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Barry Stevens
Hi, welcome to theAnalysis. I’m Barry Stevens. In a moment, I’m going to be joined by Lloyd Axworthy, the former Foreign Minister of Canada, and by the Globe and Mail’s Doug Saunders. In a two-part conversation, we’re going to be talking first about the collapse of nuclear arms control and nuclear proliferation. In the second part, the United States’ attack on the International Criminal Court.

Now, you can catch us on theAnalysis.news website, where there’s a donate button if you feel willing and able to donate, and of course on YouTube and on various audio platforms such as Spotify and Apple. We’ll see you in a moment.

I’m Barry Stevens. I’m a documentary writer and filmmaker. Joining me is Doug Saunders, a longtime award-winning journalist, been to numerous countries, and perhaps, for my money, the most interesting columnist in the Globe and Mail. He’s written very originally about 21st century cities and human migration, many things.

We’re here to talk with Lloyd Axworthy, whose career spans nearly half a century in public life. As Canada’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, he led the 1997 Ottawa Treaty banning anti-personnel landmines, presided over the UN Security Council a couple of times, and championed the idea of human security, which is significant for us today, I think, and played a major role in the creation of the International Criminal Court. Since then he’s been a university president, and chaired the World Refugee and Migration Council. He recently published a memoir, and, super interesting to me, served as international co-president of the World Federalist Movement.

Lloyd Axworthy
I did, yes.

Barry Stevens
Fair to say he’s been a very significant critic of Canada’s foreign policy and the state of international institutions. So today we’re going to talk about, I hope, nukes and the ICC a little bit if we can, if we have time.

Lloyd Axworthy
Sure.

Barry Stevens
Just to set up the nuclear thing, the last nuclear arms control treaty between Russia and the U.S.A expired earlier this year. The U.S.A is spending a lot of money modernizing its nuclear weapons, and Russia is building novel weapons to evade the so-called Golden Dome that President Trump thinks will protect the United States, which I have no doubt Canada will be involved in.

Nuclear threats have been made by President Putin and the U.S. president over Iran, and most recently, as you were writing about, Lloyd, Washington has struck a civil nuclear deal with Saudi Arabia, which I think includes enrichment rights, while using military force against Iran’s nuclear program. So, the nuclear age has always been dangerous, but Lloyd, are we in a particularly dangerous time right now?

Lloyd Axworthy
I think it was dangerous because the efforts of 40, 50 years of building some guardrails, some constraints, some standards, some protective devices like red phones have all been eliminated. I think Canada, as I’ve said before, has what I always thought was a particular legacy, going back to ’45, ’46, where Canada made the decision, which nobody pays much attention to, but we had every single necessary element to become a nuclear weapons state, and we decided not to. The Saint-Laurent government— and I’ve gone back to check Hansard, and there was some sort of a preliminary debate, but it was unanimous in the House. Canada decided to become a non-nuclear state. To me, that set up a legacy which has been followed ever since up until now.

I think we’ve, for reasons that we don’t— the depth of it, the commitment, and even the machinery— Global Affairs Canada no longer has what for a time was one of the best nuclear development diplomatic centers in GAC. That’s all kind of been shut down. No discussions. They don’t go to the meetings. We bypass the whole discussion on the treaty against banning nuclear weapons. We’re not engaged in the efforts, as I wrote about, in terms of the proliferation of sharing our issues. In fact, I still have a really kind of a serious itch that in the arrangements or agreements we’re making with Saudi Arabia, we might just be including uranium and know-how into that package. We never know because the Carney government isn’t very forthcoming in what its deals are.

I think we’re now at a stage where you’re basically saying, not just a proliferation of potential sites, but as you’ve described, brand new delivery systems and bombs that can be— and increasingly, if you look at the language of the United States, Russia, and China, it’s in the language of saying, “Well, we’re kind of reaching a stage where nuclear weapons are no longer the kind of sober mushroom hanging over the world. We can do things in a much more targeted, calculated way,” which just isn’t true. There’s just no point to it. So it’s one of those pillars of international conflict management that has fallen by the wayside.

Doug Saunders
There’s a—

Barry Stevens
Sorry, go ahead, Doug, please.

Doug Saunders
I just think this is a strange historical moment for this to be occurring, for the institutional infrastructure of nonproliferation to be fading. Because on one hand, we have the language of nuclear deterrence entering the vocabularies of a number of countries again. On the other hand, the last couple of years have really shown the world and countries that might be seeking them how ineffective and pointless the concept of deterrence is, at least against neighboring countries. Because in the last couple of years, we’ve seen Ukraine, a non-nuclear state, occupy a province of Russia, an oblast of Russia, a famously nuclear state, for more than a year, knowing full well that Russia would not and could not retaliate because using nuclear weapons against a geographically adjoining country would effectively be attacking your own population.

We’ve also seen India and Pakistan go to war against each other.

Lloyd Axworthy
Right.

Doug Saunders
India destroyed a significant amount of Pakistan’s air force and so on in a conventional war, again, knowing full well that nuclear deterrent is useless against a geographically adjoining state. You can argue about whether it has any use anywhere else. So the lesson coming out of this period should be that there’s not a lot of value in the considerable expense and risk of developing a nuclear arsenal. Yet there’s nobody saying that now because, as you say, the institutions that should be doing that have been neutered.

Lloyd Axworthy
Right. Yes, I mean, it’s become a kind of commedia dell’arte. You just go through the routines, you use the language, you hold meetings, and nothing happens. In fact, in the meantime, you’ve got North Korea, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Indonesia; I mean, they’re all beginning to nibble at the corners of this because, I guess, in terms of the great power language, the fact that Trump has blown the American mystique of being the all-powerful arbiter, people are kind of losing trust in anything they can do. So they’re saying we have to do it ourselves.

I mean, Europe is a good example where you’ve now got serious discussions in European countries about whether they have to have their own nuclear weapons. I go back to one old sort of— I had an international law professor way back in graduate school named Richard Falk, and he said, “The basic axiom is if you keep producing weapons, one of these days you’re going to use them.”

Barry Stevens
Yeah, and in fact, of course, despite deterrence, as you say, not being very effective, people can even fight wars while they have nuclear weapons without using them. Nevertheless, they are on a hair trigger in the sense that the United States has a vast arsenal of land-based missiles which will be targeted. Therefore, if there’s information coming in that they appear to be targeted, the president, of course, has five or 10 minutes. This president has five or 10 minutes to decide whether to use them or lose them, and then we’re adding artificial intelligence into this mix.

Lloyd Axworthy
Into the mix. That’s the big one. I mean, Barry, just to make that comment, I mean, we’re seeing daily, if not twice daily, the President of the United States is basically off his rocker in so many ways. At what point does his frustration, his anger, his inability to win primary nominations in Colorado force him to say, “I’m going to do something dramatic to show exactly what I mean.” You just don’t know how thin of an edge it is between the control system there, because right now there isn’t any rule that he doesn’t think he can break.

Barry Stevens
Yeah, there was a guy I spoke to who was a former State Department fellow called Tom Countryman who talked about the ecology, not just the treaties but the ecology, meaning the network of people who know each other, who know communication, and that does appear to have withered too. Would you say, like, in your time, you would perhaps have more collegial or conversant relationships with Soviets than exist now?

Lloyd Axworthy
Yes, that’s right. In fact, just a small history tidbit, but the Russian foreign minister at the time, Igor Ivanov, he and I were probably the two strongest sort of anti-nuclears at the time. We really bonded in a sense because he was pretty quickly dismissed when Putin came in. There are a lot of Russians who remember that.

I’m just writing a piece I’m sure nobody will read, but I’m probably the last of a generation of Canadians that actually grew up during World War II and can remember what it was all about. We’re forgetting all that, and with it, the whole nuclear threat, because people were scared silly. Hiroshima, it’ll just change the mindset of two or three generations, but it has no impact anymore.

Barry Stevens
Yeah, I’ve actually often thought that the leaders right up to George H.W. Bush in the United States were in the war, or even Putin now, of course, lost his brother, and so he still perhaps recalls it, although not much. But no other leader really has that actual physical personal memory. But, you know, we talk about it all collapsing, but there is this Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.

Doug Saunders
Yes.

Barry Stevens
I just looked it up; I think 100 countries— that’s more than half the countries in the world— have signed it. Canada has remained not enthusiastic. Is there any role for those middle powers who might have some influence, and should they? Is this a good thing, this treaty? Should they push it?

Lloyd Axworthy
Well, I always go that anything you can build that has the motive or the objective of putting some constraint, some rail guard on the use of weapons and war needs to be encouraged. The treaty itself, I mean, you know, as you said earlier, we did a landmine treaty without great powers being involved. I’m sorry, the exception: France and Great Britain joined in, but the Americans were disdainful. The Russians, no way. China, a very small group; they were along with Cuba and sort of Nicaragua and a few others.

The reality is, I think— here’s a lesson that I think I learned from my time— is that setting norms— I know that sounds like a very United Church kind of expression— but setting norms has an important influence on determining the use of power in the world. The more you can put some norms out there, extol them, add to them, use them, and getting the information out, it’s all a part of building a sort of bulwark against the ambitions of the military brass who think it’s all okay and politicians who no longer have restraints and particularly those crazies in Silicon Valley who think that maybe it’s a good thing, the world will destroy itself at some point.

Doug Saunders
That may be the best hope, right? That non-proliferation can become a politically valuable thing to be promoting. Because the wrong sort of people are— I think there needs to be, like you say, a making of this back into a norm. That people would want to vote for somebody who’s talking about non-proliferation. I think there are a few too many countries where proliferation has become a marketable political idea for some parties.

Lloyd Axworthy
Yes.

Doug Saunders
I think that’s just— because nobody’s saying it clearly enough.

Lloyd Axworthy
Doug, I’d be interested because you cover it pretty broadly on the international front. Is this a product of the shift into increasingly more right-wing governments whose basic ambition is to, as they like to say, destroy the liberal international democratic systems? Or is there something more to it than that right now?

Doug Saunders
Well, the underlying question there is the big question of the day, which is this wave of illiberal Democrat authoritarians, as they like to say, is it a product of masses of people having lost their minds? Or is it a matter of strongman leaders and extremist parties having manipulated party systems, the electoral systems, and so on, to gain control against the will of majorities?

The one source of optimism is that almost nowhere do the people who have these ideas, including the ideas of nuclear proliferation, have majority support. And the few places where they have, such as Hungary for 15 years and Brazil for a number of years, people have managed to overcome them democratically. Trump has never had a majority, you know, and if you look at who the actual strong believers in his ideology are, that’s an even smaller group. I think it’s when they step over the line into ideas such as arming ourselves up with a nuclear arsenal and therefore becoming a target for reprisals from nuclear arsenals, that’s when publics start to switch. So that’s why I think what you’re saying is important, is because recognizing that it’s a moral wrong and it’s a line that we don’t want to cross is something that can distinguish principled governments and leaders from the other kind.

Barry Stevens
But isn’t it true that a lot of countries, nuclear weapons are almost apolitical in the sense that, for instance, the Labor governments of Britain back in the ’40s very much wanted a nuclear weapon. Right now, France is negotiating to extend its nuclear umbrella across Europe, which they seem quite enthusiastic about. In South Korea, I think two-thirds of South Koreans or more actually want their government to have a nuclear weapon. The reason’s obvious because they fear that the United States won’t protect them anymore. The idea that nuclear weapons will is probably not true, but nevertheless, that’s what’s happening.

Lloyd Axworthy
Well, I think, Barry, you put your finger on that very important point, is that the people— we’ve increasingly lost fear of nuclear weapons, or the sense of awesome destruction that can result. Increasingly, the language is that these are strategic weapons that can be carefully targeted. We have a generation of people. In my sort of ideal here on the shores of Lake Winnipeg, where I’ve got three brothers and a bunch of friends, and we’ve had lots of talks about how today’s generation doesn’t read, doesn’t watch major media, TikTok, Instagram, and the nuclear issue is not part of their lexicon. It’s just not there.

I have a son who teaches civics at the junior high and high school level. He said when he raises Hiroshima and Nagasaki, people say, “What are you talking about?” Is it some kind of new kind of confection from Japan? There is a real information distillation going on, I think, on the issue. When you get countries like Canada that no longer talk about or are interested in it, you weaken it even more. Governments used to provide a fairly strong kind of messaging about it, and they don’t anymore.

Doug Saunders
You know, Barry, I think in that messaging that you mentioned in Europe, and I think this is true in some circles in Canada as well, you sort of have a meshing of two misunderstandings or things that we’ve forgotten, as Lloyd said. One of which, of course, is the moral pointlessness and danger of nuclear weapons, but also is a complete misunderstanding of NATO. The belief that more European countries would need a nuclear arsenal is based on a complete misunderstanding and thinking of NATO as having been a U.S. umbrella protecting countries, when, of course, the history of NATO shows that its main function for countries other than the United States was to be a collective defense alliance. As a collective, it meant that not every member has to have all the things that all the members do. It was a cost reduction method. We can each have our strengths. So even if you do think that some form of symbolic nuclear deterrence is necessary for your country, the fact that two European countries already have that should surely be enough. I think any talk in Germany and so on about developing their own nuclear arsenal— which, by the way, I don’t think is going to go anywhere in that country for a number of reasons that should be all too obvious. But I think it’s, it’s a misunderstanding of the concept of collective defense that’s so important to us right now.

Barry Stevens
It’s ironic. Just to comment, the Manhattan Project was started with a large number of Jewish scientists involved in case the Germans were developing nuclear weapons.

Lloyd Axworthy
The Germans.

Barry Stevens
So it’s kind of ironic that they should be interested in it now.

That was the first part of our conversation with Lloyd Axworthy and Doug Saunders. Please keep an eye out for the second part, in which we’re going to discuss the United States’ attack on the International Criminal Court. So of course you can watch this on theAnalysis.news or on YouTube and various other platforms. And if you enjoy it, please don’t forget to like and subscribe. We’ll see you next time.

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JOHN BELLAMY FOSTER: But all this was connected to a left where people like – Paul Sweezy and Leo Huberman, who started Monthly Review and Otto Nathan who was involved in the beginning and Einstein and Paul Robeson and W.E.B. Du Bois and Lillian Hellman – all of these people were connected in a common fight. And it wasn’t narrow. It was broad. It defended human rights, human freedom and democracy in the fullest sense. And argued on a materialist and humanist basis starting with an alliance rooted in the struggles of workers.

And this is something that we have to get back. We have to get back the kind of public intellectuals, real left intellectuals, Marxist intellectuals who are not just academics, writing academic articles in the name of Marxism on some abstruse concept. That’s valuable in a way, but you actually have to be involved as an organic intellectual – as Gramsci said – in the struggle, in education in the deepest sense. And in the hope for a new world because ultimately as Epicurus said “It’s up to us”.

LYNN FRIES: Hello and welcome. I ‘m Lynn Fries producer of Global Political Economy or GPEnewsdocs.

That opening short was a quick preview of what’s coming up in this segment. This is Part 4 of an ongoing conversation with John Bellamy Foster.

In Parts 1-3 John Bellamy Foster unpacked a seminal trilogy – ‘Marx’s Ecology’, ‘The Return Of Nature’, and ‘Breaking the Bonds of Fate’ – on a millennia-long struggle for human freedom in the long march from Epicurus, through Marx and into the present.

This then is the story of the more complete materialist philosophical view of nature and society that resulted from the synthetic development of materialist thinking from Epicurus’s materialism in the 3^rd century BCE through Marx’s 19^th century ecological materialism. So the more complete materialism by which Marx – who considered Epicurus’s philosophy as the birthplace of socialism- carried Epicurus’s fight from antiquity into a revolutionary challenge to capitalism in modern times.

At the end of Part 3, Bellamy Foster’s comments delved into the historical trajectory in which this more complete materialism underpinned humanity’s class struggles for a socialist future. The discussion then turned to Bellamy Foster’s Preface and Introduction to the 75^th anniversary reprint of Einstein’s ‘Why Socialism?’ in which he gives Einstein a core role in the contemporary struggle for socialism.

So, I asked him to talk about that book – ‘Albert Einstein’s “Why Socialism?” The Enduring Relevance of His Classic Essay’. And specifically, the context in which Einstein and contemporary ‘real intellectuals’ – including the founders of Monthly Review – engaged in resisting the systematic suppression of the case for socialism under McCarthyism, and the challenges left to us.

John Bellamy Foster is editor of Monthly Review and Professor of Sociology at the University of Oregon. He is a prolific author, co-author and editor. As well as today’s featured books and many others, he has authored ‘Capitalism in the Anthropocene’, ‘The Dialectics of Ecology’ and co-authored ‘The Robbery of Nature’ and ‘The Ecological Rift’. Bellamy Foster’s work has been awarded numerous distinctions. His book ‘The Return of Nature’ won the Deutscher Memorial Prize.

We go now to Part 4 and John Bellamy Foster’s comments on Einstein’s ‘Why Socialism?’.

BELLAMY FOSTER: Einstein wrote his famous essay ‘Why Socialism?’ for the first issue of Monthly Review in May 1949, Volume One, Number One. There’s been a lot of discussion about this because the essay ‘Why Socialism?’ has influenced so many people. It’s probably the single best introduction to socialist thinking in that number of words.

The history of Einstein, his biography isn’t really well known, I mean, especially the political aspects. But he was a socialist all of his life. And in Germany in the early 1930s, of course before Hitler’s rise, he used to give all sorts of lectures on science to working class meetings.

He came out of this whole tradition. He was really a coming out of a realist, materialist tradition philosophically. But he believed, like Marx, that science really came from the bottom. He tried to convey major scientific discoveries to working class audiences. Which is extraordinarily different than the way people think of Einstein.

He was always involved in socialist groups. He supported socialist movements and revolts in Germany. When he came to the United States he continued to support all left causes. He was really a strong fighter against racism. He was close to W.E. B. Du Bois and so on.

But what happened is, when I was looking at ‘Why Socialism?’ which was published in Volume One, Number One of Monthly Review, I had looked at it over the years and knew some of the history of it. But we decided to put out a little book on it and it required an introduction. And I had to do more historical research.

We knew a lot about ‘Why Socialism?’ from Einstein’s essay – his writing of ‘Why Socialism?’ from within Monthly Review. But I didn’t know some of the deep history and nobody else did either.

It all started with the attempt to create Brandeis University as a new kind of university. It was going to be a Jewish based university but it was secular and it was going to be under faculty control. Right then they had limits placed on minorities being admitted to all the institutions of higher education in the United States. And they decided to break that and to let minorities fully into this new university on a meritocratic basis. To make sure it did that they had a notion of education more from the bottom. It was a radical view of education.

Anyway, Einstein was very interested in this. And all the money came from the Einstein Foundation. There was an Einstein Foundation from Brandeis that was set up. Originally, they were going to name the university after Einstein but he refused. He said it should be named after a famous Jewish American. Because you know, he was an immigrant and so one of our more esteemed immigrants.He said it should be named after a famous American. And they decided on naming it after Louis Brandeis.

But it was funded by the Einstein Foundation and all the money was coming in because of Einstein’s name. But they also set up a separate board of trustees. Einstein and Einstein’s people sort of ran the foundation but the board of trustees was run by capitalist figures, people with money.

