Update 7

David Kramer’s blog post (cited below) has now, disappeared from the LRC archive. Possibly this is related to his quote about the Fed, since Peter Boettke, apparently, is for abolition of the Fed..at least, theoretically. Kramer might just have come across some quotes out of context. But it also seems that Boettke holds many positions…This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and I’m willing to believe that he’s not a masquerading statist himself.  However, I still think the WSJ promotion of a Mercatus center professor is no accident.

Update 6

A friend of The Bell who also posts with insight here  responds to my post. I’ve chosen to create a new post to respond.

Update 5:

I’m posting below the money quote from Dr. Boettke’s response. It substantiates my earlier comments at Swiss libertarian newsletter The Daily Bell that yesterday’s WSJ piece about the Austrians had everything to do with defining the academic boundaries of what Austrian economics will be. The rest of Mises-on-the-web is to be swept under the carpet, along with Jon Stewart shows, raucous blogs, politicians, hard-money cranks, stock-tipster and other vulgar riff-raff. As these things go, it’s a fair enough statement..albeit a bit sniffy. Professor Boettke proposes peer-review and refereed journals as the gold-standard of intellectual truth.

“I have no doubt that many individuals are doing a better job spreading Austrian ideas in the popular imagination, and I am sure that there are individuals that are producing better scholarship as judged by my peers in the economics profession.  I never claimed otherwise. And, in fact, I have always tried to claim that judgments are always best left to one’s peers, rather than self-assessment.  And, I would like to add, I have tried to be fair in my own judgments of others within the Austrian movement and give credit where credit is due.  But again, I am myopically focused on publications — refereed publication; SSCI ranked journals preferred; or elite university presses. Again, this is all because of the advancement of Austrian ideas in the scientific literature of economics, not in the popular imagination. Perhaps advancing the ideas in the popular imagination requires something different than my admittedly myopic perspective.  I don’t know, but I am betting that for my purposes and that of my students we are going to keep pushing the academic mission.  I don’t want to show up on the Daily Show, nor do I want to appear on the Tonight Show, and I certainly do not want to run for political office. I also don’t offer investment advice by predicting the next downturn in the economy or anticipating the next upswing.  That is not the business I am in.  Others have a comparative advantage in such activities, I don’t.

I have also repeatedly claimed that I do not want to get involved in internet wars, nor do I believe that internet contributions on blogs, etc. are really helping us in the task that I do care about exclusively — advancing the cause of Austrian economics within the economics profession and academia.  I might be wrong.  In fact, I am somewhat caught in a contradiction because I am using blogging to try to pursue my goals of academic advancement of Austrian economics.  My only “defense” is that I try to cultivate a different type of conversation on this blog than what takes place on other Austrian oriented blogs, but I don’t always get what I would like in terms of the discourse.”

Here’s what I said in a comment at The Bell yesterday:

“Perhaps you analysis is erroneous there, because you assume
those distortions are aimed at bamboozling well-read and savvy readers. They aren’t.
They’re intended to establish the boundaries of polite discourse, beyond which it will/should not stray. These boundaries will establish where academic writers will go and who will or won’t be referenced…from wikipedia to journals.

The rewriting is also directed toward popular debate. People’s attention spans are short, most have only recently heard of Austrian economics, and if the WSJ can trade on its reputation to redirect such discussions to its own precincts, there’s nothing to lose.

By the miracle of self-referential citation compounded by google and wikipedia and the tendency of all debates to “move on,” history is constantly being revised in all things, petty and large.

There are only so many people who are spotting and undoing this kind of false history, and they can’t get to all of it fast enough and often enough to undo it completely.”
Update 4

Response by Peter Boettke, which argues that the responses below from Lew Rockwellians and The Daily Bell mischaracterize his position.

Response by Tibor Machan at The Daily Bell that The Brothers Koch held anarcho-capitalist views from conviction and not because it helped their business. Machan was responding to a Frank Rich piece in The New York Times that extrapolated from an extensive piece by Jane Meyer at The New Yorker on the Kochtopus.

Update 3:

Tom di Lorenzo sets the record straight on the supposed misbehavior of the loosey-goosey Austrians at an uptight occasion (see Wenzel’s blog below) that allegedly resulted in the displacement of LRC from the lap of academic favor.

