aid to Egypt, and 10 million on humanitarian aid to Egypt. War is a lie. The Egyptians have just seen their warmakers re-take the government, and that’s been the problem for the past 60 years! The Egyptian army owns virtually every industry in the country. Shopping malls. Construction companies. Manufacturing. And they’re not going to give that money up. You wanna do business in Egypt? Ya better pony up some cash for the generals. Democracy is pushing a boulder up hill in Egypt, and will be for a long long time.
But the scariest thing about the whole situation was that the protesters, once committed, could not leave Liberation Square. If they did, they’d’ve been hunted down and tortured and imprisoned and killed, one by one. As they have been, for the past 60 years, by our paid lackey, military/police thugs. It was a situation that could not be defused. It had to break, one way or the other. And I was glad I was only watching it on Al Jazeera and didn’t have to be there. What bravery!
God bless the Egyptians. And the Tunisians. Next: Saudi Arabia.
[bird]
But my big question is: will it happen here? Can democracy, real democracy, happen here? In America? Can we elect a government that doesn’t lie to us for our “own good”. How about one million Americans show up on Wall Street, sit down, and proclaim, in no uncertain terms: we want this to end. We want the dictatorship to end. We want the corruption to end. Wall Street get out of our government. No more money or favors from Wall Street to our politicians. Period. You work on Wall Street, you cannot make any political contributions. And we don’t care what the fuck the Constitution said. It’s 200 years old and the signers never anticipated that over time the American people would be stupid enough, to let banks and corporations take over the government. The War of Independence was fought AGAINST corporations like the British East India Company, which got itself exempted from paying tea-import taxes, so tea imported on taxpaying America ships would cost more. Fuck that. Fuck the corporations. That’s what the ORIGINAL Tea Party was really about. It wasn’t against paying taxes. It was against letting corporations get away with paying NO taxes. The real tea party revolt was against NOT paying taxes. Where the fuck are the historians? How come some decrepit old beatnik living on food stamps in disability housing has to bring this kind of shit to public attention? Is American media useless? Is American education worth anything!
The banks are torturing us. Wall Street is America’s Hosni Mubarak. Wall Street is America’s Egyptian Army. Out with the dictators!
Do ya know how Wall Street got its name? The early settlers in Manhattan had a problem with wild pigs. So they built a thigh-high pig wall, that humans could step over, but pigs could not, to keep the pigs out of their gardens! And the footpath along that wall eventually became a horse-cart lane, simply called Wall Street. Let me say that again. Wall Street was a wall built to keep the fucking wild pigs out! Which is just what we need today. A Wall to keep the fucking wild pigs of Wall Street out of our government, and out of our lives, and out of our gardens, where we soil our hands, to produce the wealth that feeds all of us. Because without a wall, the wild pigs of Wall Street come in at night and eat the food from right out of our own back yards. Wake up Obama, you sell-out jackass.
We need Cairo in Manhattan. We need to fight again for democracy in this country, because as the rest of the world kicks our capitalist pigs out, like South America is doing today, we will be driven to homelessness and starvation by Wall Street greed. Which is nothing less than the extraction of the wealth from our economy, by people who cannot grow a carrot or hammer a nail. People who contribute not one damn thing to this economy, except for paying off Washington politicians, so they can keep plying their Ponzi schemes, like the housing bubble, and the oil bubble, and the Enron bubble, and the dot com bubble, and the banking bubble, and the food bubble, and the war bubble, and whatever bubbles they come up with next. They’re stealing our wealth and paying off Presidents and Senators and Congressmen and Supreme Court Justices to do it.
Yes we can! Egypt is leading the way once again, after 5000 years of latency; the world’s first civilization is rising up again. And we can catch up with them. We can follow them. Yes we can. We can get in line behind them to bring the antidemocratic bastards down.
[bird]
Here are some other lies told about war:
We need a war to keep the economy going. Bullshit. We do NOT need a war to keep the economy going. Europe has higher living standards than we do – better food, freer culture, more democracy, no corporate control of government due to publicly financed elections, virtually no homeless, little grinding poverty – and they have not had a war in 60 fucking years. The entire reason they have higher living standards is because they reinvested their wealth into their communities and their people, not into bombs to be blown up 10,000 miles away.
Also…We do not have a Department of Defense; we have a Department of War. We are making war over the entire planet, propping up repressive governments so our corporations can steal their natural wealth. But it’s not even working. While we’re bombing Afghanis, China is building new mining operations in Afghanistan. China is profiting from our stupidity. The second biggest military on the planet is digging copper mines, not bomb craters.