Einstein had this idea and he brought in Paul Sweezy who was a Marxist economist. I think he had just quit Harvard but he was a Harvard Marxist economist. He had been one of the founders of the Harvard Teachers Unions who’d been very involved in: How do you structure academics? Einstein brought Sweezy in partly because Einstein’s closest friend was a German economist called Otto Nathan, who was a socialist, a Marxist. And Otto Nathan was very close to Leo Huberman, who was close to Sweezy they knew each other.

And so they brought Sweezy in to write the plan for Einstein for Brandeis University was going to be a new kind of university. It really was, the Sweezy report, was incredible. It was putting control in hands of the faculty and boosting minorities in the institution, really, an open university.

And the Board of Trustees which was for accepting it started to turn against them. Einstein tried to bring in as president a famous Marxist thinker in Britain. There was just a big… basically the Cold War entered in and this was the beginning of McCarthyism in the universities. They accused Einstein, Nathan and the other people who were working with Einstein as being Reds. And saying they are subversive and un-American. Einstein withdrew from the foundation. The foundation name was changed to the Brandeis Foundation. He [Einstein] wouldn’t have anything to do with Brandeis University after that.

These people who were involved in this – Einstein, Otto Nathan, Leo Huberman and Paul Sweezy – they all got involved in the Henry Wallace campaign for president. Sweezy was the head of the New Hampshire campaign. And Huberman and Sweezy wrote the preamble to the progressive party political document. They were all deeply involved in it. Einstein was in pictures with Wallace. Einstein was very devoted to this. They were on the same wavelength and kind of working together.

When the campaign collapsed, when Wallace was defeated, they were all kind of depressed. F.O. Matthiessen, the great Harvard literary critic, offered some money to start Monthly Review. Matthiessen had also been engaged in helping with Brandeis University and the planning with Sweezy.

And so they all came together to start Monthly Review with Otto Nathan as one of the original editors and Einstein very much involved in it. And Einstein wrote ‘Why Socialism?’ for the first issue. This was really kind of fundamental.

His [Einstein’s] article is fundamental because it connects issues of human nature to the nature of society. And he explained things very much in terms of Marxist political economy in describing capitalism. And then he ties that to the need for social change and ends with education. Which is the priority. It has to be built on education.

It is really an extraordinary document, only about six pages long. I tried in the book to explain a lot of the details of how it happened. Like how Einstein used Veblen and Marx as the fundamentals for talking about human nature and human individuals and then moving to society.

It’s really an extraordinarily famous document, but never talked about in official circles in the United States. It’s sort of, Einstein is there but he’s treated as though he was simply a liberal. Which isn’t accurate.

And there’s a book that has come out recently from Princeton, ‘Einstein On Politics’ where they try to look at ‘Why Socialism?’ and pretend that it’s simply liberal views. Like they say: Well, Einstein believed in democracy. So, he was a liberal, not a socialist, and things like that. And so I replied to those things showing how wrong and silly, misconceived they were.

There’s also an essay in the book by John Simon who also covers Einstein’s history. I mean, Einstein was fighting…you know, Paul Robeson was in the picture with Einstein and Wallace. And when W.E.B. Du Bois was being persecuted by the state for being a communist sympathizer or something like that. He was member of World Peace Committee and they said that made him a communist. They took him before the judge and Marco Antonio, who was the lawyer, told the judge: Well, we don’t really have any witnesses, but we have one character witness named Albert Einstein. And the judge immediately ended the trial. He wouldn’t let Einstein testify because it would be world news and it would destroy his career.

So Du Bois was persecuted by the state but got off. Which he should have been he was totally innocent and what he did wasn’t a crime anyway. It was just an ideological attack. But it was Einstein’s alliance with Du Bois that was so important. He wrote for Du Bois’ Crisis [magazine] when Du Bois was the editor. Einstein was a really strong opponent of racism in the United States and spoke out but only the black newspapers reported what he said.

At the end of ‘Why Socialism?’ Einstein says we need a planned economy. He says we have to have economic planning. But he in insists that, of course, we have to do this in a democratic manner. We have to solve those problems.

And that we have to make education on behalf of humanity, really a socialist education, has to be the key to the future because it encompasses all of humanity and emphasizes freedom within society and the necessity of that. That we can’t live as atomistic individuals or egoistic beings anymore that we have to be social individuals conscious of each other living in reciprocal relations and planning on the behalf of the welfare of humanity as a whole. That’s basically…those aren’t his words but that’s sort of where he ends up. And he ended up by saying that discussions on this topic are the most important thing in our current age.

And that’s why he supported the creation of Monthly Review in the middle of the McCarthy era. After that, McCarthyism actually got worse. And Einstein introduced the strategy of using the First Amendment. Originally, people had tried to use the First Amendment and had been put in prison. People who were being accused of being communists or communist sympathizers and so on and they were put in prison. And so then everybody was using the Fifth Amendment – which says you can’t testify against yourself – to protect themselves to stay out of prison.

But Einstein reinvigorated the use of the First Amendment. People coming out and defending their positions on that basis and that was easier for writers than for some other people accused. But the first to follow the Einstein strategy, these were all connected to each other. Paul Sweezy and Leo Huberman and Lillian Hellman were the first three to use the First Amendment in this stage to fight against McCarthyism. And they were very successful.

Sweezy – in Sweezy versus New Hampshire – had been called up before the New Hampshire Attorney General on the basis of the speech he gave at the University of New Hampshire, the course he gave. The Attorney General of New Hampshire demanded his lecture notes, Sweezy’s lecture notes. He wanted names of those who had been in the Progressive Party – because Sweezy had been the Chair of the Progressive Party in New Hampshire, the Wallace Group – and demanded that he give the names of communists and so on.

Sweezy refused to do any of these things on the basis of the First Amendment. He said that he wouldn’t turn over his lecture notes. He wouldn’t name names. And he defended people’s right to have what political views they had. That case then went all the way to the Supreme Court of the United States. Then became the leading case on academic freedom. The Earl Warren Court defended Sweezy’s rights.

But all this was connected to a Left where people like – Paul Sweezy and Leo Huberman, who started Monthly Review and Otto Nathan who was involved in the beginning and Einstein and Paul Robeson and W.E.B. Du Bois and Lillian Hellman – all of these people were connected in a common fight. And it wasn’t narrow. It was broad. It defended human rights, human freedom and democracy in the fullest sense and argued on a materialist and humanist basis starting with an alliance rooted in the struggles of workers.

And this is something that we have to get back. We have to get back the kind of public intellectuals, real left intellectuals, Marxist intellectuals who are not just academics, writing academic articles in the name of Marxism under some abstruse concept. That’s valuable in a way, but you actually have to be involved as an organic intellectual – as Gramsci said – in the struggle, in education in the deepest sense and in the hope for a new world because ultimately, as Epicurus said: “It’s up to us”.

LYNN FRIES: With that concluding thought on Epicurus, we’ll leave it there. This has been a 4 Part Series featuring John Bellamy Foster discussing his trilogy– ‘Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature’, ‘The Return of Nature: Socialism and Ecology’ and ‘Breaking the Bonds of Fate: Epicurus and Marx’ featured in Parts 1-3. And from there, the enduring relevance of Einstein’s essay, ‘Why Socialism?’. Many thanks, to our guest John Bellamy Foster. And thank you for joining us.

END OF TRANSCRIPT

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JOHN BELLAMY FOSTER: My questions originally were fundamentally ecological, the human relation to nature. But I found in studying Epicurus more deeply, that the central question is really the question of human freedom or of the dialectic of freedom and determinism. But this is connected to the relation between nature and society. It’s connected to the way in which human beings organize society. Epicurus, as I mentioned before, introduced the notion of the social contract. Which he saw in terms of a struggle of the demos of democracy against monarchy and a struggle that went back and forth.

I mean Marx is revolutionary in his time. Revolutionary in Marx’s time, of course, means the critique of capitalism, the attempt to transform and transcend capitalism. Both because of its destruction of human potential – its holding back of human potential and as we say nowadays, human flourishing – but also because it’s destructive of the earth or our relation to the earth. So, it’s unsustainable.

And so, he argues that we need a society of associated producers that’s far more democratic. The word ‘democratic’ has to be given a much larger context here. But the idea is that the associated producers, people working together from the bottom essentially will control human social destiny. Breaking down class inequalities. Which put a few people in charge and encourage not only the exploitation of human beings but also the exploitation of the earth.

LYNN FRIES: Hello and welcome. I’m Lynn Fries producer of Global Political Economy or GPEnewsdocs.

That opening short was on ‘Breaking the Bonds of Fate’ and a quick preview of what’s coming up in this segment. This is Part 3 of a 4-part series with John Bellamy Foster unpacking a trilogy of books – ‘Marx’s Ecology’, ‘The Return of Nature’, and ‘Breaking the Bonds of Fate’. The focus of this third segment is ‘Breaking the Bonds of Fate’. Part 1 featured an overview of the trilogy and comments on ‘Marx’s Ecology’. Part 2 centered on ‘The Return of Nature’.

‘Breaking the Bonds of Fate’, published in 2025, completed the trilogy. And while written last, Bellamy Foster says this book is logically the first and grounds the argument running through all three books. And that “This book is about the historical and theoretical connections between the ideas of two of the greatest materialist thinkers separated by millennia of development and change: Epicurus, writing in Hellenistic Greece at the end of the fourth and the beginning of the third century BCE, and Karl Marx, writing in mid-nineteenth-century capitalist Europe.”

Our guest, John Bellamy Foster is editor of Monthly Review and Professor of Sociology at the University of Oregon. He is a prolific author, co-author and editor. As well as today’s featured books and many others, he has authored ‘Capitalism in the Anthropocene’ and ‘The Dialectics of Ecology’ and co-authored ‘The Robbery of Nature’ and ‘The Ecological Rift’. His book ‘The Return of Nature’ won the Deutscher Memorial Prize.

In this segment, the first question asked was: Why did John Bellamy Foster choose ‘Breaking the Bonds of Fate’ as the book’s main title?

We go now to Part 3 of this series as John Bellamy Foster responds to that question.

JOHN BELLAMY FOSTER: Well, the title ‘Breaking the Bonds of Fate’ is really crucial here. Epicurus used this phrase. Lucretius used it and Marx used it.

The notion that while we don’t reject causal determinism, we reject any kind of fatalistic determinism, any kind of teleology, that is, things are predetermined by God. We reject any kind of mechanism. This is the Epicurean view. And you also reject skepticism. Try to develop a materialism that’s also a humanism that has a room for human agency and change. That ultimately the world that we live in is to a considerable extent up to us. So this is an Epicurean view and it’s crucial.

I originally approached this from the standpoint of ecology and trying to understand Marx’s materialism and its roots by understanding Epicurean materialism. It was at this point that Marx became a materialist. How did this happen? What does it mean? What is the meaning of the materialist view?

What does it say about the nature of being and the relation of human beings to nature? What does it say about how we understand the world? In Epicurean terms, it’s primarily through our senses and through preconceptions and feelings and so on. But how does that work? How does this relate to human praxis?

My questions originally were fundamentally ecological, the human relation to nature. But I found in studying Epicurus more deeply, that the central question is really the question of human freedom or of the dialectic of freedom and determinism. But this is connected to the relation between nature and society. It’s connected to the way in which human beings organize society.

Epicurus, as I mentioned before, introduced the notion of the social contract. Which he saw in terms of a struggle of the demos of democracy against monarchy and a struggle that went back and forth. How do we understand justice, ethics, and human relations to each other?

Epicurus’s answer was friendship and solidarity is what we have to build. We have to build a sustainable relation to the earth, all of these things. We have to develop needs in such a way that they can be satisfied. And that are not overly materialistic in terms of the sense of consumption so that we can focus on human relations.

Epicurus didn’t develop these ideas in abstraction. He developed them in the context of the downfall of the polis in Greece in the fourth and third century BCE. He was living in a time where there was war everywhere because the successors of Alexander were engaged in this massive civil war that went on for decades. Monarchies were reemerging. The laws were held in contempt.

So, he emphasized, as a kind of defensive praxis, that people build their communities of friendship at the ground level. And concentrate on reciprocal relations, on fighting inequality in their midst and so on.

It’s a very attractive philosophy and I realized exactly why Marx was so attracted to it. Of course, he was looking for a materialism or he was looking for a way out of the Hegelian trap of idealism. He admired the Hegelian dialectic but he didn’t admire the Hegelian idealism, the Hegelian approach to religion. He didn’t admire Hegel’s basically acceding to the Prussian state as the end of history. So he wanted another approach, a way to use the dialectic but in a materialist grounding.

He came out of a family background – Marx did – on the radical end of the enlightenment. Marx came out originally with those kinds of radical enlightenment values and encountered Hegel. But did not subscribe to Hegel’s idealism ever. And he needed a way of addressing this and he came up with a conclusion early on. His friend, Köppen [who] wrote a book that related to Frederick the Great and Epicurus said he got his key ideas mostly from Marx.

One of the things that came out at that time was that Epicurus was the foundation for most of the 17th century science and enlightenment thought. And Epicurus was involved in this very strong critique of religion, particularly the astral religion that Plato promoted at the end – that the planets, the sun and so on really represented Gods. A whole hierarchy was set up on that basis that defended a hierarchical state.

Plato had said people are naturally stratified into classes. Epicurus was completely opposed to that. He had created a kind of sustainable community geared to philosophy and focused on this garden. He had a small house and a garden. Their philosophy was around the garden.

And during the Civil war – the civil wars that were going on at the time of Alexander’s successors – when there’s starvation in Athens, Epicurus kept his people alive by what they’d grown in the garden. Sharing it in such a way that everyone had enough to live, while other people were starving.

It was very easy for me to see how this attracted Marx and how it affected his thinking. And to see how the ecological materialism, how this deep materialism informed ecological thinking. To the point that all these British scientists who later on – as I talk about in ‘The Return of Nature’ – were trying to develop a ‘dialectics of nature’, they refer to Epicurus as the foundation, and for Marx as well.

I think there’s a fundamental humanism here. A human relation to nature and to other people that Marx absorbed – the notion that our understanding comes from the senses. For Marx, even art is fundamentally grounded in material conditions and our senses. I think that this, for me, it brings back a kind of coherence to Marxism that’s been lost.

Epicurus doesn’t abandon determinism entirely, causal determinism. He emphasizes that there’s a structure or there’s determining conditions but there’s also contingency which allows for human freedom. He doesn’t abandon religion entirely but he says the gods live in the ‘intermundia’, the pores of the universe, that they have no relation to the earth. The gods have no relation to the earth. So that leaves nature…our lives and nature itself are determined within and not by external forces.

So I think all of this is profound. For me, it’s quite moving. And of course, Marx said that Epicurus was the first to develop a notion of alienation. He was the first to emphasize the distinction between appearance and essence.

The first philosophers he referred to were Plato and Epicurus, and the last was Epicurus. Because he quoted: “death is nothing to us”. ‘Death is nothing to us’ in that in Epicurus, there’s no immortal soul. There’s no Hades. There’s no torture after death. You re-enter the material world. There is no immortal soul, nothing that lives afterwards. But you merge with the physical world.

We live in a world of contingency and accident. And we have the power to make changes. We have certain material conditions and limits that we can’t escape but we still have room for human freedom so there’s this dialectic of materialism and freedom.

I think it’s actually a hopeful view. It’s hopeful because it emphasizes human emancipation, human powers, human ability to have a sustainable relation to nature, human community based on friendship and solidarity.

Epicurus didn’t just help his own community when other groups were going hungry; he sent grain that he had to help others avoid hunger. This is just known. He helped a Syrian friend of his that was being persecuted in Athens. He didn’t subscribe to the arrogance – the Aryan view – of ancient Greece where all non-Greeks were barbarians. He saw human beings as essentially equal and his philosophy encompassed them also.

As a result, his philosophy in ancient times spread further than any others. It spread all through the Hellenistic world and Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Palestine, Lebanon – using the present names – and as far as Persia. It spread all the way west to Rome. It was a universal philosophy.

All the church fathers for thousands of years thought Epicurus was the leading threat to Christianity and religion basically because of the materialism. But because it argued that the gods existed, as Marx said, like the statues of Greek art, the artificial statues of the Greek gods. The gods existing as a kind of a sign, you could get them from images of preconceptions in your dreams. And they represented a kind of human perfection or perfection but they didn’t have any relation to the world. They could not intervene in any way, that the world was up to us. And as Marx said in Epicurus’s view “the world is our friend”.

I just think it gives us a new understanding of Marx’s development and how these materialist ideas emerged and ecological ideas up to the present. It gives us a unifying conception. But also, you know, it has been a tendency in Marxism in recent years to reject materialism and reject especially humanism, I think, and naturalism.

Marx argued that humanism and naturalism come together. And this is very much an Epicurean view. It says that we have to be concerned with our relations with nature as well as with society. If we alienate a relation to nature, we’re alienating our labor and our social relations too, and vice versa. That it all comes together.

We have to be concerned at all times about our relation to nature. Because that’s what we’re transforming and we’re transforming society through our production and we’re transforming ourselves.

So ultimately it comes down to the notion that I think is really an ancient notion that Marx in a way clarified. That is human beings are the self- mediating beings of nature. And if we understand that then we have a developed self-consciousness.

And a basis in which to create notions of human freedom, solidarity, substantive equality that go against individualistic, mechanistic, teleological, idealist, skeptical frameworks. All of which are diversions from our humanity and our ability to exercise judgment in accordance with human flourishing.

FRIES: Talk more about this and specifically the notion of the Epicurean Swerve where the atom’s ‘swerve’ breaks free from the deterministic, mechanical path of fate represented by Democritus.

The notion of ‘the swerve’ in Epicurean materialism was of course central to Marx’s doctoral thesis on the ‘Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature’.

You say it was Marx who first emphasized that ‘the Epicurean swerve’ formed the basis of a philosophy of freedom. Comment on how this notion influenced Marx and others.

BELLAMY FOSTER: Marx’s work on Epicurus in his dissertation was not published until the 20th century, not until first published in German in 1902 and wasn’t published in English until first time in 1967. His dissertation did not influence anything prior to the 20th century. But it was formative in his own thought.

Later on, he kind of wonders whether he actually exaggerated what he found in Epicurus, the systematic nature of it. But the system that he found – or that he thought he found and we have basically confirmed today – that system sort of became his in a lot of ways.

So like for Epicurus, How do we know about the world? Well, it starts with the senses. So, it’s a materialist view and it starts with the senses but then has to be clarified by rational thought by the mind. And he’s got various epistemological concepts about how we know, like, preconception and so on that are important.

But Epicurus starts with the senses. And this is very crucial for Marx from the very beginning, that our knowledge of the world is through the senses. It is sensual but then we have to bring our mind to bear on that, to analyze what the senses tell us. And this is just fundamental to how we think.

Human beings, we only know things through our connections to nature. And how we how build up knowledge. And how the mind develops in that context and through our attempts to transform nature. So all of this is, gets embedded in Marx…and Marx transforms the ideas in his own way.

One of the things that interests me, is that Epicurus argued that feelings were a source of knowledge. In the Western tradition we tend to say feelings and emotions have nothing really to do with knowledge. But Epicurus said that feelings were also a source of knowledge. You know, beyond the senses, beyond preconceptions and are a part of our knowledge system.

And Marx took over that, at least in his early manuscripts and economic philosophical manuscripts. And I think that’s really important because a lot of this has to do with Marx’s humanism, right? And Epicurus is a very humanistic thinker. And Marx is a very humanistic thinker.

So what you get is a humanistic materialism, a materialism that’s connected to nature. That understands human beings in terms of their development in relation to nature, human society in that context. But doesn’t turn into a naturalistic determinism. It emphasizes freedom.