As Lorenzo points out,  Boettke works at the Koch-funded Mercatus center at George Mason University. I pointed this out myself at The Daily Bell (see below), where the editors were inclined to see the article citing Boettke at the WSJ as sheer happenstance. Would that it were so…

The billionaire Koch brothers, their foundations and funding (the Kochtopus), and the Mises folks go back a long way…

Update 2

Here, Joe Salerno at Mises.org gets into more detail on Boettke’s positions and how Austrian they are.

Update 1

Meanwhile, Bob Wenzel cleverly inserts a photo of the very attractive Ms. Kelly Evans, author of the WSJ piece, into his take, which is that Boettke leads the “uptight” wing of the Austrians.

Wenzel, like The Daily Bell, has respect for Boettke himself and directs his scorn at the WSJ.

ORIGINAL POST:

David Kramer at Lew Rockwell blog points to a fascinating piece of intellectual chicanery from the Wall Street Journal. It manages to discuss Austrian economics without mentioning Von Mises, the Mises Institute, Murray Rothbard, or Lew Rockwell….but does cite Peter Boettke, a DC academic, and Schumpeter, who wasn’t even an Austrian…

KRAMER:

“After you’re done being perplexed by such a ridiculous question from me, let me ask you another question: Have any of you ever heard of Peter Boettke? I thought so. Though there are many of you who have also heard of Boettke, there are also many of you who have not—and I can assure you that you can go to your grave not fretting over that lack of knowledge.

Lila: I’ve actually linked to Peter Boettke a couple of times for pieces he had up at his blog Cato. But anything I learned from him is a cipher next to what I learned from Mises.org or Lewrockwell.com, which I had the great good fortune to discover in 2003. No disrespect meant to Professor Boettke. But a minimal regard for the truth demands that this bit of propaganda have a stake driven through its heart.

KRAMER:

Yet, “somehow,” one of the biggest One World Government propaganda rags—the War Street Journal—wrote a puff piece on Prof. Boettke of George Mason University who (according to this rag) “is emerging as the intellectual standard-bearer for the Austrian school of economic.” Perhaps in the minds of Peter Boettke and the folks at the War Street Journal. Now why in the world would the WSJ print such a baldfaced lie when Boettke could not even shine the shoes of the greatest living Austrian economists in the world today—Hans Hoppe, Walter Block, David Gordon, Joseph Salerno, Guido Hülsmann (I could go on)? Hmmm…could it be…could it be…could it be because Prof. Boettke is still a believer in one of the biggest scams ever perpetrated on human civilization?

“The Fed, he [Boettke] says, should be to make money “as neutral as possible, like the rule of law, which never favors one party over the other.” [You see, folks, there’s a reason for everything. Now you know why the War Street Journal wouldn’t dare publish an article on any of the real Austrian economists I mentioned in the previous paragraph.]

And guess who is the only Austrian (albeit barely) economist that the rag mentions in conjunction with Boettke and the Austrian school of economics? Friedrich Hayek. You know, the “Austrian” economist who once stated that the welfare state works. (I have yet to find out if, at the very least, that was a qualified statement.) I guess that’s why the Socialist members of the Nobel Price committee gave Hayek the Nobel Prize in “Economics” rather than the exponentially superior Ludwig von Mises (the number one Austrian economist—and, for that matter, economist—in history) or Murray Rothbard (the number two Austrian economist—and, for that matter, economist—in history).

Here’s a bit of historical ”ignorance” in the article:

“Mr. Boettke “has done more for Austrian economics, I’d say, than any individual in the last decade,” says Bruce Caldwell, an editor of Mr. Hayek’s collected works.”

“Of course” he has. Forget about a man named Lew Rockwell who started The Mises Institute back in 1982, giving Austrian economists Hans Hoppe, Walter Block, David Gordon, Joseph Salerno, Guido Hülsmann, et al. a central location from which to promote the Austrian school of economics (which, at that time, barely anyone outside of academia—and many even inside academia—had ever even heard of). And forget about Lew Rockwell’s Austrian economics-promoting website lewrockwell.com, which happens to be the number one libertarian website in the world. Even Ron Paul has done more to bring Austrian economics to the attention of the public than Boetkke in the last decade. Of course, Lew and Ron want to end the fed, not “improve” it—as “Austrian” Prof. Boettke implies he wants to in his above-quoted statement.

Lila: A ferocious discussion at The Daily Bell on why (and how) Prof. Boettke might  differ from the Rockwellian/Paulian position.

KRAMER:

This propaganda piece intentionally omitting Mises, [sic] Rothbard, The Mises Institute, Llewellyn Rockwell, et al. in relation to the Austrian school of economics reminded me of two things—one personal and one public.