Also: Warriors are not heroes. Warriors are deluded murderers. I can pity them, as I do most deluded murderers. But I sure as fuck am not welcoming them home as heroes. They went to other countries and murdered babies and old men. They know they’re not heroes. And if we keep blowing smoke up their asses, they’ll keep going overseas, and keep murdering. They’re baby killers. They were in Vietnam, and they are now. In World War One 10% of the casualties were civilians. In Afghanistan 90% of the casualties are civilians. War is not fought on a battlefield with both sides lined up against each other, like in the movies. Today’s battlefield is your house! And your neighbor’s house. At night. And the enemy is a 23-year-old girl sitting at a computer in St Petersburg Florida flying a Predator drone…and the enemy is a19-year-old gay asshole with an M-16, a night scope, and some fucked up manhood issues to work out. That’s right. Fuck gay soldiers. I do not support their right to go kill old women and kids in Iraq and Afghanistan. During Vietnam, if you told the draft board you were gay, like some of my star halfback football-playing friends, you got to NOT go to war. Are you people completely brain dead? You got your dicks up your OWN assholes?
Wars will not end until soldiers stop fighting them. War is a Lie. Fuck wars. And fuck warriors.
[bomb]
Now for a word from our sponsors:
Hi,
I am a big fan of your podcasts and I listen to them regularly.
I share some of your concerns and views about uncontrolled capitalism. But as you yourself mentioned in your last podcast, both capitalism and Marxism lead to a situation where a few rich people get the power. You have been advocating socialistic solutions like nationalization of banks. I suggest you look at the history of my country (India). For many decades after our independence from the British, our government controlled everything – Steel Plants, Airline, Railways, Watch-making, making of drugs and fertilizers, mines — you name it. And of course, the health care and education. In the early nineties, the country was on the verge of bankruptcy. We bounced back only after a major liberalization. Today our nationalized banks serve us better because they have to compete with Citibank, and our own new private banks. Today our private airlines are doing better than the government owned Air India. Of course people like me are the products of the government sponsored “Indian Institute of Technology”, who benefited immensely from government help, in the international competition with the “evil” Silicon Valley. (I dunno what he means by evil.) Unfortunately neither the old socialistic system, nor the new free market system, could feed more than half our population for the last sixty years. The only difference is this: In the first 40 years of our independence under western imperialism, India was not even noticed. In the last 20 years of free market, we have managed to get some position. But at this stage, it is clear that no known political system offers a good solution for the masses.
Anyway it is always a pleasure to listen to your highly intellectual, informative and even provocative podcasts.
Thanks and Regards
Vivek V Govilkar
Mumbai, INDIA
Thank you and blessings, Mr. Govilkar
I lived in southern India in 1989 and I remember saying to myself then, the only things you can buy in India are things made in India. And India doesn’t make anything! Imports were almost entirely forbidden. But I liked it a lot, just like that. For the same reasons I liked living in Tonga. It was earthly and real and sacred, and had survived for thousands of years. Which is something extraordinary to an American from the throw-away culture. Anyway, you can find out all about those travel adventures to India and Tonga and other undeveloped countries in my book: The Corporate Cult. And, you can also read about them starting on page 172 of my free online autobiography. Go to happyfool.orG. Word search “autobiography”. Download the pdf. Go to page 172. Poof!
And here’s another email:
From Jeff Duke from Waterloo Iowa
When I listen to your show I get a jolt of energy. Reading your two books (What Men Know and The Corporate Cult) has opened my eyes to a whole new way of living. I tell my family and friends that when it comes to politics and social issues (especially men’s issues which the media is too pussy whipped to address) that I am a Zubatyist. Ha ha ha ha ha
Thanks Jeff.
[bird]
If you like this show, email me. So I hear about it. So I muster the will to keep on going. So I know that someone besides National Security Agency eavesdroppers, and open-minded citizens of Australia and India, are not the only ones listening. therudeguy@hotmail.com and maybe I’ll even read some of your thoughts on the air…I only have a few hundred regular listeners, but they sure’re in a lot of different countries…and visit my website too: happyfool.ORG And if you want to participate in the gratifying experience of keeping this show from sinking beneath the waves, donate a few bucks, if you can. Remember…2011 is the Year of Reality. Fuck fantasies, we don’t have time for that shit any more. The Egyptian populist revolutionaries are the Avatars…not some big blue guys with cat faces riding around on big birds in a computer graphics movie extravaganza. Fuck fantasy. Gimme reality…every time.
Kefaya kefaya kefaya…kefaya means “enough” in Egyptian Enough!