Epicurus had this idea of ‘the swerve’. Which is his most famous idea. In Democritus the atoms go every which way. And Epicurus said: Well, the atoms fall in straight lines like rain. But there is this indeterminate swerve on occasion that represents contingency or chance; contingency swerving away from that structure.

It was a way of talking about the fact that nothing’s completely deterministic or predictable. That there’s room for human freedom and there’s room for change. And he built his whole system around that, about human’s powers to determine themselves.

He lived in a period where there was essentially constant civil war among Alexander’s successors, fairly bloody warfare everywhere. And he devised an approach. The polis no longer could protect people and was no longer that viable. And so he emphasized people creating their communities based on friendship and solidarity. And these things are really important values.

One of the reasons why it’s so difficult to talk about all this is that it involves so many aspects. But you get maybe a sense of a materialism that is…everything is connected to everything else. And in this, there’s also room for human freedom, for struggle, for development. I think that’s the lesson.

I started off with this just ecological interest and I talk about this as a trilogy of ecological materialism. But the materialism involves more than just society-nature relations – ecological materialism. It also involves everything to do with us as human beings.

FRIES: The book’s title – ‘Breaking the Bonds of Fate’ –explicitly points to revolutionary struggle as foundational in the materialism of Epicurus and Marx.

As stated in the book <to quote>:

“Epicurus was the foremost materialist philosopher in antiquity, whose work extended from epistemology, to physics, to ethics. He introduced a new, if limited and defensive, praxis aimed at human survival, sustainability, and happiness. Marx, in the age of the dual industrial and political-economic revolutions in nineteenth-century Europe, developed a materialist conception of history, complementing the earlier materialist conception of nature.”

“What Epicurus and Marx taken together provide us with is a conception of a complete materialism—ontological, epistemological, and practical—associated with the struggle for human freedom and the creation of a new relation between humanity and nature.”

Starting with Marx, comment more on Epicurus and Marx as revolutionary figures.

BELLAMY FOSTER: Yeah. I mean Marx is revolutionary in his time. Revolutionary in Marx’s time, of course, means the critique of capitalism, the attempt to transform and transcend capitalism. Both because of its destruction of human potential – its holding back of human potential and as we say nowadays, human flourishing – but also, because it’s destructive of the earth or our relation to the earth. It’s unsustainable.

And so, he argues that we need a society of associated producers that’s far more democratic. The word ‘democratic’ has to be given a much larger context here. But the idea is that the associated producers, people working together from the bottom essentially will control human social destiny. Breaking down class inequalities. Which put a few people in charge and encourage not only the exploitation of human beings but the exploitation of the earth.

Funny thing is that Epicurus – a couple of millennia beforehand really – was dealing with similar problems. I mean way back in the third century BCE, he was dealing with a breakdown of the Alexandrian empire. He was really a Hellenistic philosopher. Which emerged after the defeat of Greeks polis. I mean there was Civil War going on.

And he was revolutionary in the sense that he said: Look we need a practice to protect ourselves. Because everything was arbitrary, people were being killed all over the place. The king, monarchy had come back.

So he argued, that we need to build society on the basis of social contract. This was the concept that Epicurus introduced, the social contract. Not in the sense of Hobbes or Locke – although they got the concept from Epicurus – but in the sense that the social contract was imposed by the population in struggles against monarchies and that had been a historical process and that we needed to have a social contract.

We needed reciprocity between human beings was the basis of justice. We had to take into account changing material conditions. Society had to be based on friendship. All of that is directly out of Epicurus.

But it was limited because of his time. It wasn’t really about transforming the mode of production or anything like that because that wasn’t the nature of Greek society. It wasn’t even a possibility conceived at the time.

But there was a kind of revolutionary praxis involved in this. And there were times when Epicureans struggled against the dominant astral religion that had emerged partly as a result of Plato. And they organized against state religion. And this was revolutionary in his time.

The ideas were revolutionary. Because to develop this notion of a world that was based on reciprocity and justice and sustainability with nature and a philosophy of enough – criticizing affluence, acquisition and building society around friendship and solidarity – that was revolutionary at that time. His whole philosophical system was designed to defend that.

And then Marx coming along, Marx being a very bright guy studied Epicurus more thoroughly than anyone else in the 19th century. He saw all that and he pointed it out although he focused on the physics and sort of the more ontological level because he wanted to get into the deep roots of it. And he saw all that and it definitely affected his thinking.

We think of Marx as breaking away from Hegel because of Feuerbach. But nobody reads Feuerbach’s ‘History of Modern Philosophy’ where he studied Gassendi. Feuerbach studied Gassendi who in the 17th century was the great restorer of Epicurus, his philosophy. That’s what Gassendi was famous for.

And Feuerbach took his notion of the senses as the basis of materialism and humanism from Epicurus via Gassendi about the same time that Marx took the same things from Epicurus. And so they converged.

Marx wasn’t ever a follower of Feuerbach. They were meeting on converging paths finding materialist responses to Hegel. But Marx was much more thoroughgoing.

Marx wasn’t simply a follower of Epicurus. But he took in a lot of this and it was fundamental. What Marx said Epicurus had was an immanent dialectic. Within his analysis – though he didn’t discuss the dialectic like Hegel did – obviously his whole system was immanently dialectical. And his understanding of the relationship of nature and society and freedom and determinism was dialectical.

And for Marx, this was a way in which you could connect humanity to nature, and freedom to determinism, without going in the direction of idealism or skepticism or into mechanism; all of which Epicurus fought against.

Marx famously said in ‘Capital’ in what we call the postface or sometimes Marx’s last preface to ‘Capital’, Marx said that: Hegel had been standing on his head. And he was going to put him on his feet. But that actually comes from Epicurus or from Lucretius. Where it’s said that the idealist and skeptic philosophers had been standing on their head rather than on their feet. And so that reflects a materialist view. It’s metaphorical.

Marx liked that Epicurus’s follower Colotes had criticized Socrates for being a non-materialist in saying that Socrates couldn’t live by his philosophy. And he used a joke that: He tries to put corn in his ear instead of his mouth. Marx loved that. He says the point is that we are physical beings.

At the beginning of ‘The German Ideology’ – what is considered to be Marx’s real revolution in thought as Engels says in his funeral speech on Marx’s big insight – at the beginning of ‘The German Ideology’ he says that we can explain human beings any way we want, religion, so on. But we really become aware of ourselves, conscious of ourselves, when we produce.

That production is really the basis of self-consciousness, human self-consciousness because production involves a relationship between human beings and nature. And it involves transformation of nature by human beings and therefore transformation of ourselves and the activation in new ways of our senses and our knowledge.

This is all a materialist approach. Our self-consciousness comes when we produce our means of subsistence. And you don’t find that quite in the ancient philosophy in Epicurus because they’re not talking about production. They had a more static view in some ways. But even there in Epicurus and Lucretius, they talk about that the fundamental thing is planting the grain, sewing the fields. And that our existence is everything, the development of human society is based on that.

So, it’s a way of thinking… but I think what happened to me is that when I went back to in ‘Breaking the Bonds of Fate’, I had striven back to Epicurus again to try to explain more fully Marxist foundations. And then I realized just how broad…I realized even more than I had before just how broad Epicurus’s philosophy was and how it was necessary and his stature…

And I realized that this isn’t just a question of ecology and human beings and nature. This is a question of human freedom. And they’re so tied together in this analysis. And then, I guess that’s what makes it revolutionary.

And it also says: Look, sustainability is something that we choose. We choose to create, say co-evolution, or even you could say solidarity with the earth. We choose to create solidarity with other human beings. We choose a justice that’s based on reciprocity not on the reinforcement of inequality or the promotion of commodity relations.

I was actually stunned by Epicurus all the way through is the number of times that riches, the pursuit of riches is challenged, and the importance of sustaining other human beings.

Epicurus even breaks with the Greek tradition of treating all other peoples as barbarians. And this was really important. You know, he was a very important Hellenistic philosopher in that sense because all peoples were invited into the philosophy. It wasn’t a philosophy for Greeks. It wasn’t colonialist. I mean there was a Greek colonialism. It was not part of that kind of thinking.

FRIES: You make the point that Epicureanism was no longer centered simply in Greece but reached out to the larger Hellenistic world to the east. In a major departure, slaves were admitted to the Epicurean community of friends. Most disturbing to Epicurus’s critics in antiquity was the inclusion of women as full members of Epicurus’s philosophical community.

BELLAMY FOSTER: Yeah, it’s interesting in the Epicurean community…Jean Paul Sartre once said something like Epicurus’s philosophy was the first one to free women and slaves. I wouldn’t go that far, but in his community women became some of the greatest philosophers of the time. Epicurus couldn’t abolish slavery but he freed all of the slaves, who were mostly scribes. But they operated at the highest level.

I think that is part of a general conception of justice and equality and he said also, that justice changes historically with changing conditions. So when Marx, was put on trial by the Prussian state over the Rheinische Zeitung, Marx used Epicurus’s defense, Epicurus’s approach to justice and laws to get himself off. And the jury acquitted him. Marx just used the same argument that Epicurus had first introduced.

That if the material conditions change, the laws have to change with them. And any laws that no longer conform to the material conditions are not laws. I’m putting it in different terms, but this was the argument and Marx was acquitted. But it’s one of Epicurus’s principles of justice.

FRIES: Comment more on materialism and socialism. More specifically, as it relates to points you discuss in ‘Breaking the Bonds of Fate’ that < to quote>:

“Marx in ‘The Holy Family’ followed Epicurus in arguing that the human individual was not an ‘atomistic individual’ and therefore contentless like the atom itself, but a social individual, living and developing in society, and to be judged in those terms… Epicurean materialism had explicitly introduced historical and social change and development, with the concept of the social contract, and notions of social justice.”

“It was Epicurus, as Marx repeatedly noted over the years, who introduced the concept of the social contract, along with the whole historical approach to the development of society.”

“Hegel’s dialectic, in Marx’s conception, was the single greatest achievement of speculative philosophy. In contrast, Epicurus’s system, with its immanent dialectic, pointed beyond speculative philosophy to materialism, the intellectual birthplace of socialism.”

BELLAMY FOSTER: Yeah. Marx considered materialism, the birthplace of socialism. And he explained that. And he started with Epicurus in ‘The Holy Family’. He has this discussion of the origins of materialism and socialism. And he sees it as rising out of Democritus and Epicurus. And then he traces it through the different Enlightenment figures and contrasts that to Hegel and to Spinoza’s metaphysics. Which he doesn’t really have any truck with at all and is very critical of. But he traces the whole materialist tradition.

One of the things I’ve been looking at lately is, his comments on Helvetius who was an important Enlightenment thinker that we don’t talk about. But I was very interested in Marx’s discussion of Helvetius in ‘The Holy Family’ because Helvetius talks about the role of education. And not education in the narrow sense, of course, education in terms of mentorship and learning and so on but also education coming from life itself.

Helvetius takes the position that education in that sense is crucial to – well, he doesn’t use the term socialism – but to a materialist view and to human progress. Marx says that even if individuals are some way competitive and so on, that the conditions of education can change that.

That education can change that and make us more into social beings. So I’ve been thinking about that. And trying to look at how Marx uses the notion of education as a mediation between egoistic and social beings.

And it makes me think of Veblen and Einstein. Thorsten Veblen had this notion of, well, he used the term ‘instincts’, Marx always used the term ‘drives’. Which is our contemporary term. But Veblen said that human beings (and this was in ‘The Instinct of Workmanship’ mainly)… said that human beings have these kind of divided instincts.

There are instincts like the parental bond which are really social and connected to solidarity. There are other instincts like the instinct of idle curiosity that can take us off into a more individualistic direction. So he has these kinds of instincts divided between ones that are more social and more individual or egoistic.

And then Einstein who was studying Veblen very deeply while he was at Princeton in the United States, Einstein comes up with this notion human beings have both an individualistic or egoistic part of themselves and a social part. And what’s important is how does society enhance the social part? And that was very much Helvetius.

Marx employed that too in his comments on Helvetius. That we are social animals as Aristotle said but we can be more fully social beings, right? Social individuals, maybe you can say and that doesn’t happen of itself but it requires education. Not only direct education but education in his terms comes from people’s experiences and recognizing the importance of those and building on them.

He believed that science really came from the bottom. Scientific revolutions tended to come from the bottom and new ideas because people were dealing out of their actual experiences and the contradictions between their experiences and reality. So, there’s that element.

Epicurus, we’ve discovered in the Book 25, it’s kind of astonishing but he had a notion that human beings had a certain “original constitution”. And this is explained in terms of atoms, mind atoms and so on. But human beings had a certain constitution, human constitution, and then they developed or were educated through their experiences.

And then the mind developed in that way and that there was no room for an essentialist view or reductionist view that we actually were developmental beings. I think that’s so in line with Marx and also with what Marx thought about Epicurus. But he never had access to Book 25 of ‘On Nature’.

At any rate, it’s a whole philosophical view that we call materialist. Mainly because it’s opposed to teleology, religious determination and idealism in the sense that we’re all taught that ideas are paramount. And ideas, once they’re created, can become kind of material conditions. But the ideas don’t come from nowhere. It’s always the grounding that we have to look for.

FRIES: As headlined with the release of ‘Breaking the Bonds of Fate’:

“Until now, there has been no full scholarly treatment of the relation of Epicurus to Marx, paying equal to attention to both thinkers and examining the long-term impact of Epicureanism on Marxist thought. ‘Breaking the Bonds of Fate’ fills this gap.”

“If Marx was the first to penetrate to the essence of Epicurus’s philosophy, the study of Epicurus enables us to uncover the essence of Marx.”

You argue Marxist scholarship has to catch up with contemporary Epicurean scholarship. What does this work mean to you?

BELLAMY FOSTER: I’ve ended up being kind of passionate about this. I think it’s because when I started studying Marx seriously, I was introduced to Marx by my father when I was in grade school and so I had a background but I really started studying Marx seriously in college when I encountered his humanism. I had a reader of excerpts by Bottomore and Rubel on [Marx’s] social philosophy. And I was impressed by Marx’s humanism and how it merged with his materialism. I was also influenced by British historians like E.P.Thomson.

And I was dismayed by how Marxist structuralism took over: made humanism the enemy, removed the human agency. I felt that distortions were introduced. Marx’s ‘Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts’ which so influenced my generation became less and less talked about in terms of Marxism.

I’m a political economist, so I’d studied ‘Capital’ and so on. And I was influenced by István Mészáros’s, ‘Marx’s Theory of Alienation’. He was a good friend. And he sees Marx’s humanism, his critique of alienation as going through all of his work. And it’s fundamental. And I felt that the loss of that was a terrible tragedy for Marxist thought. I mean, it created a lot of bad Marxist thought, I thought that people couldn’t identify with.

And so I was surprised in a way when as a result of my studies in ecology really and in materialism that I ended up studying Epicurus and Marx’s relationship to Epicurus. And seeing this is where so much of the humanism came from. It clicked with Marx.

Marx of course, is a synthetic thinker. And he was not Epicurean any more than he was Hegelian. He was a critical thinker but so much of the humanistic and materialist notions – the notion of freedom and determinism and what the nature of the human struggle was – was there. He found it in Epicurus. And it influenced him.

He couldn’t refer to it a lot because he was the only one who understood it. His work on this wasn’t published. And the scholarship in Epicurus at his time denied there was any kind of rationality to Epicurus because of ‘the swerve’. They just sort of passed him off as an irrational thinker, quite differently than Marx. And there are traditions that like Tony Burns today said that: Well, Epicurus was illogical and Marx was criticizing him for that.

But Marx said Epicurus had an “Iron Logic”. And it was that “Iron Logic” that connected all of these things up that was so influential for him. But it eventually I think it became as much a part of him that he didn’t really address it that much anymore. He wrote about Epicurus in ‘The Holy Family’ and in ‘The German Ideology’ and referred to him all through his life. But it was, it was so foundational for him that it just became part of his own makeup.

I think this might be important. This is important in my view because we need a more ecological Marxism. We need a way of talking about the dialectic of freedom and determinism, again.

We’re in a different kind of struggle now. Those struggles that emerged when the Athenian Empire was destroyed – when that empire had collapsed and monarchies, dictatorial monarchies were taking over, arbitrary killings and people really having no security – there are resemblances to our time, what kind of a praxis do we need?

We need a praxis that combines Epicurus’s notion of sustainability and a philosophy of enough and reciprocity with Marx’s emphasis on production and transformation. I think this is this is the road, the way as the Daoist would say.

And there is a relation there. And Needham says that we’re all Daoists and Epicureans now. But he was also a Marxist. He saw the three as coming together. And I think in China too, they’re beginning to recognize this. I’ve given talks in that venue too.

FRIES: Can you expand on that? Because in ‘Breaking the Bonds of Fate’ you go into this <to quote>:

“In his studies of science and civilization in China, Needham was to stress the close correlation between Epicureanism in ancient Greece and Rome and Daoism developing in the Warring systems period in China. Both emphasized the organic material connections of life and a philosophy of self- sufficiency. Reflecting a modern age where ecology was becoming ever more important, Needham argued, ‘Today we are all Taoists and Epicureans’. For Needham, Marxism both in its most authentic materialist scientific version in the West emerging out of Epicureanism and in ways that it had been creatively transformed in the East when placed in contact with traditional Chinese civilization, particularly Daoism, expressed the cross-civilizational affinity of classical organic philosophies – an affinity rooted in material life itself.”

BELLAMY FOSTER: There is the idea of the Axial Age that covers this whole period of the fourth and third centuries BCE in both China and Ancient Greece, the Hellenistic world as a whole. Carl Jaspers introduced that in an idealist way and there are various kind of religious discussions of this. But I think there is some truth to truth to it.

There is a parallel in human civilization at this time. I think of it in terms of Samir Amin’s notion of tributary societies or the tributary mode of production. So there were parallels in these tributary modes of production that existed, let’s say in China and Greece. I mean, obviously very different societies but they had similar levels of development, the Warring States period in China and Hellenistic Greece kind of overlap in time.

In both you see, in Daoism and in Epicureanism, you see the emergence of this notion of the self-mediating being of nature. I mean, not in those terms, those are Marxist terms, but you see the notion of – in Hegelian terms – the growth of self-consciousness.

Hegel associated Epicureanism and the Hellenistic philosophies in general with the growth of self-consciousness. So did Marx. So that means understanding the human relation to the objective world including the world of nature and seeing the role of human action in that and kind of philosophically grasping that. So that human beings become self-mediating beings of nature or a ‘homo faber’.

And in both Daoism and Epicureanism, there’s the same critique of wealth. There’s the same kind of organicism. There’s the same notion of ‘the way’ as they say in Daoism, that we are self-mediating beings. We can choose. And Needham who was an expert on Epicurean philosophy (he built it into his scientific analysis) and also on Daoism and on the development of science and technology in Chinese civilization, he saw the parallels.

Amin too said the beginning of modernity is not the Renaissance or the Enlightenment. But the beginning of modernity in a world sense happens in this period where self-consciousness becomes…there’s a self-conscious philosophy. There’s this notion of the self-mediating being of nature of our interactions and so on.

And this happened concurrently across civilizations at a certain period of development. But actually in China and ancient Greece, in the Hellenistic world. I think probably in India too at a very similar period of time there was some cultural interaction.