The personal: Many years ago a friend of mine (whom I suspected of being homosexual) wrote me a long letter about how he had met someone who he was in love with. Yet not only did he not mention the person’s name, he never once used a pronoun in the entire letter!! I wrote back to him goading him into telling me the person’s name. He wrote back to me mentioning the man’s name.

The public: I remember when Murray Rothbard died, The New York Slimes obituary “just happened” to come up with an extremely unflattering photo of Rothbard to accompany the obit rather than this standard one:

I guess it was one of those “unfortunate” lapses that are so “rarely” found in the One World Government media.

By the way, please don’t bother to write me any emails praising Peter Boetkke. I’m sure Peter’s done some fine work—but he is NO Mises, Rothbard, Hans Hoppe, Walter Block, David Gordon, Joseph Salerno, Guido Hülsmann, Robert Murphy, Stephan Kinsella, Roger Garrison, et al.

And when it comes to someone “who has done more for Austrian economics, I’d say, than any individual in the last decade,” the only person on this planet who can lay claim to that monumental, heroic achievement is LLEWELLYN ROCKWELL. (Except it hasn’t been a decade. It has been over a quarter of a century.)

UPDATE: John Grimsley wrote to me to point out a glaring omission in my post:

“You missed one thing in your recent blog post on lewrockwell.com: Peter Boettke isn’t even the “intellectual standard-bearer for the Austrian school of economics” at his own university. That would be Walter Williams.”

Indian revolutionary and mystic Aurobindo Ghosh on why war continues:

“The progress of humanity proceeds by a series of imaginations which the Will in the race turns into accomplished facts and a train of illusions which contain each of them an inevitable truth. The truth is there in the secret Will and Knowledge that are conducting our affairs for us and it reflects itself in the soul of mankind; the illusion is in the shape we give to that reflection, the veil of arbitrary fixations of time, place and circumstance which that deceptive organ of knowledge, the human intellect, weaves over the face of the Truth. Human imaginations are often fulfilled to the letter; our illusions on the contrary find the truth behind them realised most unexpectedly, at a time, in ways, under circumstances far other than those we had fixed for them.

Man’s illusions are of all sorts and kinds, some of them petty though not unimportant, ­ for nothing in the world is unimportant, ­ others vast and grandiose. The greatest of them all are those which cluster round the hope of a perfected society, a perfected race, a terrestrial millennium. Each new idea, religious or social, which takes possession of the epoch and seizes on large masses of men, is in turn to be the instrument of these high realisations; each in turn betrays the hope which gave it its force to conquer. And the reason is plain enough to whosoever chooses to see; it is that no change of ideas or of the intellectual outlook upon life, no belief in God or Avatar or Prophet, no victorious science or liberating philosophy, no social scheme or system, no sort of machinery internal or external can really bring about the great desire implanted in the race, true though that desire is in itself and the index of the goal to which we are being led. Because man is himself not a machine nor a device, but a being and a most complex one at that, therefore he cannot be saved by machinery; only by an entire change which shall affect all the members of his being, can he be liberated from his discords and imperfections.

One of the illusions incidental to this great hope is the expectation of the passing of war. This grand event in human progress is always being confidently expected, and since we are now all scientific minds and rational beings, we no longer expect it by a divine intervention, but assign sound physical and economical reasons for the faith that is in us. The first form taken by this new gospel was the expectation and the prophecy that the extension of commerce would be the extinction of war. Commercialism was the natural enemy of militarism and would drive it from the face of the earth. The growing and universal lust of gold and the habit of comfort and the necessities of increased production and intricate interchange would crush out the lust of power and dominion and glory and battle. Gold-hunger or commodity-hunger would drive out earthhunger, the dharma of the Vaishya would set its foot on the dharma of the Kshatriya and give it its painless quietus. The ironic reply of the gods has not been long in coming. Actually this very reign of commercialism, this increase of production and interchange, this desire for commodities and markets and this piling up of a huge burden of unnecessary necessities has been the cause of half the wars that have since afflicted the human race. And now we see militarism and commercialism united in a loving clasp, coalescing into a sacred biune duality of national life and patriotic aspiration and causing and driving by their force the most irrational, the most monstrous and nearly cataclysmic, the hugest war of modern and indeed of all historic times.