So, I think that’s important. One of the reasons it’s been important in terms of dealing with Chinese Marxism, there’s this argument that Chinese Marxism is an alien imposition parachuted into Chinese society. That Marxism is an artificial imposition in China separate from traditional Chinese culture. And also, that Marxist ecology is sort of an artificial imposition and that we should turn to traditional ecology. Some have argued that ecology in China or ecological civilization in China, that notion comes out of traditional Chinese thought and not from Marxism.

I argue that it’s much more complex than that. Because Marxist thought came out of a materialist view in the case of Epicureanism in the fourth and third centuries BCE. And Daoism came out of a similar time period, a certain similar kind of historical condition, the breaking down of Dynasty in China. And similar kinds of philosophies about the human relation to nature and so on arose.

So that Needham said when Marxism came to China, they felt like it was our own philosophy. In so far as it had this kind of Epicurean flavor still. That is still had this classical materialism. The sort of thing that Needham would have conveyed, that they felt that it was an enlargement on their own philosophy. Because Marxism in the West was to Epicureanism as Chinese Marxism was to Daoism.

So, it’s not an accident, I think that the struggles of humanity, the class struggles of humanity have resulted in similar kinds of results and convergences in history and that there was an early modernity. Really the classic modernity as Amin says, was all about the discovery of human self-consciousness and human mediation of nature. And he attributed it to the Hellenistic world as a whole. But Marx got that – in terms of Hellenism for Marx – it came from Epicurus.

FRIES: So your last statement really encapsulates a central insight uncovered in this discussion and in your trilogy of books – ‘Marx’s Ecology’, ‘The Return of Nature’, and ‘Breaking the Bonds of Fate’. As stated in this last book <to quote>:

“What I had originally thought of as an inquiry into Marx and Epicurus turned into an exploration of Epicurus and Marx, with Epicurus’s philosophy as the actual starting point and a crucial part of the millennia-long struggle for human freedom. If Epicurus in antiquity sought to ‘break the bonds of fate’, this was a task that Marx would consciously take up and carry forward under very different historical conditions in modern times.”

“The more complete materialism that results, through the long march from Epicurus to Marx, and then down to the present, allows for a more synthetic development of the materialist philosophical views of nature and society, and thus of ecology, necessary for our time.”

As you say, Marx considered materialism, the birthplace of socialism. So in the long march resulting in this more complete materialism, Marx carried Epicurus’s fight from antiquity into a revolutionary challenge to capitalism in modern times. In your Introduction to the book ‘Albert Einstein’s “Why Socialism?” The Enduring Relevance of His Classic Essay’ you gave Einstein a core role in the contemporary struggle for a socialist future. And in the Preface to the book you state: “To ask, ‘Why Socialism?’ as Einstein did in his day, is to raise the question of the future of humanity.”

To round off our discussion on the trilogy, talk now about this essay: Why Einstein wrote it? And why it still matters?

LYNN FRIES: John Bellamy Foster’s response follows in Part 4. We are going to break here. This has been Part 3 of a 4 Part series featuring John Bellamy Foster on his trilogy – ‘Marx’s Ecology’, ‘The Return of Nature’, and ‘Breaking the Bonds of Fate’. Many thanks, to guest John Bellamy Foster. And thank you for joining us.

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JOHN BELLAMY FOSTER: The work by Engels in ‘The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man’ is fundamental work…He was moving from what we call external nature to human beings in the analysis. And so he has this fundamental analysis of the part played by labor… He argued that human beings, and it was in line with Marx, Engels argued that human beings essentially created themselves.

We’re introducing things into nature, into the world that are synthetic. That species haven’t been able to adapt to, that aren’t the product of this long evolutionary process… And they introduce all kinds of toxicity – bioaccumulation, biomagnification – and so on. And this is what Rachel Carson was about… When she talked about evolution in the 1960s she was connecting ‘the theory of the origin of life’ – that Haldane and Oparin had introduced – to evolution and to ecological crisis and to the notion of the biosphere, the earth system.

The biosphere didn’t really become an acceptable term in the United States – because it was associated with the Soviet Union – until the 1970s. But she was presenting all of this and saying: This is all connected. This is how life comes about. This is what we’re destroying. And she was using the analysis of people like Haldane and Bernal – although not referring to them directly – in order to make her point.

LYNN FRIES: Hello and welcome. I’m Lynn Fries producer of Global Political Economy or GPEnewsdocs.
That opening short was on ‘The Return of Nature’ and a quick preview what’s coming up in this segment. This is Part 2 of a 4-part series with John Bellamy Foster unpacking a trilogy – ‘Marx’s Ecology’, ‘The Return of Nature’, and ‘Breaking the Bonds of Fate’.

John Bellamy Foster is editor of Monthly Review and Professor of Sociology at the University of Oregon. He is a prolific author, co-author and editor. As well as today’s featured books and many more, he has authored ‘Capitalism in the Anthropocene’, ‘The Dialectics of Ecology’ and co-authored ‘The Robbery of Nature’ and ‘The Ecological Rift’. His book ‘The Return of Nature’ won the Deutscher Memorial Prize.

In Part 1 Bellamy Foster gave an overview of the trilogy and commented on the first book, ‘Marx’s Ecology’. The focus of this segment is on the second book, ‘The Return of Nature’. On this book the question first tabled was: Why did Bellamy Foster write ‘The Return of Nature’ and how does it follow on from ‘Marx’s Ecology’?

We go now to Part 2 of this series as John Bellamy Foster responds to that question.

JOHN BELLAMY FOSTER: So in terms of ‘The Return of Nature’, which is subtitled ‘Socialism and Ecology’, the question was what happened after Marx developed this ecological analysis? And I sort of prefigured that in the epilogue to ‘Marx’s Ecology’ but I had not dealt with it fully. And it was a response in a way and there was a need to connect things up. It was a response to the criticisms that originally came out of the book.

They said: Well, Marx’s ecology is irrelevant because no other thinkers were influenced by any of this. Later on, there were no socialists or ecological thinkers who followed this track or developed in line with this in any way. Then they also said: Well, Marx lived in a time where there were no PCBs and no nuclear weapons and so no nuclear radiation, no climate change. So how could his analysis be any use to us today?

So I wrote ‘The Return of Nature’ to continue the story. Originally, I actually wanted to go back to the foundations and do the book on Epicurus. But it was a more immediate problem to connect this analysis up to the environmental movement, to explain how socialism and materialism had played a role in the development, a fundamental role, maybe the crucial role in the development of ecological analysis.

And that was difficult because there had not been anything written on the subject. Helena Sheehan had done a book on ‘Marxism and the Philosophy of Science’ that dealt with some of the big figures of British science. And that was a great help. But she hadn’t addressed the ecological problem.

This then was a crucial endeavor that I could not rely on secondary works for. There just wasn’t anything written. And so I had to do archival work. Which took a long time because I was busy with other things. And getting away to visit the library in Britain, for example or an archive in Britain, that just wasn’t always very easy and archives in the United States. So the project went on and on.

The story became very elaborate because so much did happen in that century. Marx died in 1883 and I basically brought the story up to the 1980s. So that’s a whole century that had to be covered.
The basic approach was this ecological materialism. One of the interesting things that became more and more apparent is that the Epicurean strand carries right through.

FRIES: We are going to be looking into your argument that socialism and materialism played a crucial role in the development of ecological analysis. And so, the development of ecological concepts – like the concept of ecosystem – and many other breakthroughs in the ecological movement.

Given its basic approach, ecological materialism, as explained in the book <quote>:

“This is a story that concerns art as well as science – the two principal means of ascertaining our sensuous relation to the world as a whole. It is the synthesis of the scientific and aesthetic critiques of capitalism that constitutes the basis of the modern ecological critique, leading to the pivotal notion of sustainable human development.”

“The major socialist (and social-democratic) thinkers that constitute the focus of this book were all politically and socially active in developing a critical-materialist view rooted in ecology and dialectics that extended to science and/or art.”

This book discusses the history of leading roles played by these British figures as strands of an interconnected tradition. And so a lineage of influences running from Marx through his contemporaries Lankester, Morris, and Engels; from Lankester to Tansley and Wells; from Engels to Bernal, Haldane, Needham, Hogben, and Levy; and from Morris and Engels to Caudwell. Leading classicists like Benjamin Farrington also figure in this history. From there, the modern ecological movement comes into the story with leading roles played Steven Rose in the UK and Rachel Carson, Barry Commoner, Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin in the US.

And as you say: “One of the startling aspects of this history was the way it traced an Epicurean as well as a Marxist thread running through the entire development of ecological materialism.”

We can only dip into a fraction of all this. So, let’s discuss some of the scientific figures central to the story starting with E. Ray Lankester and Frederick Engels both of whom attended Marx’s funeral. And as you say, after Marx’s death, it was Engels who provided the most direct connection between Marxism and science.

Since Lankester is discussed in Part 1 of the book and Engels later in Part 2, let’s follow that order.

BELLAMY-FOSTER: The book begins with a discussion of E. Ray Lankester who was the leading biologist in England in the generation after Darwin and Huxley. And he was actually Darwin and Huxley’s protégé. Lankester was also a close friend of Karl Marx. Lankester’s father, Edwin Lankester was a medical doctor and scientist who’d been involved in discovering the causes of cholera and was a materialist. Lankester then had that background and became the protégé of Darwin and Huxley and late in his life a close friend of Marx. Late in Marx’s life, not late in Lankester’s life, he was still a young man.

Lankester was the first to introduce the term ecology into English. In the sense of, I mean he supervised the translation of one of Haeckel’s works. Which used the word ecology. He had worked with Haeckel in Germany, Ernst Haeckel. But Lankester also used the word bionomics. The whole idea was whether you used the word ecology in those days or you used bionomics it referred to what Darwin had called the ‘economy of nature’. So they were trying to get at the economy of nature and its relation to human society as well.

Lankester was the leading, probably the greatest ecological thinker of his time, environmental thinker. He wrote extensively on species extinction. He was also a pioneer in epidemiology, in disease from parasites. And dealt with the African sleeping sickness and argued that epidemics were primarily human caused. They weren’t simply natural. They were human caused.

He was a strong critic of capitalism but he is also the leading scientist – biologist – in England of his day. So, he is a phenomenal figure. He wrote about the human destruction of the environment all over the earth.

And he also had a very ecological perspective. He argued that you had to understand the relations between species in terms of the habitat. You had to because you had to be able to look at the nutrient cycling and so on. This is something that was related to Marx’s metabolic rift.

Marx’s metabolic rift was the notion (we didn’t really talk about it in terms of Marx and nature or not fully) that there’s a soil nutrient cycle. This is what Liebig was talking about. That in modern society -in capitalism, industrial capitalism – the basic soil nutrients, like nitrogen and phosphorus and potassium, are removed from the soil and sent to the new industrial centers in the food and fiber. And then this ends up being pollution in the city rather than being returned to the earth.

That’s sort of the structure of ecological crisis that Marx talked about in terms of metabolic rift. But it also helps us understand ecological crises in general, other kinds of similar rifts. So this created the problem of fertilizers. They had to build artificial fertilizers, synthetic fertilizers. They had to take guano from Peru to fertilize English fields to combat the destruction of the soil, the degradation of the soil and loss of soil fertility.

So nutrient cycling became a very big issue. And it was very fundamental to ecological thinking. Lankester built this into his notion of bionomics. His father had worked on aquariums. Lankester created a marine laboratory in England. Because you couldn’t look very well in those days at how animals interacted in the natural habitat, especially not in England. But you could look at marine systems. You could create a marine laboratory and begin to understand about nutrient cycling. So he was looking at this. And how in the disruptions that took place, he argued, we were destroying the fish stock and we were depleting the ocean.

One interesting thing is that Lankester’s student was Arthur Tansley (Lankester was a socialist of a Fabian type). Arthur Tansley became the leading British botanist, the leading British ecologist, actually, plant ecologist. It was Tansley in 1935 who introduced the notion of ecosystems. Fundamentally based on the analysis of metabolism, nutrient cycling and this sort of understanding of the interrelationship within nature. He also dealt with human destructiveness in that context.

He used the scientific systems theory of Hyman Levy, Marxist, mathematician and scientist in Britain to develop his ecosystem analysis. But this all came out of this sort of materialist tradition. There is sort of a lineage here and it is more complex than what I’m saying but Marx’s analysis clearly influenced Lankester. Lankester had read Marx’s ‘Capital’. And Tansley – who was also Fabian style socialist materialist who basically grew up in the working men’s college in England – carried some of this analysis further attacking idealist and racist views of ecology. So there’s all of that.

FRIES: To wrap up on E. Ray Lankester, as noted earlier, Lankester attended the funeral of Marx in 1883. It is also of note that Lankester attended Darwin’s funeral in 1882. To draw from the book:

“In his own person and intellect, he symbolized a continuing, complex critical-historical relation between socialist and Darwinian thought, and between the materialist conception of history and the materialist conception of nature that was to play a major role in British science for half a century or more, and which marked the emergence of modern ecological materialism.”

Turning now to a discussion on Engels, Part 2 of the book, Engels’s Ecology delves into Engels’s little known ecological world-view and his analysis of the dialectics of society and nature. This includes chapters featuring Engels’ work on – The Environmental Conditions of the Working Class, The Dialectics of Nature and The Ecology of Human Labor and Social Reproduction, respectively.

The chapter on The Dialectics of Nature’includes a famous example of how Engels had gone further with Marx’s materialism and its relation to nature. To cite ‘Marx’s Ecology’ <quote>:

“[…] Marx sought to provide a natural-historical basis, linked to Darwin, for his own general theory of the role of labor (which was of course related to the development of tool making) in the development of human society. Engels was to develop this analysis even further in his path-breaking essay ‘The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from the Ape to Man’ (written in 1876, first published posthumously in 1896).”

Comment on that essay by Engels.

BELLAMY FOSTER: The work by Engels in ‘The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man‘ is fundamental work. ‘The Part Played by Labour’ was part of his ‘Dialectics of Nature’ – his unfinished work ‘The Dialectics of Nature’ – and it was the last part of what was finished. But it was supposed to come near the end of the book because he was moving from what we call external nature to human beings in the analysis. And so he has this fundamental analysis of the part played by labor.

He argued that human beings, and it was in line with Marx, Engels argued that human beings essentially created themselves. Evolutionary-wise, if you wanted to understand the development of the human mind, for example, you recognize that our ape-like ancestors came down from trees and had upright carriage and that freed up the hands. He argued, Engels said that it was tool making.

A lot of modern anthropology supports this. In fact, it’s the main line that tool making – it was actually laboring to survive – to try to make the earliest tools to meet subsistence needs. I mean, the earliest flaked stone implements, I think were used to get into carcasses so they could eat meat. That is what the anthropological data says. But they developed tools to have an extension of their organs and to be able to transform nature.

The ancient Greeks had said that the word organs both referred to parts of your body and to tools because they thought of the organs as the tools of the body. The idea is that human beings were able to extend their physical beings by making tools and then transform their relation to nature.

Engels said that you would find that the hands developed before the brain. Well, there was the Piltdown hoax in England about that time or after that fooled everybody for about 40 years. There was a hoax. They put an ape jaw with a human brain or something. Because there was this notion in idealist circles which dominated English thought that the brain came first, that human beings were defined by the brain. So the brain came first before other changes.

But there were all these anthropological discoveries in Africa – the Australopithecines – that showed exactly what Engels said. You know, it was related. Darwin had a similar view. And Ernst Haeckel in Germany had a similar view but Engels had developed it further. And it showed that the Australopithecines had more developed hands with ape-like brains exactly what is suggested, so that the hands develop first.

And it’s by interacting with nature that human beings, and obviously they did it socially, human beings are social animals and as they made tools and interacted with nature the language develops in tandem with that. And with that, there’s an evolutionary pressure to the development of bigger brains.

Stephen Jay Gould said Engels’s analysis in ‘The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man’ was the leading work. I mean all thought on humanity’s evolution is about kind of ‘gene-brain coevolution’, ‘gene- culture coevolution’. And Stephen Jay Gould said that Engels represented the most developed theory of human evolution in the 19th century. And it was largely because this materialist perspective that said: Yeah, the mind didn’t just lead things. We evolved and our brains evolved our language by interacting with nature in fundamentally new and more intensive ways and more universal ways than animals could.

I don’t know how much Engels’ analysis directly influenced scientific development. But I think that others who knew Engels and knew German like Ray Lankester, who was a close friend of Marx and the protégé of Darwin and Huxley, developed a similar argument much later and I think he may have been influenced in that by Engels.

At any rate, that’s the basic way we understand human evolution. Now there are attempts to kind of reverse it. But the idea that “the tool make the man”, to quote a famous book, is really fundamental in anthropology.

So, Marx had said: Look, he had read Darwin’s ‘Origin’. And in ‘Capital’, he mentioned: Look, if we want to understand the anthropology of human beings, we have to look at their tools, at the tools, right? We’re not looking so much for bones. If we want to understand the development of human beings, it’s not so much the bones as in other species and the evolution of the physical anatomy, that’s important. What’s important is the evolution of tool making.

FRIES: So, Engels died in 1895. Lankester died in 1929. Talk next about the 1930s generation of British scientists. Who were some of the major figures in British science? And what had sparked their interest in the materialist view of science and for some an intense interest Engels’s ‘The Dialectics of Nature’ more than a half century after it was written?

BELLAMY FOSTER: There were British scientists and Marxist scientists like J.B.S. Haldane who was one of the principle developers of the modern synthesis on evolution. He was one of Britain’s great biologists, pioneered in so many different areas. Joseph Needham, who was the leading British biologist and theorist of evolution and emergence and ended up being the world’s greatest Sinologist in his time and expert on China and science and technology in China. J.D. Bernal, the crystallographer physicist and Hyman Levy; Lancelot Hogben is another figure who is very important in this.

They were all influenced by Marxism and materialism and were all kind of bringing together Marx and Darwin. And a critical aspect of this was opposition to ecological racism and idealism in South Africa that had developed with Jan Smuts, General Smuts in South Africa and his followers like John Phillips. So part of this was also attacking ecological racism and genetic theories of race. Hogben and Haldane played leading roles in attacking the notion of eugenics and a race gene.

All of these thinkers were involved in a materialist view. A lot of them were connected to the Communist Party at that time but they didn’t follow the Stalinist track.

What happened and what really brought together these scientists was that in 1931 in The Second International Congress on Science and Technology in Britain, a big event occurred, what was kind of a historic event. There was a plane that flew in from Russia. Which was stunning at the time because intercontinental flights were barely known. Bukharin stepped out along with a half a dozen Soviet scientists to visit this conference.

And leading British scientists on the Left – like Needham and I think Bernal, Hogben, Haldane wasn’t there at the time but most of these scientists were there at that meeting. They heard a whole different view of science. British science had had a very idealist framework and they heard a materialist approach.

Boris Hessen introduced a materialist interpretation of Newton and a critique of 17th century mechanism that was dialectical in nature. Nobody had ever heard anything like this before.

Bukharin talked about human beings and the biosphere and Marxism as integrated with the environment.
Nikolai Vavilov was the leading geneticist in Russia. I mean Russia was the leading ecological center in the world at the time due to the Russian revolution mostly. And Vavilov, with his assistant, had located the centers of germ plasm, the original centers of germ plasm all over the world using historical materialist methods. They located the origins of germ plasm. Which are still called the ‘Vavilov areas’. They theorized that if you wanted to find the original genes of contemporary plants -the origins, the genetic base with all of its diversity – you found the earliest areas of cultivation by human beings. So, they mapped all of that. Nobody had ever thought of that before.

There was another physicist who did a critique of vitalism. Which was very important. Vitalism is an attempt to say: well, you got material foundations but above that there’s something epiphenomenal. Something extra that we can’t explain in material terms that explains the mind or spirit or something else. He did a critique of vitalism on the basis of an emergent materialism.

So all of this and more was really fundamental. A whole lot, you know, a group of British scientists turned to Marxism under that and explored Engels’s ‘Dialectics of Nature’.

FRIES: In The Return of Engels, Chapter 9 of the book, you discuss new radical ideas on science and philosophy that were presented by Soviet scientists from the then revolutionary USSR at the time of this International Congress in 1931. And go on to make the point <quote>:

“Ironically it was in Britain rather than the USSR that the critical ideas of the Soviet delegates to the 1931 International Congress in London were to exert a major continuing influence.”

“Among the British socialist scientists, leading roles in developing what was commonly referred to in line with Soviet philosophy as “dialectical materialism,” were taken by Bernal, Haldane and Needham.” With respect to the attempt to connect materialist natural science and the dialectical process: “they drew almost all their inspiration with respect to the application of dialectics to the material world from Engels’s four later works, written in the 1870s and ’80s – ‘Anti-Dühring’; ‘The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State’; ‘Ludwig Feuerbach’; and, after its publication in German in 1925 and in English in 1940, ‘The Dialectics of Nature’.”

As further discussed in ‘The Return of Nature’ <to quote>:

“For Engels, the relation between ‘freedom and necessity’ had first been correctly understood by G. W. F. Hegel. As Engels was to express it, ‘Freedom does not consist in any dreamt-of independence from natural laws’, and hence the conquest of nature, ‘but in the knowledge of these laws, and the possibility this gives of systematically making them work towards definite ends’, which, however, must remain within nature’s laws as a whole. It was this that fed into Engels’s critique of capitalism’s transgression of nature’s laws and the resulting ecological destruction.”

So, talk now about the issue of the ‘dialectics of nature’ in Marxism.

BELLAMY FOSTER: One of the differences between ‘The Return of Nature’ and ‘Marx’s Ecology’ is that in ‘Marx’s Ecology’ I talked about Marx’s materialism. I didn’t talk about the ‘dialectics of nature’ because the ‘dialectics of nature’ is very controversial in Marxism. And I thought that if I brought that in too much – I did mention it – but if I brought in the ‘dialectics of nature’ in relation to Marx, people would just focus on that. And they wouldn’t understand or recognize Marx’s materialism and its relation to ecology. So I sort of left that aside because Engels had gone further with it. Though I left it aside until the next book, implicit throughout ‘Marx’s Ecology’ was Marx’s dialectical as opposed to mechanistic materialism.

But for Western Marxism, the ‘dialectics of nature’ was very controversial. When I went to my first critical theory course at the graduate level in York University in Toronto, I sat down and the instructor said: the first principle of critical theory is that there is no ‘dialectics of nature’.

In fact, Western Marxism had defined itself that way as rejecting any kind of ‘dialectics of nature’ in opposition particularly to Soviet Marxism. But you couldn’t use dialectical processes; you couldn’t think of nature in term in dialectical terms.

Then that sort of gave nature over to positivism, to rigid mechanical deterministic views. So Marxists basically abandoned science and abandoned any treatment of nature. So when the environmental movement came along, Western Marxism had disarmed itself. The Western Marxist philosophical tradition couldn’t really say anything meaningful because they didn’t have any ‘dialectics of nature’.

While other thinkers who had come out of this tradition that I’m talking about like Barry Commoner in the United States came out of this same Marxist scientific tradition (he had studied Engels’s ‘Dialectics of Nature’ and nature in Bernal and Haldane and this was an influence) and he recognized Marx’s ecological contributions. But the Western Marxist philosophers in the Western Marxist tradition basically couldn’t talk about it at all. They couldn’t get themselves to be positivists. But they’d already rejected a dialectical approach to nature. So basically, they had abstained from any analysis in that area.

So, they also rejected all the Marxist scientists in Britain. I was shocked when I read one of the major works on Marxism in Britain. And somebody said – I don’t think it was Bottomore – but anyway they said that the British had not contributed anything to Marxism of significance. I was completely thrown by that. Because by that you were saying that all these Marxist scientists, all these scientists – that talked about the relationship between nature and human freedom, that talked about the ‘dialectics of nature’ – they didn’t even rank as Marxist thinkers. Even though they were among the most influential thinkers in their time period and the most influential scientists in their time.
How could that be? But it was a very strict dividing line.

If you think of all these thinkers like Bernal and Haldane and Needham and Hogben and Hyman Levy and so on – they all referred to Epicurus. They all referred to the Epicurean materialism. So did Tansley, who quoted Lucretius in his famous article introducing the concept of ecosystem. Or he referred to Lucretius.

These thinkers all saw materialism as coming through this long tradition from Epicurus to Marx. And they tied this to emergentism particularly, Needham. Needham, who is the great Sinologist as well, tied Epicureanism to Daoism. Not that they had any direct contact from each other but they rose in similar historical periods and similar historical conditions, analogous. What we call the ‘Axial Age’.

And they represented in Needham’s terms and Samir Amin’s terms – the awakening of human self-consciousness – the notion that human beings were the self-mediating beings of nature as Marx always insisted. So, there were parallels and these thinkers understood that, emphasized that. But they’ve been largely ignored.

And also the greatest thinkers connected to these scientists were figures in the classics like Benjamin Farrington and George Thomson [have been largely ignored]. They were the leading classicists of ancient society in their time. And they were experts particularly on Epicureanism, both Farrington and Thomson. And they explored this. Farrington explored the relationship of Epicurus to Marx and Bacon. He introduced Marx’s doctoral dissertation to Hogben and these other thinkers. And so they were all part of this discussion.

But it completely disappeared from understanding in Marxism.

But you have a train of Marxist thinkers. Another one was Christopher Caudwell who was both a literary critic and a philosopher of science who was phenomenal in understanding this overall synthesis. He died at 29 in the Spanish Civil War but after producing a whole series of works very quickly. And he was part of this too. He knew the classics and he knew the science and he put a lot of this together.

So these thinkers, and there are others, they influenced later thinkers like Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould in the United States and Barry Commoner. Levins and Lewontin and Gould all refer back to their education in Engels, his ‘Dialectics of Nature’; Bernal and Haldane and so on.

So this tradition carried over into the United States, also visible in England with people like Steven Rose. This was a Marxist tradition and it was attached to the organization – Science for the People. But most Marxists in the social sciences completely ignored this.

There’s an aesthetic strand also in ‘The Return of Nature’ where I focus on William Morris too. Who wasn’t influenced so much by the scientific aspects of this but was deeply influenced by Marx and made all sorts of ecological connections himself and Morris influenced Hogben. So there are complicated strands of materialist, scientific and cultural analysis that was very ecological.

These names even though they were so famous worldwide were hardly known to scholars of Marxism in the social sciences.

In fact, are still disowned because some of them were close to the Communist party in England. But they were close to the Bukharin element. Bukharin remember had come into England on the plane with Vavilov and others and Boris Hessen. Most of them were executed. Most of them were the victims of Stalin’s purge. Stalin basically executed the ecologists. But these were the figures that the British Marxists were connected to. So they kind of carried forward that tradition and not that kind of degenerate tradition that came out of Stalin.

FRIES: Can you just recap the chronology of Stalin’s purge of those Soviet scientists?

BELLAMY FOSTER: Yeah. It was in the mid-thirties that Stalin really exercised power. And there was the Lysenko period where they politicized science in a very dangerous way. And a lot of scientists were executed. Bukharin was executed. Hessen was executed. Some of them were purged and died in prison. I think maybe Vavilov died in prison. But they all…they died in the purge, most of the leading figures in this.

This put the British Marxists in a peculiar position. They still tried to retain for quite a while a relation to the Soviet Union. But they were really part of this tradition of Russian science in the 1920s and early 1930s that was really revolutionary and ecological. And they carried forward in that tradition and out of Engels and Marx. They generally distanced themselves as much as they could from the Stalinist element. Not all of them broke completely with the Communist Party or at least not in the beginning. I think eventually all of them broke, one way or another. Bernal was a leader of a world peace movement [World Peace Council] that was grounded in the Soviet Union against nuclear weapons. So he really retained a relationship.

But what makes them unique is that they went forward with this kind of classical Marxist view and this revolutionary ecological materialist view. And so they in a sense were a continuation of some of the things that were going on early on in Russia. So Haldane is considered to be one of the discoverers along with Oparin- they’re the co-discoverers – Oparin in the Soviet Union and Haldane in Britain – of the materialist conception of the origin of life that has been so influential.

So, they carried that forward. That’s what makes them so interesting. But they were all victims of the Cold War. Since they were so prominent, they were targeted. So that was defeated for a while. But it reproduced in the United States with people like Levins and Lewontin who arose in the 1960s who had been influenced by all of this work. And they really restarted this kind of Marxist scientific perspective.

FRIES: In the history uncovered in ‘The Return of Nature’, this brings us to the period when the influence of this revolutionary ecological materialist view reasserts itself with the rise of the modern environmental movement. An era in which the influence of this tradition of rigorous ecological analysis and the necessary connection between materialism and dialectics, gets absorbed and carried forward. In discussing how this played out in the US, the book examines leading roles played by figures like Rachel Carson, Barry Commoner, Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Levins, and Richard Lewontin.

Talk next about some of those major figures in the US ecological movement. Let’s start with comments on Barry Commoner and his Four Informal Laws of Ecology. I am thinking here more specifically of his law that ‘nature knows best’.

BELLAMY FOSTER: Yeah. One of his four laws is ‘everything is connected to everything else’. Which actually paraphrases almost exactly something that Engel’s says in ‘The Dialectics of Nature’ or ‘Anti-Dühring’ (I can’t remember which) – ‘nothing comes from nothing’. ‘Nothing being destroyed turns into nothing’. That is a basis of Greek materialism. Epicurus said that.

But the one that you refer to ‘nature knows best’ sounds strange to a lot of people. They think: Oh, well, that’s just, some sort of spiritual belief in nature. But that’s not what Commoner was saying. What he was saying is that most of what we have used in production – materials that we’ve used in production – up until the 1950s were products of millions of years; hundreds of millions of years, maybe billions of years of evolution. Materials that are at hand to us were products of geological time, many millions of years.

He is talking about what happened in the 1950s. I talk about this in ‘The Vulnerable Planet’. It’s the introduction of the ‘Synthetic Age’. And that’s connected to what we nowadays call the ‘Great Acceleration’ that created the Anthropocene. But in the 1950s partly coming out of the Second World War, we had two new fundamental technologies.

One was nuclear technology and the beginning of the ecological movement in the 1950s. It really dates back to the 1950s for people like Barry Commoner and Rachel Carson because she was a product of that. There was above ground nuclear testing and all the radionuclides. So this was endangering the population of the Earth. But nuclear radiation was a new thing, a new phenomenon. It was created by human beings as a result of the Second World War and then carried forward in the Cold War.

And the other thing was the rise of the petrochemical industry, the new synthetic chemicals, organic chemistry. Of course, organic chemistry goes back but this massive creation of chemical multinationals and huge scale chemical production where they’re creating all these synthetic chemicals. I mean, now there are – I keep losing track of the numbers – but I think it’s like a hundred thousand synthetic chemicals we’ve created. In Commoner’s day it was less; but all of these things, plastics and now we’re worried about micro-plastics.

But Commoner is looking at the ecological destruction, and it was a result to a large extent of radiation and this new chemistry polluting everything. And CFCs emerged in that period. And they threatened the ozone layer and so on.
So, it’s the rise of ‘the Synthetic Age’.

So when he said – ‘nature knows best’ – what he meant is we can trust much more in what nature created over millions of years. First of all, species have been able to adapt to those. But we’re making changes. We’re introducing things into nature and into the world that are synthetic, that species haven’t been able to adapt to, that aren’t a product of this long evolutionary process and that they introduce all kinds of toxicity – bioaccumulation, biomagnification – and so on.

And this is what Rachel Carson was about. She saw these processes of biomagnification and bioaccumulation. Which we first discovered in relation to radiation. And she was influenced by scientists on the left, on this. She first saw it in that way. Then she realized: Well, this applies to pesticides, to all these toxics too, they biomagnify and bioaccumulate and end up in human tissues.

She traced this to a system – an extreme profit system. That profit had become God and she directly opposed herself to that.

But she’s a product of the same tradition. When she talked about evolution in the 1960s she was connecting ‘the theory of the origin of life’ – that Haldane and Oparin had introduced – to evolution and to ecological crisis and to the notion of the biosphere, the earth system. The biosphere didn’t really become an acceptable term in the United States – because it was associated with the Soviet Union – until the 1970s.

But she was presenting all of this and saying: This is all connected. This is how life comes about. This is what we’re destroying. And she was using the analysis of people like Haldane and Bernal – although not referring to them directly – in order to make her point, which was extraordinarily powerful.

That’s when the word ‘ecology’ really became a popular term in English, based on that speech, that particular speech to a women’s group. And I think it was fundamental but the wisdom that she was providing there was basically ignored. People didn’t understand it or try to understand it. And we are where we are now.

FRIES: The word ‘ecology’, as you commented earlier, was first introduced into English by E. Ray Lankester and the concepts of ecosystem and human ecology were introduced by Lankester’s students – Tansley and Wells. Drawing their inspiration from Engels, we spoke of how Bernal, Haldane and Needham brought dialectics to twentieth century natural science.

Bernal came to a central figure in the first great ecological movement of the post Second-World War period, the movement against above-ground nuclear testing. And Bernal’s influential book, ‘The Social Function of Science’, was foundational work in what became known as the Social Relations of Science movement. And from there, the idea of the social responsibility of science was then taken up by activists, under the banner – Science for the People.

In the history of the development of ecological materialism, in ‘The Return Of Nature’ the key figures you focus on in the US environmental movement were natural scientists, who as you say had absorbed the work of an earlier generation of UK scientists.

The Marxist thread and so dialectical way of thinking running through Barry Commoner’s law that ‘everything is connected to everything else’ is quite explicit. As you noted, it almost exactly paraphrases something said by Engels.
Comment more on this dialectical way of thinking. For example, as you point out in ‘Marx’s Ecology’ <quote>:

“Life (organisms) and the physical world, as Rachel Carson was wont to emphasize, do not exist in isolated compartments. Rather there is an extraordinary unity between organisms and the environment. A dialectical approach forces us to recognize that organisms in general do not simply adapt to their environment; they also affect that environment in various ways and by affecting it change it. The relationship is therefore a reciprocal one.”

BELLAMY FOSTER: Yeah. For example, Levins and Lewontin in ‘The Dialectical Biologist’, they have a chapter on organisms as subject and object. In the traditional adaptationist mode that came out of Darwin – and I don’t know how much Darwin is actually to blame for this there’s controversy over that but – he’s usually read in a kind of an adaptationist way so that species adapt to their environment. But in the dialectical frame, Levins and Lewontin argue that species change their environment as well as simply adapting to it.

And the environment of one species can be another species’ and much more than that. Maybe a deer will have a wolf in its ecosystem as part of its environment. So it’s a complicated development where you can’t approach it in a one-sided way.

In dialectics, we often talk about contradiction. And contradiction, as Bertell Ollman once said, is best understood as the incompatible development of different elements within the same relation.

But the thing is that in a kind of a dialectical frame you look for contradictions, material contradictions that are a result of change and opposing forces and development. And you try to understand, in that way, the possibilities in terms of change and movement.

So it’s all about change, movement, transformation and the fact that everything is really a relation. We don’t have things that are just separate from each other, like billiard balls. What we exist in is a complex of relations. So, we have to learn to think about things in that way.

Lukács tried to come up with a different approach to the ‘dialectics of nature’ that he thought was closer to Marx and rooted in the notion of labor metabolism. But at any rate, in the 1920s, Karl Korsch and Antonio Gramsci also sort of backed off from the notion of the dialectics of nature. And then Merleau-Ponty – in I don’t know it was 1940s – defined western Marxism as the abandonment of the ‘dialectics of nature’ and then that sort of spread through the Western Marxist philosophical tradition.

So they didn’t reject dialectics. They thought dialectics only applies to society because with society you have the subject-object relation. You have human beings relating to objects and relating to each other – you have identical subject-object relation where there’s interaction and not a contemplative approach to the objective world. They say this dialectic depends on the identical subject-object. So there can’t be any dialectics of nature where human beings aren’t present, right? You can’t look at how things happen in nature in dialectical terms.

But the British scientists actually argued you could. And they made all sorts of scientific discoveries based on that form of thinking. Levins and Lewontin, their ‘The Dialectical Biologist‘ is a work in that tradition. As well as Lewontin’s ‘Triple Helix’ [‘Triple Helix: Gene, Organism and the Environment’] that says: look, to understand evolution, you have to look at all three. You have to look at genes, organisms, and the environment – our ecosystem- all three to understand evolution. You can’t do it on the basis of any one of those.

It’s the whole dialectical relation that was so key to them. So this was very productive in science, particularly in the life sciences and within this Marxist tradition. And a lot of contemporary scientific views are essentially dialectical. They don’t use that language.

But the Western Marxist philosophical tradition backed off from that because they argued dialects could not apply to nature. Then nature becomes irrelevant to Marxism. But a Marxism that doesn’t have a relationship to nature is itself irrelevant.

FRIES: You talked how the rejection of the ‘dialectics of nature’ in the Western Marxist philosophical tradition created a divide in Marxism. Talk next about another divisive issue. Critics of Marx, charge that Marx was a pro-technological Promethean. Could you give some background on that?

BELLAMY FOSTER: If you go back to the Greek myth, if you go back to Aeschylus – Aeschylus’s ‘Prometheus Bound’ – which Marx read in the original Greek every year he was so fond of it. It’s really a story about enlightenment and revolution. Prometheus brought fire to humanity. And that stood – in the original Greek myth – not for technology or big engines or industrialism. It stood for enlightenment. It stood for light; being able to see. And it was understood that way for thousands of years. Like Voltaire came out with the term Enlightenment based on Lucretius’s statements about Epicurus in this sense.

You asked me earlier about – and maybe I didn’t answer – how Epicurus represented a shift away from speculative philosophy. He represented to some extent the introduction of the philosophy of science. A materialist philosophy and since that was seen as interfering with speculative philosophy, it was not seen by Hegel as fully philosophical. It was more tied to materialism and empiricism and science. So they made that division.

But this is what Marx meant when he said Epicurus was the Enlightenment figure of antiquity.

The Promethean myth for thousands of years was understood as a kind of revolutionary focus on enlightenment. In Aeschylus, Prometheus is bound in chains and he is still defiant of the Gods, resisting Zeus, and fighting on the behalf of humanity. For Marx, this defiance even in chains was a revolutionary story.

The term ‘Promethean’ is nowadays used primarily to refer to an extreme productivism, an extreme technologism. Somebody who thinks that production should forever expand at the accelerated ways and so on. It’s associated with the industrial revolution sometimes. But this was kind of an artificial creation. And it is drawn on the Greek myth very loosely.

This notion of ‘prometheanism’ in these terms started during the Cold War. When quite a few thinkers who were Cold War thinkers – mainly sort of coming out of the Left like Robert Tucker and a whole lot of others Daniel Bell – started using the term ‘Promethean’ to criticize Marx and Marxism and to claim that Marx was an extreme productivist.