Another illusion was that the growth of democracy would mean the growth of pacifism and the end of war. It was fondly thought that wars are in their nature dynastic and aristocratic; greedy kings and martial nobles driven by earth-hunger and battle-hunger, diplomatists playing at chess with the lives of men and the fortunes of nations, these were the guilty causes of war who drove the unfortunate peoples to the battlefield like sheep to the shambles. These proletariates, mere food for powder, who had no interest, no desire, no battle-hunger driving them to armed conflict, had only to become instructed and dominant to embrace each other and all the world in a free and fraternal amity. Man refuses to learn from that history of whose lessons the wise prate to us; otherwise the story of old democracies ought to have been enough to prevent this particular illusion. In any case the answer of the gods has been, here too, sufficiently ironic. If kings and diplomatists are still often the movers of war, none more ready than the modern democracy to make itself their enthusiastic and noisy accomplice, and we see even the modern spectacle of governments and diplomats hanging back in affright or doubt from the yawning clamorous abyss while angry shouting peoples impel them to the verge. Bewildered pacifists who still cling to their principles and illusions, find themselves howled down by the people and, what is piquant enough, by their own recent comrades and leaders. The socialist, the syndicalist, the internationalist of yesterday stands forward as a banner-bearer in the great mutual massacre and his voice is the loudest to cheer on the dogs of war.

Another recent illusion was the power of Courts of Arbitration and Concerts of Europe to prevent war. There again the course that events immediately took was sufficiently ironic; for the institution of the great Court of International Arbitration was followed up by a series of little and great wars which led by an inexorable logical chain to the long-dreaded European conflict, and the monarch who had first conceived the idea, was also the first to unsheath his sword in a conflict dictated on both sides by the most unrighteous greed and aggression. In fact this series of wars, whether fought in Northern or Southern Africa, in Manchuria or the Balkans, was marked most prominently by the spirit which disregards cynically that very idea of inherent and existing rights, that balance of law and equity upon which alone arbitration can be founded. As for the Concert of Europe, it seems far enough from us now, almost antediluvian in its antiquity, as it belongs indeed to the age before the deluge; but we can remember well enough what an unmusical and discordant concert it was, what a series of fumblings and blunderings and how its diplomacy led us fatally to the inevitable event against which it struggled. Now it is suggested by many to substitute a United States of Europe for the defunct Concert and for the poor helpless Hague tribunal an effective Court of International Law with force behind it to impose its decisions. But so long as men go on believing in the sovereign power of machinery, it is not likely that the gods either will cease from their studied irony.

There have been other speculations and reasonings; ingenious minds have searched for a firmer and more rational ground of faith. The first of these was propounded in a book by a Russian writer which had an enormous success in its day but has now passed into the silence. Science was to bring war to an end by making it physically impossible. It was mathematically proved that with modern weapons two equal armies would fight each other to a standstill, attack would become impossible except by numbers thrice those of the defence and war therefore would bring no military decision but only an infructuous upheaval and disturbance of the organised life of the nations. When the Russo-Japanese war almost immediately proved that attack and victory were still possible and the battlefury of man superior to the fury of his death-dealing engines, another book was published called by a title which has turned into a jest upon the writer, the “Great Illusion”, to prove that the idea of a commercial advantage to be gained by war and conquest was an illusion and that as soon as this was understood and the sole benefit of peaceful interchange realised, the peoples would abandon a method of settlement now chiefly undertaken from motives of commercial expansion, yet whose disastrous result was only to disorganise fatally the commercial prosperity it sought to serve. The present war came as the immediate answer of the gods to this sober and rational proposition. It has been fought for conquest and commercial expansion and it is proposed, even when it has been fought out on the field, to follow it up by a commercial struggle between the belligerent nations.

The men who wrote these books were capable thinkers, but they ignored the one thing that matters, human nature. The present war has justified to a certain extent the Russian writer, though by developments he did not foresee; scientific warfare has brought military movement to a standstill and baffled the strategist and the tactician, it has rendered decisive victory impossible except by overwhelming numbers or an overwhelming weight of artillery. But this has not made war impossible, it has only changed its character; it has at the most replaced the war of military decisions by that of military and financial exhaustion aided by the grim weapon of famine. The English writer on the other hand erred by isolating the economic motive as the one factor that weighed; he ignored the human lust of dominion which, carried into the terms of commercialism means the undisputed control of markets and the exploitation of helpless populations. Again, when we rely upon the disturbance of organised national and international life as a preventive of war, we forget the boundless power of self-adaptation which man possesses; that power has been shown strikingly enough in the skill and ease with which the organisation and finance of peace were replaced in the present crisis by the organisation and finance of war. And when we rely upon Science to make war impossible, we forget that the progress of Science means a series of surprises and that it means also a constant effort of human ingenuity to overcome impossibilities and find fresh means of satisfying our ideas, desires and instincts. Science may well make war of the present type with shot and shell and mines and battleships an impossibility and yet develop and put in their place simpler or more summary means which may bring back an easier organisation of warfare.