It’s a weird thing. So there are all these discussions and Anthony Giddens I think introduced the Promethean criticism into Marx and ecology. He said that Marx was a Promethean industrialist and so on. And that he had only contempt for nature.

And so there was all this literature that said: Well, Marx was Promethean – and still today – or that he was an eco-modernist in today’s sense. That he believed industrialism would solve the ecological problem. The term Promethean was thrown around in that sense.

Originally, it was an attack on Marx to characterize him as productivist and oriented towards Big Industry and technologism as opposed to being a humanist. Then it switched and it got to be a criticism of Marx: He’s Promethean. He’s not an ecologist.

The whole thing is totally absurd, really. So, I wrote saying Marx wasn’t ‘Promethean’.

It’s very clear that Marx was opposed to any such views of mechanistic ‘prometheanism’.

FRIES: Comment next on a critique of the notion of progress itself, more specifically, an ecological critique. Among the discussions about this in the book you refer to US scientist Stephen Jay Gould. You say <quote>:

“Gould’s intellectual corpus was full of dialectical accounts of the evolution of organisms in relation to the environment, considering numerous factors, including structural change and the pathways they generated, and contingent historical developments. It was contingency that destroyed all teleological accounts and made evolution a historical phenomenon.”
“Gould’s singular contribution to ecological analysis was his critique of the crude concept of progress – a critique that pervaded all of his thought and was a product of his dialectical-evolutionary view. The most serious fallacy associated with Western norms, he argued was ‘the idea of progress, the idea that we can see ourselves as predictably and properly on top of this biological heap’, and that evolution can be depicted ‘as moving upward from single-celled creatures predictably toward the eventual appearance of some self-conscious form, like human beings’. Far from advancing human progress as an inherent teleological trait, he pointed to the fact that ‘no other species has ever had the capacity to destroy itself and drag large parts of the earth down with it’. In this respect, he fancifully suggested that humanity should make a sustainability pact with our planet to live and let live: the problem lay entirely on the side of humanity and its defective notions of progress.”

Comment on the regressive conception of progress.

BELLAMY FOSTER: All ecological thinking has been very skeptical of the notion of progress. And it goes way back. The notion of progress is often seen as like the ‘Whig view’ of history. That everything that modernizes gets continually better. ‘Modernization’ is sort of a seen as a teleological process that’s brought on by capitalism that always creates progressive results.

But ecological thinking has always been opposed to that. Lankester wrote a work on degeneration. Which Marx really liked. Marx tried to help get it published in Russian. Lankester was studying parasites and he was studying how evolution is not necessarily progressive. It isn’t necessarily about improvement. Obviously, it can be de-evolution in some cases, a degeneration, higher life forms can deteriorate, can give way to lower life forms, right?

So he was talking about this. And Marx at various places like in a speech he gave in England criticized the notion of progress. Not that we don’t want to improve but any notion of inevitable or automatic progress.

Materialism is really and certainly Marx’s materialism is an open-ended view. So, this is very important. And in terms of all of these thinkers criticize any simple concept of progress. That doesn’t mean that we can’t improve things; we can’t get to a better place. But as Epicurus says, “It’s up to us”. It doesn’t happen in any deterministic way. We have to make it happen.

There’s nothing to suggest today that capitalism automatically leads to progress. In fact, I once wrote an article called ‘The Accumulation of Catastrophe’. Because as we develop, especially under capitalism, there are all sorts of gains but we’re expanding the potential for catastrophe at the same time.

And we have to understand that. We can’t see it as just progress. When Donald Trump says he’s going to increase military spending by 50% next year, no doubt it’ll result in modernization of the military and maybe new technology. But there’s no way to call that progress in any uncritical way.

FRIES: In the closing paragraph of ‘The Return of Nature’ you write <quote>:

“Two millennia after Lucretius’s ‘De rerum natura’, Rachel Carson in ‘Silent Spring’ evoked the killing off of birds by noxious fumes and effluvia as the symbol of a new, more lethal age of destruction brought on by ‘the gods of profit and production’. What we must dethrone today is the idol of capital itself, the concentrated power of class-based avarice, which now imperils the ecology of the earth. It is this that constitutes the entire meaning of freedom as necessity and the return of nature in our time.”

Comment on this kind of popular writing by Rachel Carson and other scientists in that tradition.

BELLAMY FOSTER: Yeah, one of the things think about her writing ‘Silent Spring’. Think about Barry Commoner writing ‘The Closing Circle’. Think of some of Levins’s and Lewontin’s writings. Or Gould, you know, he’s such a famous writer of essays on nature. Think about the popular writings of Haldane and Bernal and Hogben. All these scientific figures entered into popular writing in a big way.

They wrote for the public. They devoted most of their efforts – even when they were making scientific advances – they mostly wrote for the general public. Because they believed that science and meaningful change comes from the bottom. They wanted to reach people and get them involved in materialist thinking and science and their own relation to the world so that they could play a role in human praxis to change and transform the world. So they were not like other scientists who were abstract.

Rachel Carson, and you just pointed out in that quote, was inviting the creation of environmental movement. Her book was meant to create environmental movement, to alert people. I mean, it starts off with the parable of “silent spring”. A parable where you go outside and there are no bird songs anymore. There are no birds whatsoever. It reminds me of Lucretius where he talks about the same thing “the loss of birds”. It’s a metaphor for what could happen for the disappearance of so much of external nature.

FRIES: Like Rachel Carson, Lucretius was writing for the public. As a student of Epicurus, Lucretius’s popular writing focused on Epicurus’s materialist philosophy. In commenting on Epicurean materialism you wrote <to quote>:
“In its materialism and its ethics, that is its emphasis on freedom, equality and justice, if not exactly in its praxis of self-sufficiency and ‘ataraxia’, Epicureanism had prefigured modern socialism. As Marx wrote in his ‘Seventh Epicurean Notebook’ – using a metaphor that was later to become increasingly important to him, drawn from Hegel and William Shakespeare – what was revealed in the study of Epicurus was the ‘silent, persevering mole of real philosophical knowledge’ struggling to emerge to take ‘its place in history’. In Epicurus, the mole represented the emergence of materialism for the first time as a social doctrine, one in which the individual human being was both a material being and a social being, and therefore needed to struggle to be free.”

This wraps up our look into ‘The Return of Nature’, which extends the lineage discussed in ‘Marx’s Ecology’—from Epicurus (3rd c. BCE) through Marx (19th c.) up to the modern environmental movement. And in doing so, shows how socialism, as a social doctrine emerging from materialism, was crucial in the development of ecological analysis.
That quote about Epicureanism prefiguring modern socialism comes from ‘Breaking the Bonds of Fate: Epicurus & Marx’, published in 2025. As we turn now to this last book in the trilogy, let’s start with the title itself. What does ‘breaking the bonds of fate’ actually refer to?

LYNN FRIES: John Bellamy Foster’s response to that question and more follows in Part 3. We are going to break here. This has been Part 2 of a 4- part series with John Bellamy Foster on a trilogy: ‘Marx’s Ecology’, ‘The Return of Nature’ and ‘Breaking the Bonds of Fate’. Many thanks, to guest John Bellamy Foster. And thank you for joining us.

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JOHN BELLAMY FOSTER: The beauty of Marx’s analysis in ecological terms is that Marx provided the only theoretical approach – up to the present to this day I think – that connected society and nature. We say society and ecology together. They were seen as essentially two sides of the same coin. You couldn’t talk about society without talking about a social relation to nature.

So, he has got a completely unified analysis. Which is penetrating. It’s really not a question of a few phrases. It goes through his entire analysis. There’s this relation between humanity and nature through social production. And if we don’t get it right, if we don’t sustain the earth for future generations, which is another thing that he talked about, then we’re going to have ecological crises and essentially destroy ourselves.

LYNN FRIES: Hello and welcome. I’m Lynn Fries producer of Global Political Economy or GPEnewsdocs.

That opening short was on ‘Marx’s Ecology’ and a quick preview what’s coming up in this segment. This is Part 1 of a 4-part series with John Bellamy Foster unpacking a trilogy – ‘Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature’, ‘The Return of Nature: Socialism and Ecology’, and ‘Breaking the Bonds of Fate: Epicurus and Marx’. This first segment features Bellamy Foster’s overview of the trilogy and comments on ‘Marx’s Ecology’.

John Bellamy Foster is editor of Monthly Review and Professor of Sociology at the University of Oregon. He is a prolific author, co-author and editor. As well as today’s featured books and many others, he has authored ‘Capitalism in the Anthropocene’, ‘The Dialectics of Ecology’ and co-authored ‘The Robbery of Nature’ and ‘The Ecological Rift’. Bellamy Foster’s work has been awarded numerous distinctions. His book ‘The Return of Nature’ won the Deutscher Memorial Prize.

In this opening segment, the first thing I asked our guest to clarify was why he says ‘Breaking the Bonds of Fate’ is logically the first book of the trilogy? We go now to Part 1 of this series as John Bellamy Foster responds to that question.

JOHN BELLAMY FOSTER: Well, first of all, I mean, it is a little confusing because the first book written in this trilogy was ‘Marx’s Ecology’. And it did deal with materialism, Epicurus, and so on. And then ‘The Return of Nature’ is the second book written. But the third book written is actually the beginning of the trilogy; that’s ‘Breaking the Bonds of Fate’ is logically the beginning. I went back and explained the foundations more fully.

‘Marx’s Ecology’ is the first book written. ‘Return of Nature’ is the second book written. And ‘Breaking the Bonds of Fate’ is the third book written but actually the foundation for the whole trilogy.

FRIES: We are going to be talking about each of these books one by one in the order in which they were written but first comment on how you came to write this trilogy. And then run through a brief overview.

BELLAMY FOSTER: Well, I got interested in the question of Marx and ecology. I originally wrote an article for a German dictionary on Erde/Earth. They wanted me to talk about the classical political economy and the soil and also Marx’s role. I discovered the full depth of Marx’s ecological analysis influenced by the German chemist, Justus von Liebig and I wrote about that. Then I developed that into an article called ‘Marx’s Theory of Metabolic Rift’ that explained Marx’s ecological analysis in ‘Capital’. Or at least the core of it, in terms of what was called the ‘theory of metabolic rift’. Which we’ll talk about. But it’s his theory of ecological crisis and focused initially on the soil.

I wanted to know how Marx could have possibly done that. Like if you assume that Marx was a genius, still a genius can’t make bricks without straw as the saying goes. So there had to be some foundations. How was it that Marx was able to intervene so fully into what was an ecological discussion at enormous depth and connect the social and natural in what we now call an ecological way? How could he do that? He was not primarily a natural scientist. Where did he get the foundations for that? I decided the answer had to be in Marx’s materialism.

But that raised a question. I had come out of the Western Marxist tradition. I’d been trained in economics and philosophy. And there really wasn’t an answer to that. When people talked about Marx’s materialism, they generally meant his economics and nothing more than that or it wasn’t examined. So, I felt I needed to discover where Marx’s materialism came from and really what the roots of it were. So, I went back to his doctoral dissertation.

The principle problem, of course, was that when Marx wrote about the materialist conception of history, there was also a materialist conception of nature. Where did that come from? How did Marx tie into that? So, I went back to his doctoral dissertation on Epicurus, on the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus, who lived from 341 to 270 BCE. That’s thousands of years before; but Marx had written his doctoral dissertation on Epicurus’s philosophy of nature. And that had always been a puzzle for analysts of Marx’s work.

But it was there that I searched for the origins of Marx’s materialism. Obviously, Marx was influenced by Hegel’s idealist philosophy but where and when did he embrace materialism? And what did that mean?

I found a lot of the answers in Marx’s doctoral dissertation. And in ‘Marx’s Ecology’, I explained some of Epicurean materialism. I had to study Epicurus’s philosophy itself and I explained some of that. And then I wrote the book, ‘Marx’s Ecology’ basically about 19th century materialism centering on Marx but also taking into account other thinkers like Darwin and Liebig and Malthus.

Of course, Liebig and Malthus weren’t strictly materialists. They weren’t materialists but I dealt with a whole lot of thinkers who were including Darwin. And tried to understand, you know, the development of ecology centering on Marx and rooted in this notion of materialism, of the human dependence on nature and natural conditions.

So I did that and the book, ‘Marx’s Ecology’, was subtitled ‘Materialism and Nature’. The book was a success in terms of explaining Marx’s ecology and getting people to recognize that. But then there immediately were criticisms: That this didn’t continue…what Marx did with respect to ecology and materialism was erased later on. It didn’t have any effect on the later development of either Marxism or ecology.

So, I wrote, ‘The Return of Nature: Socialism and Ecology’, which took me about 20 years. Of course, I was doing other things as well. That told the story from the time of the death of Darwin and Marx in 1882 and 1883 respectively, up until the 1980s.

And it showed how this materialist view and ecological materialism had grown out of Marx and Darwin and had been promoted in socialist thought. And that resulted in concepts like the concept of ecosystem and many other breakthroughs up through the ecological movement of the fifties, sixties and seventies.

That story was told in ‘The Return of Nature’. And then after that, I could go back to what was the essential problem. I could go back to Epicurus and Marx and really do a thorough job this time of analyzing Epicurean philosophy and Marx’s dissertation. And how that had affected much of Marx’s thought. Which we don’t recognize today or have ignored.

So, I did that in ‘Breaking the Bonds of Fate’. And ‘Breaking the Bonds of Fate’ has four chapters. One is on Epicurus’s life and times in ancient Athens. The second is on his philosophy. The third is on Marx’s dissertation and how Epicurus influenced Marx and how he developed these ideas. And the fourth chapter is on Epicureanism and Marxism, on how this permeated much of Marxism. So, I did that.

But in going back and looking at Epicurus again – I had actually been reading the materials – for a couple of decades, I’d collected – I decided that Epicurus in his time was a figure of the same stature as Marx in his. In the sense that Epicureanism was the most influential philosophy in ancient times both in terms of adherence and in terms of duration. It lasted for seven centuries as a school. And I discovered just the profundity of Marx’s analysis.

But another thing happened. And that was I got more deeply into the current Epicurean scholarship. A lot of it is based on the discoveries of… when Mount Vesuvius went off in 79 AD it buried not only Pompeii, but Herculaneum, which was a Roman Resort town. And in what we call the Villa of the Papyri, they discovered the only still existing ancient library. It had the papyri.

Thousands of papyri had been turned into what looked like carbonized lumps of coal. But they were able to unroll them to some extent, developing machines; destroying a lot in the process. Now we have very advanced techniques for reading them. And they were able to discover all sorts of Epicurean works because it was an Epicurean library, including a crucial part of Book 25 of Epicurus’s ‘On Nature’.

Marx had developed a very unique analysis of Epicurean philosophy seeing it as a materialism that left room for human agency and contingency and development and human freedom – a dialectic of determinism and freedom.

And it was a very unique interpretation and they sort of rediscovered Marx’s interpretation in the early 20th century. And realized that, let’s say, in the analysis of some parts of Epicurus like the ‘Epicurean Swerve’, he was way ahead of modern Epicurean scholarship even in the 20th century.

But with the discovery of the papyri, we’ve discovered that Marx’s fundamental interpretation of Epicurus was correct and that Marx’s whole interpretation of freedom and determinism in Epicurus and the dialectical basis of it, and so on, has been verified by modern scholarship.

What do we get out of this? Well Marx got out of it a materialism that was active; that was not mechanical. Epicurus rejected mechanistic views, mechanical materialism. He rejected idealism. He rejected skepticism.

He sort of, as Marx said, swerved away from all of that and came up with a view that took into account nature and society. That took into account a degree of determinism, causal determinism, but left room for human freedom.

And that had a proto-evolutionary perspective. Had what we now call emergence that takes into consideration the role of organization. And this is fundamental to science now, that we have certain physical properties. You could say – atoms – but we also have organization. And between the two, we have a complete view of the world where there are emergent levels.

And that’s very important because it goes against any kind of reductionism, Marx very anti-reductionist. And of course, he got that a lot from Epicurus.

So, Epicurus also influenced the whole 17th century scientific revolution and the Enlightenment. All of the major thinkers were indebted to Epicurus and said so. It was part of the development of materialism. It was part of the development of the Enlightenment. And Marx knew that. And that’s why he was interested.

But it was fundamental because Marx had spent time studying Hegelian idealism but he was really inclined to materialism. But how do you construct a materialism that is ontological: that is deals with the nature of being? That’s epistemological: that is has an explanation of how we know things? And that’s also practical: that deals with real conditions?

And Epicurus for Marx was a plus because he was very critical of religion or teleology – the notion that the gods or God determined things on earth. He rejected that without rejecting religion completely. And he emphasized that the basis of human life was community, friendship; building a society based on friendship.

He was the first to bring women into philosophy – allowing them to emerge as major philosophers within the Epicurean school – and also slaves. He couldn’t do anything about slavery itself, but he brought slaves into Epicurean philosophy. They were given a high status.

The whole society was organized around a garden. And emphasized sustainable living, and very ecological in orientation. Epicurus criticized those who thought that, “enough was too little”. The idea is that everyone needs enough but no one needs more than that.

He emphasized that justice was based on reciprocity. And he said that justice – the conditions of justice changed or justice – changed depending on changes in material conditions.

We have from Lucretius, his major follower, a very historical approach too, an anthropological historical approach to human development.

So, all of these things attracted Marx. And he found in Epicurus, what he called an immanent dialectic. He saw Epicurus as the first thinker to develop a concept of alienation.

So he was able to take his background in Hegelian philosophy and study Epicurus and imagine a new kind of analysis. A materialism that was an active materialism that was oriented to praxis. That had a role for human agency and was aimed at freedom and equality and human development and so on.

Marx quoted Epicurus and Lucretius on “breaking the bonds of fate”. Epicurus was always about “breaking the bonds of fate” and making room for conceptions of human freedom without renouncing materialism or determination to some degree. So that was crucial to Marx. How do we ‘break the bonds of fate’ and recognize that the world is up to us? We can change the world.

All of this is in the Epicurus and Marx relationship. And while I started out looking at materialism from the standpoint of ecology and this is all the development of an ecological materialism, it also deals with these other issues. Like how do we conceive of human freedom in a world that is also partly determined?

FRIES: There is a lot to unpack here. We are going to take these books one by one starting with the first book written so, ‘Marx’s Ecology’.

You said in this first book you tried to understand the development of ecology rooted in this notion of materialism – so of the human dependence on nature and natural conditions.

You had published an article on Marx’s theory of ecological crisis, ‘Marx’s Theory of Metabolic Rift’ and you needed to find out where Marx got these ecological insights. For that, the Western Marxist tradition had no answers. Having decided Marx’s ecological insights had to come from his materialism, to discover the foundations of that materialism you went back to Marx’s doctoral dissertation titled: ‘The Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophies of Nature’.

And as explained in ‘Breaking the Bonds of Fate’:
“Marx’s doctoral thesis had generally been treated in the Western Marxist philosophical tradition as an immature product of his early Hegelian idealist phase.”

Departing from the dominant tradition in this respect, ‘Marx’s Ecology’ presented: “Epicurus’s materialist philosophy as the nascent basis on which Marx had begun to work out a materialist dialectic, inverting G.W.F. Hegel’s idealist system.”
And for this you say, Marx was able to take his background in Hegelian philosophy and his study of Epicurus and imagine an active materialism that had a role for human agency and that was aimed at freedom and equality and human development and so on.