So long as war does not become psychologically impossible, it will remain or, if banished for a while, return. War itself, it is hoped, will end war; the expense, the horror, the butchery, the disturbance of tranquil life, the whole confused sanguinary madness of the thing has reached or will reach such colossal proportions that the human race will fling the monstrosity behind it in weariness and disgust. But weariness and disgust, horror and pity, even the opening of the eyes to reason by the practical facts of the waste of human life and energy and the harm and extravagance are not permanent factors; they last only while the lesson is fresh. Afterwards, there is forgetfulness; human nature recuperates itself and recovers the instincts that were temporarily dominated. A long peace, even a certain organisation of peace, may conceivably result, but so long as the heart of man remains what it is, the peace will come to an end; the organisation will break down under the stress of human passions. War is no longer, perhaps, a biological necessity, but it is still a psychological necessity; what is within us, must manifest itself outside.

Meanwhile it is well that every false hope and confident prediction should be answered as soon as may well be by the irony of the gods; for only so can we be driven to the perception of the real remedy. Only when man has developed not merely a fellowfeeling with all men, but a dominant sense of unity and commonalty, only when he is aware of them not merely as brothers, ­ that is a fragile bond, ­ but as parts of himself, only when he has learned to live, not in his separate personal and communal ego-sense, but in a large universal consciousness, can the phenomenon of war, with whatever weapons, pass out of his life without the possibility of return. Meanwhile that he should struggle even by illusions towards that end, is an excellent sign; for it shows that the truth behind the illusion is pressing towards the hour when it may become manifest as reality.”

The personalities of two tyrants, Josef Stalin and Czech president Gustav Husak, as portrayed by writers, Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Ivan Klima:

“Yet it is clear that the portraits of Solzhenitsyn’s and Klima’s respective oppressors have a great deal in common. They identify accurately the overriding character trait of the dictator, namely narcissism. One can do worse than quote from Alan Bullock’s monumental study Hitler and Stalin – Parallel Lives:

“Narcissism” is a concept originally formulated by Freud in relation to early infancy, but one which is now accepted more broadly to describe a personality disorder in which the natural development of relationships to the external world has failed to take place. In such a state only the person himself, his needs, feelings, thoughts, everything and everybody as they relate to him are experienced as fully real, while everything and everybody otherwise lacks reality or interest.

Fromm argues that some degree of narcissism can be considered an occupational illness among political leaders in proportion to their conviction of a providential mission and their claim to infallibility of judgment and a monopoly of power. When such claims are raised to a level demanded by a Hitler or a Stalin at the height of their power, any challenge will be perceived as a threat to their private image of themselves as much as to their public image, and they will react by going to any lengths to suppress it. (p. 11)

Bullock distinguishes between this personality disorder and any other (paranoia, schizophrenia, psychopathic condition) since these would normally affect the sufferer’s ability to function on a day to day basis, let alone allow him to achieve what Hitler and Stalin did. From the examples we have in Solzhenitsyn and Klima it would seem that the creative writer can tell us as much about mind of the tyrant as can the psychiatrist or the historian.

One final question: both our tyrants seem to have started out with some degree of idealism and sense of destiny. In the case of Stalin, as perceived by Solzhenitsyn, these qualities become perverted into a God-like notion of immortality and infallibility. In the case of Husak, as seen by Klima, there is hardly a trace of such early idealism – the resignation speech is shallow and trite in the extreme. The president comes across as a cynic and opportunist, exhibiting a combination of racism, boorishness, callous indifference and sentimentality. In terms of morality the results are the same: the debasement of a society. Thus both writers – inadvertently? – raise as a moral lodestar the standard of if not healthy skepticism then at least an uncertainty factor, as displayed in their most successful works. The real heroes of The First Circle are the questioners (Rubin, Nerzhin, Sologdin); the real heroes of Waiting for the dark, Waiting for the Light are the film-maker, forever compromising in order to survive but with some sense of decency and integrity. It is ironic that tyrants, so convinced of their own immortality, are so frequently, paranoically afraid of death; similarly, it is ironic that Solzhenitsyn and Klima, both increasingly preoccupied with conscience and clear -cut moral divisions, are at their most engaging when presenting us with seekers rather than finders.