As you talk about this first book, let’s start with this notion of materialism. Marx’s Ecology emphasizes the necessary connection between materialism and ecology – which as stated in the book’s intro is the whole point of the study –and then does go on to clarify this notion of materialism. That <quote>:

“In its most general sense materialism claims that the origins and development of whatever exists is dependent on nature and ‘matter’, that is, a level of physical reality that is independent of and prior to thought.”

The book then goes on to clarify the notion of materialism in the terms that you just referred to in your overview of the trilogy: an ontological materialism, an epistemological materialism and a practical materialism. Can you expand on the explanation you already gave on what all that means?

BELLAMY FOSTER: Well, the best thinker on this is Roy Bhaksar. A lot of his writings are very difficult and I plowed through them. But what I would recommend the most is an essay he wrote which I first encountered in Tom Bottomore’s dictionary of Marxism. He wrote an essay on materialism. Which is then included in some of his later works and developed on.

But Bhaksar is very clear. There are three levels of materialism. Ontological, that is the nature of being; Epistemological, how we know and the basis of human knowledge. And the third one is practical or praxis. Where materialism is seen as… it’s more like what we think of in terms of economic struggle or struggle over the class material conditions of production and so on.

At the level of praxis, materialism represents starting with those material foundations. Which means human production and seeing that as the basis of society and social action.

Ontological materialism means that we have to have some kind of notion of what the material base is. In that, Epicurus and before him Democritus, they were adamant they said it all came from atoms. Except that Epicurus made that into less of a rigid, fatalistic sort of theory.

Now we talk in terms of sub-atomic particles and everything else. But the idea is that there’s a physical material basis to the universe, to the earth, to our own existence. And we have to start with that. That defines at the most basic level what is and what is possible.

Then there’s the question of how do we know things? And the Epicurean approach says we know things primarily through our senses. The materialist approach always starts with the senses, with empirical analysis starting with the conditions, the material conditions. While a more idealist approach starts with religion or the mind or so on.

Hegel in his ‘Phenomenology’ once said that these approaches can almost be viewed as equivalent but they have different starting points. They both represent, you know, absolutes. Like you make nature the absolute or you make God the absolute. But you have different starting points.

The materialist approach always starts with nature, material conditions. And how do we know things? We know things first through our senses and then we build up our mind, you know our mind develops. There’s a whole evolutionary process I won’t get into.

But basically, that’s the approach. We know from what we physically experience and how we rationally learn to perceive and examine that rather than final causes. There’s no teleological principle that establishes some final end that’s ultimately determined by God.

And ideas aren’t floating signifiers that come out of nowhere or come out of Athena from the head of Zeus. You have to, in the materialist view, start with the basis of physical existence. And our own existence is based on our subsistence on earth, that means through our production, and how we therefore meet our needs.
So that’s a fundamental materialist approach. And it’s rooted in a kind of ontology that says that nature is and physical existence is basic to this.

Science sees things this way. So we think of physics as the most basic science, but physics can’t explain society. Because even though physics explains a lot of what are the fundamental conditions of the world in material terms, society is what we call an emergent level or an integrative level that has its own laws. It can’t be simply reduced to physics or biology or anything like that. But a materialist approach does that.

It seems strange because science is so much seen as the enemy of ecology; for some environmentalists often within ‘green theory’ science becomes the enemy. And science can be very destructive, right?

But our notions of ecology, all of our fundamental ecological notions – like metabolism, ecosystem, the earth system – they all come out of science and out of a materialist perspective. And this is fundamental and this is one of the reasons why Marx was able to advance so far in this.

FRIES: In the introduction to ‘Marx’s Ecology’ you say <quote>:
“The argument of this book is based on a very simple premise: that in order to understand the origins of ecology, it is necessary to comprehend the new views of nature that arose with the development of materialism and science from the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries. Moreover, rather than simply picturing materialism and science as the enemies of earlier and supposedly preferable conceptions of nature, as is common in contemporary Green theory, the emphasis here is on how the development of both materialism and science promoted—indeed made possible—ecological ways of thinking”.

Comment more on what you are saying there.

BELLAMY FOSTER: That’s essentially saying that the answer lies in materialism. And those ideas that arose in the 17th through the 19th century, that new materialism, let’s say Francis Bacon, for example, or Voltaire in a different way, they were all influenced by Epicurean philosophy. To some extent Democritus but it was mostly Epicurus but also Lucretius was very important, Epicurus’s great Roman follower.

So the 17th century scientific revolution was really a revolt against Aristotelian scholasticism that had been attached to the church, basically the Catholic Church in the medieval era. In the Renaissance but much more in the 17th century scientific revolution, they broke away from that Aristotelian scholasticism in the understanding of nature by way of primarily of Epicurus, Democritus and Epicurus. And they came up with another understanding.

For one thing, the understanding which is basic to materialism and to evolutionary thought that ‘nature is its own explanation’. It was the rejection of final causes and teleology in the examination of nature.

So, in Aristotle there were four causes, two of them were material causes. And then, there are final causes. And the ultimate cause was always God, in the final causes. Bacon said that final causes were like Vestal Virgins. They were barren. He always used metaphors.

But the idea was that the final causes were consecrated to gods. They told us nothing about nature and they were barren in the understanding of nature. We had to approach things in a materialist and empirical way.

And it’s interesting to me that Bacon said that, but then Darwin quoted that same phrase in the 1840s when he was developing his ideas. Because Darwin was struggling with materialism all through his life, out of which his evolutionary theory came. And Marx in the 1840s quoted that same phrase from Bacon about a year from Darwin.

They all were reorienting themselves to a view that ‘nature was its own explanation’. That nature created itself. God was not responsible. And all of this sort of went back to the roots of materialism and Epicurus. So there was a whole scientific revolution going on.
Ecology cannot really be meaningfully approached, I believe, except on a materialist and realist basis. The idea that the ecology is, you know, something that we can get just spiritually (I mean the spiritual elements are important) or that it just comes from some sort of sense of intrinsic nature, that isn’t enough.

We really need a materialist understanding and a scientific, a realist understanding and that’s what emerged at this time. And ecology actually arose out the understanding of materialism.

FRIES: In the introduction to ‘Marx’s Ecology’ you go on to say:

“The overall discussion is structured around the work of Darwin and Marx—the two greatest materialists of the nineteenth century. But it is the latter who constitutes the principal focus of this work, since the goal is to understand and develop a revolutionary ecological view of great importance to us today; one that links social transformation with the transformation of the human relation with nature in ways that we now consider ecological. The key to Marx’s thinking in this respect, it is contended, lies in the way that he developed and transformed an existing Epicurean tradition with respect to materialism and freedom, which was integral to the rise of much of modern scientific and ecological thought.”

Expand on that. And notably, why you chose Marx’s analysis as the principle focus of this work.

BELLAMY FOSTER: The beauty of Marx’s analysis in ecological terms is that Marx provided the only theoretical approach – up to the present to this day I think – that connected society and nature. We say society and ecology together – that they were seen as essentially two sides of the same coin. That you couldn’t talk about society without talking about a social relation to nature.

But at the same time, it wasn’t reductionist like a biological determinism or any kind of a naturalistic determinism. He perceived the role of the social in all of this but never separated the social from the natural material conditions.

And this approach led to his ecological crisis theory, what we call ‘the theory of metabolic rift’. Well, that’s sort of a short-hand for a lot of other things.

Marx introduced the notion of the universal metabolism of nature. If you want to talk about nature, you talk about it as a universal metabolism. And he took the concept of metabolism that had been developed in the 19th century and he expanded on it in social terms.

So, first you have the universal metabolism of nature. But what do human beings do when they produce? When we produce and transform nature? He called that the social metabolism. The social metabolism, which is really production in Marx’s terms, is what connects human beings to nature. And it’s what allows us to live.

He came up with this notion of the metabolic rift. Well, an interruption, a rupture, a rift, an irreparable rift in the interdependent social metabolism between nature and society. And the idea was that we developed an alienated social metabolism – an alienated production – that’s destructive of the universal metabolism of nature.

And that this is particularly prominent in capitalism, which tends to rob nature and treat it as a free gift. And has anything but a sustainable relation to nature. We create this irreparable rift in the interdependent social metabolism between nature and society and that has to be reconciled. But it can’t really be reconciled within the kind of system that we have.

All of this came out of Marx’s materialism. In fact, if you look at Lucretius, you know, Epicurus’ follower, there is a place where he refers to essentially the irreparable rift or irreparable rupture when talking about death.

And Marx is saying, what we’re doing is killing ourselves and the earth or the human relation to the earth by having an alienated social metabolism that’s in conflict with the universal metabolism of nature. And he ties this back to capital accumulation.

He’s got a completely unified analysis, which is penetrating. It’s really not a question of a few phrases. It goes through his entire analysis. There’s this relation between humanity and nature through social production.

And if we don’t get it right, if we don’t sustain the earth for future generations, which is another thing that he talked about, then we’re going to have ecological crises and essentially destroy ourselves.

All of that is in Marx. And it comes out of this very unified materialist perspective. Darwin is another matter. Darwin was not concerned with ecological crisis. But Darwin does teach us a lot about evolution. And that came from a materialist perspective.

It has been discovered in recent scholarship, let’s say in the last few decades or last half century, how much Darwin was a materialist…in his notebooks. It’s clear in his notebooks, he tried to hide his materialism because of the religious views in England at the time.

And his evolutionary theory came out of his materialism. And if you understand, I think, the implications of Darwin fully it doesn’t really come down to just the survival of the fittest, as we see him. You can get out of Darwin or Darwinian thinking a notion that we have to co-evolve with the earth. So this is extremely important.

FRIES: As a follow-on to your comments that Marx had a completely unified materialist perspective I should note for viewers that there is an in-depth and multi-faceted discussion of this running through all three books. While it is not possible to do justice to this in today’s conversation, there are some summary points about this in ‘Breaking the Bonds of Fate ‘that I find myself constantly referring back to and of special relevance to the story told in ‘The Return of Nature’. On the view, other generalists may also find this useful background for today’s discussion I will take a moment to quickly run those now.

“From the beginning, then, Marx’s materialism could be said to have two sides: the ecological and economic. This was later manifested in his development in ‘Capital’ of his theory of the metabolic rift. To understand the full dialectical character of his thought, his underlying materialist conception of nature is as vital as the materialist conception of history: there is, in the end, only ‘one materialism’.”
“If Marx’s general philosophical outlook can be called dialectical-critical materialist (or dialectical-critical realist), his distinctive contribution was the materialist conception of history or historical materialism.”
“Without a thorough materialist grounding in the material world at large, including Earth itself, historical materialism was without grounds. Hence, Marx and Engels throughout their work sought to ground their critique of bourgeois society and historical forms in the much wider context of the earthly conditions of existence. All of their texts continuously referred back to this. Nevertheless, the vast changes in natural science in the nineteenth century and the development of a crude mechanism, often accompanied by a crude idealism, forced the development (in chronological terms) of a ‘second foundation of Marxism’, underlying the first, that is, a materialist dialectics that would counter the prevailing mechanistic materialism. This was a task clearly recognized and taken on by both Marx and Engels. But given Marx’s desperate efforts to complete his critique of political economy, which tied him down considerably, the integration of historical materialism with the materialist conception of nature via the explicitly development of a dialectical naturalism fell largely to Engels in ‘Anti-Dühring’ and his unfinished ‘Dialectics of Nature’.”
“If the first foundation of classical Marxism was therefore the materialist conception of history, in which a materialist conception of nature was largely assumed, the second foundation was the development of a dialectical-natural conception of the physical world and of life as a necessary basis for moving forward.”
“The second foundation of Marxism was thus a ‘return of nature’ and thus a dialectical integration of the materialist conception of history with the materialist concept of nature that led to major developments in cultural theory, natural science, and ecology.”

With that as a lead in, let’s turn now to the next book of the trilogy that we’re going to be discussing- ‘The Return of Nature: Socialism and Ecology’. What then was your focus and goal in writing this book? And how does the story you began in ‘Marx’s Ecology’ carryover into ‘The Return of Nature’?

LYNN FRIES: John Bellamy Foster’s response to that question and more follows in Part 2. We are going to break here. This has been Part 1 of a 4-part series with John Bellamy Foster on a trilogy: ‘Marx’s Ecology’, ‘The Return of Nature’ and ‘Breaking the Bonds of Fate’. Many thanks, to guest John Bellamy Foster. And thank you for joining us.

END OF TRANSCRIPT

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Shalaj Lawania
This is a conversation with Paul Jay. He’s a filmmaker popularly known for the documentaries Hitman Hart: Wrestling with Shadows and Return to Kandahar, and a journalist who was the former producer of the debate programs CounterSpin and Face Off on CBC. And the founder of independent media platforms like The Real News Network and theAnalysis.news.

As we wrap up, you brought up nuclear war, so I want to wrap up with the work that you’re about to do on this film that’s about to come out. You got interested in this subject, then you read Daniel Ellsberg’s book, The Doomsday Machine, and after you interviewed him as well. So what’s the history of the nuclear program, and then how can we prevent nuclear war? No pressure.

Paul Jay
To some extent, the film begins after we introduce Ellsberg and whatever with this question. By 1943, and certainly by ’44, the Americans and British knew there was no German nuclear bomb. But that was the reason for the Manhattan Project. The scientists were gathered together to create a nuclear weapon because they believed there was a German bomb. In fact, Einstein and Szilard, two physicists, wrote a letter to FDR saying, “You’ve got to work on the nuclear bomb because the Germans are working on it.” It turned out the Germans actually gave up on it pretty early. They didn’t— they were going down the road of heavy water, and they wouldn’t work with the Jewish physicists who either left or were imprisoned. It became clear to the Germans early on that they could not get a nuclear bomb in time. Meaning they thought they’d win the war without it.

Anyway, the Americans and British knew this by ’43, ’44. Why do they keep building the bomb? They are warned by their own scientists. Many are saying they get how catastrophic a nuclear war would be, but they keep building it anyway. And it’s clearly because, first of all, the history of the U.S. prior to World War II, especially prior to the Depression, was already expansionist. They’d taken over the Philippines, Cuba, and Central America. They had troops fighting in China. The idea of becoming a global hegemonic power was already quite developed.

But during the war, the Council on Foreign Relations, which was funded by the Rockefellers, which is Standard Oil, had a plan. It was called the Grand Area. There’s a great book called Imperial Brain Trust by Larry Shoup and a guy named Minter. They went through CFR documents, and it clearly makes the case. The plan was for the Grand Area. The Grand Area would be the non-Soviet world, and the prime directive is don’t let any country leave the American Western capitalist sphere and join the Soviet sphere.

So the beginning of World War II is all about that in terms of the geopolitical American objectives, and in that, Indochina is critical. They need the rubber, the tin, the rice production, and the populations. The bomb is developed because, one, the Americans believe they’ll have a monopoly on that bomb for at least a decade, if not longer. It was a shock to them when the Soviets had one, what, four years later? The bomb was the spine of American power because it could threaten its use, and they did so. This is why the Korean War is so important in 1951, ’52, ’53.

Truman explicitly threatens using nukes. Eisenhower threatens using nukes. They establish the role of the nuclear weapon as blackmail against the Soviet Union and against China. It’s one of the reasons the Soviets wouldn’t get involved directly in the Korean War. In a minor way, they did with some airplanes, but even the Americans didn’t want to recognize that. The bomb became the core of American global power by threatening its use, and it continues to this day. But of course, it doesn’t have a nuclear monopoly anymore.

Something else happened that’s very interesting, which is that at the end of the Korean War, in 1953, Eisenhower was in power. They finally get this agreement to go back to where they were in the first place, with the 38th parallel. Millions of people were killed. Every single village, town, and city in North Korea was demolished. Every single city by Curtis LeMay, the American general.

At the end of the war, public opinion in the United States was like it was after Vietnam, or during the end of the Vietnam War, totally against the war. Thousands of Americans were killed for nothing. The whole thing ended up where it started. Nobody understood why the war had been waged in the first place, and it was the need for a militarized economy to stop the American economy, and even global, from going into a deep recession.

There was a need to spend government money for government stimulus, kind of almost World War II levels, because even the New Deal didn’t really end the Depression, it just mitigated it. They knew they needed a way to funnel government money into the European economy so they could start buying American goods. The Japanese economy, they had to rebuild Japan so Japan could start buying American goods, and most importantly, the militarization of the American economy itself. The aerospace industry was about to go down the toilet. It had grown to big proportions, but all based on government military contracts. Well, the war’s over. So now what?

There’s a quote from the guy who’s the head of Lockheed, Gross, he says something like, “If we have a real peace, we’re going bankrupt. But if we have an armed truce, well, they’re going to need a lot of airplanes.” They were very conscious that they needed— some people call it military Keynesianism, government stimulus, but through military means.

So the Cold War politics, ideology, it’s there to justify military expenditure. It has other purposes. It suppressed the left in the United States. The Red Scare cleaned the militants out of the unions, out of Hollywood, and out of government. They fired thousands of teachers. It was a way to purge American society of the left. Something Trump talks about doing again. There’s even a quote where Trump uses the words “leftist vermin,” which is an echo right out of Hitler. So the Cold War solved a lot of problems. You exaggerate the Soviet threat, now you get Europe to join NATO.

I was in Norway speaking at the Nobel Center in Oslo, and I told this story. In 1948, General Clay, who had the Berlin area under his command, told the world, the White House, and the Europeans, “The Soviets have 2,000 to 3,000 troops ready to invade Western Europe.” Norway, the Norwegian Labor Party that’s in power, is debating whether to join NATO or not, and they send an emissary to Washington, and they tell them, “You’re about to be invaded.” And they go back, and they decide to join NATO. So Norway is a founding member of NATO.

I’m telling this story to this group at the Nobel Center. This old guy in the audience was staring at me through his glasses. He’s giving me what, to me, I thought was the Norwegian stink eye. Anyway, he has the last Q&A. So, he has the mic, and he says, “I’ve been listening to everything Mr. Jay has been saying, and I have to say, I agree with everything he just said. And I’m the former Prime Minister of Norway.” And he was. He was Prime Minister in the late ’90s and early 2000s. And he agreed with this whole story that Norway was lied into NATO.

Ellsberg called NATO a protection racket. You have to escalate and exaggerate the threat. Now you’re going to have to come to us to protect you, which means you have to buy American weapons and get all enmeshed in our military-industrial complex. And if you do that, the Marshall Plan, other things will help finance you, will get you back up on your feet until your economies are going, but you’ve got to keep buying American weapons or you’re going to be doomed. And of course, the elites that come to power, they’re all making money hand over fist out of the same military expenditures. They get their taste, to use the mafia language, of protection rackets.

So the Cold War is primarily a scam that even people in it come to believe. This is about identity again. You know, for the longest time, to me, this is like one of the greatest ways to tell this story. Apparently, executives at tobacco companies knew the research, because they had the secret research that cigarettes cause cancer, and they kept smoking. Not only did they keep smoking, but they let their kids smoke because the culture of the company was, you don’t get ahead if you’re not pro-smoking.

The same thing happens, I think, at the political level, at the level of the Pentagon. People’s identities get formed. You go to school, you’re told the Soviets are out to get you, and to go hide under your desk. The communists just want a dictatorship. You lose all your freedoms. “Better red than dead,” like you said. You grow up in that stuff, and eventually that becomes who you are. That becomes a big part of your identity.