Dedicated to warriors against the state everywhere:

Swamp Fox! Swamp Fox!
Tail on his hat,
Nobody knows where The Swamp Fox’s at.

Swamp Fox! Swamp Fox!
Hiding in the glen,
He runs away to fight again.

I fire a gun the birds take wing.
There startled cries a signal clear.
My men march forth to fight the king.
And leave behind there loved ones dear.

(Chorus)

We had no lead, we had no powder.
Always fought with an empty gun.
Only made us shout the louder.
We are men of Marion.

We had no cornpone, had no honey.
All we had was Continental money.
Wouldn’t buy nothing worth beans in the pot.
Roasted ears and possum was all we go.

(Chorus)

We had no blankets, had no bed.
Had no roof above our head.
We get no shelter when it rains.
All we got is Yankee brains.

The Redcoats fight in a foreign land.
Their hearts are far across the sea.
They never try to understand.
We fight for home and liberty.

Judith Bello in Counterpunch:

“The Atlantic published a disturbing article recently, “The Point of No Return” by Jeffrey Goldberg, who makes the case that, since Israel is guaranteed to initiate an attack on Iran by next spring, the US should take the initiative and do the job itself.

The ‘War with Iran’ propaganda machine is running full throttle. First, there are the grand statements of propaganda denouncing the government for terrorism, barbarism, supporting terrorism, meddling in the affairs of their neighbors, not having a free press and other undemocratic practices. All this floats atop the assumption/insinuation that they have a nuclear weapons program which will come to fruition in the very near future as an international menace of intolerable proportions. Then the spinners. There are 50 comments after every article and post, arguing, elaborating, spinning a story where the details have been obscured by lies, threats and counter-threats, innuendo, histrionics and a high energy conflagration of information with misinformation. Ultimately, its really hard to predict whether there will be a strike on Iran just because there is so much unconstrained energy in the issue, and so little recourse to reason in addressing it.

After reading the Goldberg article, I find myself inspired to add a few words to the ongoing discussion to address one aspect of The Atlantic’s presentation. On the same web page, embedded in one of the first few paragraphs of the article, there is a video of Jeffrey Goldberg conducting an interview with Christopher Hitchens on Israel and Iran that is a shameless piece of hysteria. Ironically, the 6 minute video begins with a full 25 seconds of Bob Dylan singing The Gates of Eden (“Of war and peace the truth just twists . . . “).

During the first 15 seconds the camera pans the books in the book cases in the room, (Hitchen’s study, perhaps), followed by the credits, and photos of Hitchens, who is being treated for cancer at present, and looks very ill, from a happier time. We get the impression of a scholar who is both hip and wise, not to mention very well read, and long suffering. When he speaks, Hitchens’ tone is hesitant, deeply emotional; he often looks down and fidgets before speaking.

Goldberg tells us Hitchens has deep knowledge of the ‘Holocaust’, and “the protean eternal nature of antisemitism”. Eternal antisemitism. That’s a big statement, a cynical statement. In a world where racism and greed have impoverished and debilitated broad swaths of humanity who have darker skin, who sit on resources other, better armed, races covet while they lack the basic necessities of life, water, for instance, we are to focus on man’s inhumanity to man in the form of “eternal” bigotry against an etno-religious group, largely white, well fed and successful, who have been given permission to drive out the indigenous inhabitants of their ‘Promised Land’ and unconditionally supported in the establishment of their homeland through violent, separatist, racist policies towards their neighbors.

Hitchens is asked what he would do if he were in Netanyahu’s shoes. Hitchens speaks reverently about the US role as the leader in fostering Human Rights in the world, not just because the US wrote the treaties, but because it convinced other countries to sign on to them. He specifically mentions the Geneva Conventions, the United Nations and the Convention for Human Rights. Apparently he hasn’t noticed that the US has openly scorned those conventions and repeatedly bullied, cheated and undermined the UN for some time now. But apparently he’s assuming that you haven’t noticed either as he goes on to build his argument. Iran, he says, has signed all kinds of treaties and guarantees that they have no ambitions to build a nuclear weapon. So, if it “turns out” they have done so, then “there is no international law”. And, if we find we have allowed this to happen, then “we have watched while [the law] was contemptuously dismantled”.

This is a curious basis, and his logic grows more fantastic with every statement. If someone breaks the law, he argues, then there is no law, because if we allow this so far unproven violation to occur, then we are responsible for this fall into lawlessness, and this is important [because . . . . we are the law?] By contrast, another country has placed itself above the law, refused to sign the salient treaties – those supporting human rights, rejecting WMD and showing a willingness to work with other nations – built the bombs, persists in a policy of ethnic cleansing and openly declares its right to attack its neighbors with impunity in the name of preemptive “defense”. But the US’s willing complicity in that project doesn’t undermine the law.

Hitchens goes on to make some rather strong statements about those being menaced and under threat having an “obligation” to “take out” the offending regime. Then he says, “don’t look at me like that, don’t look at the Jewish people like that”. Apparently he isn’t aware that his statements are pretty menacing, and represent a serious threat to someone. Furthermore, he purports to speak, not for Christopher Hitchens, not for the State of Israel, but for all of the Jewish People. It is problematic enough to live in a country where you disagree with government policy which is assumed to be ‘speaking for you’, but the Jewish people aren’t safe anywhere from the aggressive little nation that insists on speaking for them. As for Hitchens, he was invited to speak [for Israel], so I guess you can’t fault him on doing so. He finishes his thought in a defensive tone, with the statement that if you haven’t acted, then you have acted. Inaction is action, culpable action. You deserve what you get. I suppose you could make this argument in a fever pitched crisis, but in the current case, it’s a little over the top.

Goldberg now raises the issue that Iran will point out (as I have above) that Israel has developed an arsenal of nuclear weapons outside the international treaties, i.e. outside the law. Hitchens hangs his head, then looks up and responds defiantly, saying that he regrets the proliferation of nuclear weapons in the world, BUT, “there is a big difference a country that has a weapon to preserve a certain, what we used to call ‘balance of terror’, and one that wants one to upend the existing order”. He refers to a regime (the Iranian regime we must assume) that ” is a messianic dictatorship that crushes its own citizens and threatens the territories of its neighbors”. If that isn’t the pot calling the kettle black, I don’t know what is! It’s true the Iranian theocracy is no gem, but a supporter of a country that was founded through ethnic cleansing, and has preemptively attacked its neighbors repeatedly since its inception resulting in the occupation of neighboring territories nearly equal to its allotted area, is hardly in a position to criticize.

But let’s face it. That is what this is really about, that idea that we have to “preserve the balance of terror.” And what we are really talking about here is a “balance”, nay, an “imbalance” of “power” that we are preserving through the means of “terror.” That’s what it’s all about. But Hitchens really is, dare I say it, paranoid on behalf of Israel and the Jewish people, which are conflated into a single entity in his mind. When asked whether Israel’s nukes are required to “prevent another Holocaust”, he says that perhaps if Israel had never existed, it would be OK with him, but now that it’s here “civilization” must defend Israel to prevent the “unthinkable”.

He goes on to say that if we have to pick on a client country for its corruption and human rights violations, we should pick Pakistan. The remark is a petty indirection, but it’s an interesting choice, actually. Pakistan, like Israel, was created by Great Britain in the process of unwinding its empire. Like Israel, it was a gift to a small elite population, a bribe of sorts to insure their post-colonial loyalty, and imposed on the masses who now inhabit the country, and those who were forced to leave. Here we are more than 60 years later, still trying to manage the consequences of this disastrous policy.

So, more than enough analysis. This interview ought to be an embarrassment, to Jeffrey Goldberg and Christopher Hitchens, and to The Atlantic. I suppose you can view it as propaganda, but Hitchens’ reality is so twisted, and his presentation so childlike and sulky that it’s just another sad testament to the pathetic level of analysis to which Americans are regularly subjected. It really is time the mainstream media (and our president) give a hearing to independent and experienced foreign policy experts who actually practice diplomacy. To practice diplomacy, you have to be willing to talk to people. Pragmatism in international relations doesn’t mean bowing to the baddest boy on the block, or the most deserving or the longest suffering. It means working with others to construct reasonable solutions to real problems that cause everyone to suffer.”

“Well, don’t look to me, Dolores. All my money is tied up in cash.”

— “Dolores Claiborne,” Stephen King

From GeorgeWashington.blogpost.com:

“Has the U.S. Government ever carried out false flag terror attacks?

Well, as shown by this BBC special (which contains interviews with some of the key players), it is probable that America knew of the Japanese plan to attack Pearl Harbor — down to the exact date of the attack — and allowed it to happen to justify America’s entry into World War II. See also this short essay by a highly-praised historian summarizing some of the key points (the historian, a World War II veteran, actually agreed with this strategy for getting America into the war, and so does not have any axe to grind). The Pearl Harbor conspiracy involved hundreds of military personnel. Moreover, the White House apparently had, a year earlier, launched an 8-point plan to provoke Japan into war against the U.S. (including, for example, an oil embargo). And — most stunning — the FDR administration took numerous affirmative steps to ensure that the Japanese attack would be successful.

And the New York Times has documented that Iranians working for the C.I.A. in the 1950’s posed as Communists and staged bombings in Iran in order to turn the country against its democratically-elected president (see also this essay).

And, as confirmed by a former Italian Prime Minister, an Italian judge, and the former head of Italian counterintelligence, NATO, with the help of U.S. and foreign special forces, carried out terror bombings in Italy and blamed the communists, in order to rally people’s support for their governments in Europe in their fight against communism. As one participant in this formerly-secret program stated: “You had to attack civilians, people, women, children, innocent people, unknown people far removed from any political game. The reason was quite simple. They were supposed to force these people, the Italian public, to turn to the state to ask for greater security.”

Moreover, recently declassified documents show that in the 1960’s, the American Joint Chiefs of Staff signed off on a plan to blow up AMERICAN airplanes (using an elaborate plan involving the switching of airplanes), and also to commit terrorist acts on American soil, and then to blame it on the Cubans in order to justify an invasion of Cuba. If you view no other links in this article, please read the following ABC news report; the official documents; and watch this interview with the former Washington Investigative Producer for ABC’s World News Tonight with Peter Jennings.

In addition, the FBI had penetrated the cell which carried out the 1993 world trade center bombing, but had — at the last minute — cancelled the plan to have its FBI infiltrator substitute fake power for real explosives, against the infiltrator’s strong wishes (summary version is free; full version is pay-per-view).

And the CIA is alleged to have met with Bin Laden two months before 9/11.

And the anthrax attacks — which were sent along with notes purportedly written by Islamic terrorists — used a weaponized anthrax strain from the top U.S. bioweapons facility, the Fort Detrick military base. Indeed, top bioweapons experts have stated that the anthrax attack may have been a CIA test “gone wrong”; and see this article by a former NSA and naval intelligence officer. It is also interesting that the only congress people mailed anthrax-containing letters were key democrats, and that the attacks occurred one week before passage of the freedom-curtailing Patriot Act, which seems to have scared them and the rest of congress into passing that act without even reading it. And it might be coincidence, but White House staff began taking the anti-anthrax medicine before the Anthrax attacks occurred.

Even the former director of the National Security Agency said “By any measure the US has long used terrorism. In ‘78-79 the Senate was trying to pass a law against international terrorism – in every version they produced, the lawyers said the US would be in violation”(the audio is here).

Then, of course, there is 9/11…”

“War is just a racket. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small inside group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses. I believe in adequate defense at the coastline and nothing else. If a nation comes over here to fight, then we’ll fight. The trouble with America is that when the dollar only earns 6 percent over here, then it gets restless and goes overseas to get 100 percent. Then the flag follows the dollar and the soldiers follow the flag. I wouldn’t go to war again as I have done to protect some lousy investment of the bankers. There are only two things we should fight for. One is the defense of our homes and the other is the Bill of Rights. War for any other reason is simply a racket. There isn’t a trick in the racketeering bag that the military gang is blind to. It has its “finger men” to point out enemies, its “muscle men” to destroy enemies, its “brain men” to plan war preparations, and a “Big Boss” Super-Nationalistic-Capitalism.

(Lila: Which is mercantalism, not free markets)

It may seem odd for me, a military man to adopt such a comparison. Truthfulness compels me to. I spent thirty- three years and four months in active military service as a member of this country’s most agile military force, the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from Second Lieutenant to Major-General. And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscle- man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I suspected I was just part of a racket at the time. Now I am sure of it. Like all the members of the military profession, I never had a thought of my own until I left the service. My mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of higher-ups. This is typical with everyone in the military service. I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912 (where have I heard that name before?). I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested. During those years, I had, as the boys in the back room would say, a swell racket. Looking back on it, I feel that I could have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.”

— General Smedley Butler