So a lot of the people to this day who are involved in nuclear weapons planning, nuclear weapons policy, and are still planning how to win a nuclear war— still, there are people that sit around, like Dan Ellsberg did in the beginning, until he realized how insane the whole thing was and how driven by money the whole thing was. To this day, there are people working in the Pentagon on how to win a nuclear war, which is why they don’t want to recognize such a thing as nuclear winter. Because if you recognize nuclear winter and you think of a nuclear war, even a smaller one like India-Pakistan, for example, apparently, the models suggest that something like a billion people could die as a result of an India-Pakistan nuclear war.

Even if it’s confined to those, the fire raging through cities would create so much smoke that in the entire region, which could reach as far as sections of Europe, into China, certainly, parts of Russia, there may be next to no agriculture left. But put that on a global scale of all-out nuclear war, there are no humans left. Dan used to joke that maybe there’ll be some people down in New Zealand who can eat mollusks. Maybe there’ll be 2,000 or 3,000 humans left somewhere on a mountain in Peru. But the Pentagon dismisses nuclear winter, and this has been around for decades. Carl Sagan was talking about nuclear winter in the 1980s. This isn’t a new concept. If you accept nuclear winter, there cannot be a nuclear war, because there is absolutely nobody left.

Then why build all this stuff? What is the point? It’s like, why do we have ICBMs? Do you want to know how we can stop a nuclear war? Well, Dan used to focus on getting rid of intercontinental ballistic missiles. What do they do? So you get an early warning that something’s coming at you. Well, you don’t know if that something coming at you is missiles, geese, asteroids, or some screwed-up AI analyzing sensor radar activity and hallucinating. You don’t know if it is real until it hits. So what’s the rational course of action? You fire before it hits, so at least you get yours in. But what if it turns out it wasn’t real? So why don’t you let it hit? And you know why you should let it hit? If it— to find out if it’s real or not, because you can’t stop it anyway. You can’t stop whatever’s coming in. There is no anti-ballistic missile system.

This Golden Dome thing is another con job. Americans have been told since the 1950s that building anti-ballistic missile systems that would defend America like a Golden Dome, like a shield, is all a boondoggle. Trillions of dollars down the toilet. It never worked. It doesn’t work today. So if something’s coming, you have no choice but to let it come because you cannot stop it. You can’t hit a bullet with a bullet. There’s no defense.

And in all likelihood, it is not a real attack. Why? Because you always have a second strike capability because you’ve got subs. So if, in fact, it turns out you are under attack from missiles, and it does take you out, and you want to end human civilization, you can do what Putin said.

Somebody asked Putin once, “If you were attacked under a first strike, would you launch a second strike knowing it’d be the end of human civilization?” And Putin’s answer was, “What’s the point of human civilization without a Russia?” And the Americans feel the same. Maybe not all, but a lot of them feel the same way. “You know what? If we’re all— if we’re going, they’ve got to go too. You know, we’re not going to be the only— we’re not going to leave them standing.” Which is why, in the old nuclear war plans under Eisenhower, if there was ever a fight between Russians and Americans, they would take out not just the Russians but the Chinese too, even though the Chinese would have had nothing to do with it.

So what do we need to do to stop nuclear war? We have to expose the lies of the Cold War, because Americans and everybody has internalized their own version of this, and it’s essentially threat escalation, and exaggerating the enemy. They’re so contradictory. Even the Americans admit. So the Russians, the Chinese, the North Koreans— nobody with nuclear weapons wants to commit suicide.

So if you know that, what’s the point of it? You don’t want to commit suicide. So what are you doing it for? If you really want deterrence, how about having two or three subs. The Russians, Chinese, Indians, Pakistanis, if they want, whoever wants, they can have one, two, or three subs. You can always have a second strike. I mean, even that, do you really need it? But let’s say you’re convinced you need something. But that’s deterrence.

All the rest is a boondoggle. All the rest is money-making. All the rest is this internalized worst-case scenario. How do lawyers make money? They give you a worst-case scenario, and once you buy the worst-case scenario, you need a 120-page contract.

My entertainment lawyer was great. I said, I was going to do a licensing deal for a film, and this and that, and I said, “Can you draft me a contract?” And he said, “You want to do business with these guys?” And I said, “Yeah.” “You trust them? You’re okay?” “Yeah.” “Okay, here’s your contract.” He’d give me one page, and it would say, “I’m selling you this, you’re paying me that, you get these rights, goodbye.” Otherwise, “Oh, they’re going to cheat you, you’re going to do this, you need 120 pages.”

So put that into the Pentagon head. So many people are making money in the United States, in Russia, in China, in India, in Pakistan, you name the place, people are making money out of worst-case scenarios. And then they convince their populations, “Only we can defend you from the worst-case scenario.” And it’s not true. There’s no defense. That’s the big lie. There is no defense from the worst-case scenario because the worst-case scenario is nuclear war, and nuclear winter, and we’re done. So it’s all based on lies.

So, the film, we’re going to try to unravel the lies that underpin the nuclear weapons architecture, then some concrete, rational steps— get rid of ICBMs. Unilateral things that the U.S. can do all on its own. Get rid of the ICBMs, get rid of launch-on-warning, get rid of early warning. All of that construct is only there so that you can strike before you even know you’ve been hit.

So what is it really? What it really is is a first-strike capability. It’s not about defense at all. Other things. Get rid of sole authority. Isn’t it— you trust one president who professes to be a Christian nationalist, a true believer who doesn’t think we need elections. And there may be— worse may still be to come. You trust one person to end the world and human civilization.

Say no to the Golden Dome. Anti-ballistic missile systems are inherently dangerous. I have this line: “The only thing worse than the Golden Dome not working and being a trillion-dollar boondoggle is that it does work.” To the extent it works, if it can take out any incoming missiles from Russia or China, all it does is make Russia and China have to build more, and maybe build their own anti-ballistic missile system. So now you get a whole other phase of the arms race.

But the point people need to understand, and even Governor Jerry Brown, who’s in my film, said this, “You have to understand, the arms race is the objective.” Deterrence isn’t the objective. Winning a nuclear war is not the objective. The objective is money-making. You can rationalize it through worst-case scenario belief systems, which I think a lot of people, in some ways, sincerely believe in the Pentagon, and I’m not so sure that the arms manufacturers think they know what’s going on.

But we need the American public, the Canadian public, the public everywhere to demand some rational steps to reduce. Like, why don’t we have serious negotiations to keep AI out of nuclear command and control? They’re racing towards it now. People like Schmidt, who used to run Google, he goes on and on warning of the existential threat of AI, and he’s one of the biggest investors in militarized AI.

I mean, the hypocrisy is astounding. So you’re telling me AI may become autonomous, and “Someday—” I’m quoting him directly. He says, “Someday we’re going to get to a point where we’re going to create an AI team that’s somewhat autonomous, becomes more autonomous as the team works together, and then they’re going to start needing a language that’s faster than English, than human language, and they develop their own language. And at that point, we don’t know what they’re saying to each other.” So he says— this is in a YouTube video, people can look it up— he says, “At that point, we’d better pull the plug. It’s the only thing we can do.” Except he forgets to say one thing: there is no plug.

What plug? And you’re investing trillions of dollars in this AI infrastructure, all these companies, trillions, and you’re going to pull the plug? No way. And then you take this autonomous AI team, and what’s their job? “Oh, you’re going to interpret the data from our radar stations and our sensors, or you’re going to tell us if there’s an attack coming in.” Even he says, Schmidt, but he’s not the only one; many of them are saying it, it’s going to reach a point where AI could very well decide, why do we need humans? Aren’t they expendable if we can figure out the power grid without them?

You know, they’ve been doing experiments recently. They gave five AI models— this is just a few months ago, a geopolitical scenario. There are tensions over Taiwan. The Chinese do this, the Americans do that. What’s the plan for the U.S.? I think if I’m remembering correctly, there’s been more than one of these, but the first one was four out of the five models recommended a nuclear strike. Only one, Anthropic, I think it was, said negotiate, use diplomacy. They’ve tried this more than once, and they keep coming— the majority of the AI models conclude: launch a nuclear weapon.

So 99% of the public never heard any of what I’m saying. So why aren’t we doing something about it? How come the media is not talking about it? Getting back to our media conversation. It’s the number one thing, or I should say two, that the media does that is a crime. They’ve given up on climate as a news story, which it was for a while, you know, for two or three years even.

I remember one of the— ABC or somebody had a week of climate science stories. It wasn’t bad. Over. They can even do stories now about floods that are killing children in camps and storms and fires and all the rest, and they don’t even mention climate change.

And then two, the biggest taboo, they never talk about nuclear weapons or nuclear weapons policy. Has there ever been a public discussion about nuclear winter? They don’t even have congressional hearings. The Sentinel missile, this whole new boondoggle of ICBMs, billions and billions of dollars of new silos and new infrastructure, on and on and on.

Well, there was an amendment, I forgot the name of it, but two senators had this amendment. They passed this legislation that if a program goes so much over budget, it must be reviewed by a congressional committee, and they must hold hearings, and then there must be a vote on whether to let this program continue because it’s so over budget. So the Sentinel was way over budget, and the hearing was gonna take place, and the guy, the senator, one of the congressmen that was going to be on the committee, got sick, and they had to postpone the hearing.

Austin— this happens under Biden, this isn’t all about Trump— Biden’s Secretary of Defense Austin signs the authorization for the program to go ahead without following the legislation. And so we’re now full bore into billions and billions of dollars on a new ICBM system, which is absolutely worthless, pointless, and dangerous. The only way you use it is as a first strike, or because you think something’s coming in. Just to repeat myself.

So, you have to demand that the Sentinel program be stopped and freeze testing. There are all kinds of talk to abrogate the Test Ban Treaty and start testing again. Freeze all modernization. Public discussion about nuclear winter and even hearings. Congress should be having real hearings about where we’re at with nuclear weapons.

There are some real things that people can demand. So, what we’re hoping with the film is to spark, like, wherever you are, you know, in your neighborhood, in your union, in your church, wherever you are, if you’re in a wine club, get people to watch the film, get people to watch it, and talk about it. And then don’t vote for anybody that doesn’t take the threat of nuclear war seriously and start raising these questions. Anyone who comes and says, “Vote for me.” You say, “Okay, but what are you going to do about nuclear war and nuclear weapons?”

Get your unions to pass resolutions, get your cities to pass resolutions, and get in the streets. And when people march, make it an issue, whether it’s no kings or whether it’s on climate or whether it’s on issues of civil rights. It doesn’t matter what people are marching for. Get out there and make this one of the issues. We need to merge all these disparate movements. And one of the key demands is that we have to have some kind of bloody rationality.

Even the business community, which is so in denial, doesn’t want to think about this. But there’s a wonderful line, and I’ll end on this unless you want to go further, but there’s a guy named Stanley Weiss, and this would’ve been in maybe the ’80s. He was a mining executive, a real guy. He knew mining. He got rich because he understood mining, and he really understood the threat of nuclear weapons.

He’d go around having meetings with business groups, and he had a great line, which I— to anyone listening to this who’s rich, who’s in the corporate world, that may even have some power, listen to Stanley, because here’s what Stanley said. “Being dead is bad for business.” So, anyone who’s in business, why don’t you think about that? So I don’t care if you have oil wealth or own Amazon or whatever, and you’re sitting on your yacht, being dead is bad for business, and we are looking that in the face.

Shalaj Lawania
Well, the movie Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb ends with— spoiler alert— a scene of a man straddling a nuclear bomb, waving a cowboy hat. I hope that does not happen. I’m going to end this on an optimistic note. Now that you brought it out, there’ll be more discussion, and when the movie comes out, hopefully, we’ll start having those types of discussions. Let’s start wrapping up. What would you like your legacy to be? How do you want to be remembered?

Paul Jay
You know, I don’t think about it much. I don’t think about it. I see myself as— we’re all little tiny specks of consciousness in a flow of history, and if I can move the football a few yards down the field, that’d be great. That’s what I’m trying to do. The field is the transition from animal to human, and we’re not even halfway there. I have teenage kids. I hope they think well of me. I’m an older dad. I hope they live a life with meaning. If my kids live a life of meaning and do some good things in the world, that would be good. Other than that, I don’t think about it. I’m not invested in that.

Shalaj Lawania
We started this conversation with you saying you’d be happy if you lived a meaningful life. Now you just mentioned you’d be happy if your kids lived a meaningful life. So that’s a perfect segue into the final question. It’s a very easy one. What is the meaning of life, Paul Jay?

Paul Jay
Well, this is obviously total speculation, but I’ll tell you what I feel or think it is. I think all life, from human to single cell, but of course humans are the highest form of living consciousness that we know of anyway, is still trying to figure out why it’s here. So our meaning of life as part of conscious life is to try to find out why we’re here. This is going to sound a little Muskian, but he doesn’t get it because it’s all about his ego. Right now, the meaning of life is to preserve and advance a civilization that becomes increasingly conscious, and maybe at some point, we’ll figure out, assuming there is a reason, we’ll figure out more about why we’re here.

But the defense of real human consciousness, not mystical, metaphysical, Muskian, “go to Mars and space,” and someday maybe there’ll be a statue of Elon somewhere. Now that’s people who do worry about their legacy. No, I think we just have to try to defend— and what’s the greatest obstacle to a more conscious humanity? Inequality, poverty. The vast majority of humans don’t get time to think. You have to work all day. Two jobs, three jobs. They can’t feed their kids. Their money is running out at the end of the month, or they’re worried about war.

The vast majority— so one of the beauties and possibilities of AI and robots is to free humanity from the drudgery of most labor and free people to do art, to write, to think, to become more conscious. So if we can create a society that liberates humans to be, so these millions and millions of people, of which there’s probably thousands of Einsteins, thousands of geniuses, thousands of artists, and thousands of incredible talent that’s wasting away because they can barely eat every day. Imagine liberating, unleashing that force. Then we start to get to a place where maybe we can really address more seriously the meaning of life, because we’ll have so much more consciousness to share, because individually humans are nothing. And I mean that literally.

There are stories of feral kids. They had this kid in Fiji who was put in a chicken coop by its parents for the first six or seven years, lived in a chicken coop because the parents were mentally handicapped, and they had to go work in the fields. And seven years after living in a chicken coop, the kid is pecking food, making sounds like a chicken, flapping its arms like a chicken. So detached from human culture, we can’t even walk. As an individual, we can’t talk. Put us with wolves or chickens, we act like animals.

Human culture is the powerhouse. So imagine if we liberate millions more people to contribute to that storehouse of culture and consciousness. Now we’re talking. Then we start moving to being humans more than animals. So for me, the meaning of life is, what can I do to help us get a little further in that direction?

Shalaj Lawania
Paul Jay, if people wish to connect with you, watch your movies, and watch theAnalysis.news, how can they find you? How can they connect with you?

Paul Jay
Well, the website’s theAnalysis.news, and we have a website for the film. It’s still very early because the film’s not coming out till September of ’27. But there’s a stop-nuclear-war.org, and that’s giving updates on the film as we make it and so on. If people want to actually volunteer to help when the film comes out, get on the email list, because we’re hoping there’s sort of like groups, chapters, whatever, all over the world, actually, where people can get, you know, start this kind of discussion.

Shalaj Lawania
That’s the way to find you and help out. Paul, thank you so much for your time. This was a real privilege. It was an honor for me. Thank you.

Paul Jay
Thanks, for me too.

Shalaj Lawania
This is Know Time. If you liked what you just watched or listened to, then please consider supporting this project. You can subscribe on YouTube, follow on Spotify, and rate five stars on Apple Podcasts.

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Shalaj Lawania
This is a conversation with Paul Jay. He’s a filmmaker popularly known for the documentaries Hitman Hart: Wrestling with Shadows and Return to Kandahar, and a journalist who was the former producer of the debate programs CounterSpin and Face Off on CBC. And the founder of independent media platforms like The Real News Network and theAnalysis.news.

It’s interesting, this journey that you’ve gone through from filmmaking to the news and now back to filmmaking. Filmmaking was your first love. When you were at the experimental school, Everdale—

Paul Jay
Can I interrupt?

Shalaj Lawania
Sure.

Paul Jay
It wasn’t my first love.

Shalaj Lawania
What was?

Paul Jay
My first love was a girl who lived on my street when I was eight.

Shalaj Lawania
Okay.

Paul Jay
And, no, I never— it was never about my first love, filmmaking. It was always a means to an end. The debate show— whatever I did in media wasn’t because I loved doing media. It’s because it was a means to an end. If tomorrow you could say, I don’t know, make me President of the United States tomorrow instead of making films, I’d rather do that.

Shalaj Lawania
Let’s explore that journey through films, because when someone donated a camera in Everdale, you started off by making a film about this rich kid who shed his clothing and fought monsters.

Paul Jay
Yeah.

Shalaj Lawania
But very quickly, like, you mentioned, it was a means to an end. You started exploring the world through the camera lens. You’ve made a documentary about Las Vegas after you heard a commercial in the dentist’s chair. You’ve done two about pro wrestling, Bret Hart, and Owen Hart. You’ve done about—

Paul Jay
You’ve done way too much research on me.

Shalaj Lawania
You underestimate the interns who do my research. I don’t have the time for it. You’ve done documentaries about cowboys in Alberta, about the Quebec referendum, about Koko the gorilla in The Birth of Language, and about Afghanistan with Nelofer Pazira.

You said in a previous interview, which is why I said this is interesting, you said that even though you enjoyed the process of filmmaking, you felt at that point it didn’t have the same reach or the impact or the influence as the daily news, which is why you want to start putting more effort into the daily news itself. Do you think that’s shifting now? And you’re clearly shifting your efforts as well, because at least with the newer generation, it feels like not many people watch the daily news, but they do consume documentaries and films on Netflix. So maybe that’s a better way now to persuade them and send a message?

Paul Jay
The daily news still has more impact, sure. But you need a platform that has impact. So you need both sides of it. It’s fine to be daily, but if not enough people are watching, it doesn’t make any difference. You know, if somebody handed me a show tomorrow on mainstream television, daily— I still want to finish this movie, but I think it might have more impact. Like, see, the debate show on a mainstream platform, or CBC News Channel, we had a tremendous impact, more than any film could have. We were shaping the public discourse day after day after day.

Shalaj Lawania
Would it still work today?

Paul Jay
If I could have the same model, which was an independent show. In the entire 10 years of doing that show, nobody from CBC even once told me, “You can’t do such and such,” because we were smart about it. We always treated the show, in the end, that it had to be the best show. We didn’t have a propaganda objective. Meaning we booked the best right-wing guests we could find. We didn’t beat— if you weren’t clever, if you couldn’t make the argument, if you didn’t know some history, we wouldn’t book you to be the fall guy for some smart left-winger. Quite the contrary, some of the lefty guests we would book often lost the debate because they were so used to talking to each other, they didn’t have to face up to some of the smarter right-wing arguments.

So in all that time we used to get, you know, we— the most controversial shows, of course, would be about Israel. So, I once did a show with the guy who wrote that great book on the Lebanese War, the very famous British journalist.

Shalaj Lawania
Robert Fisk.

Paul Jay
Robert Fisk. So I once did a debate with Robert Fisk, versus— I needed to get an Israeli representative. So I said, “Well, who’s the most authoritative person we can get?” And I’m not sure who suggested it, but the idea was, “Let’s get Uri Dan.” Now, Uri Dan was one of the most famous pundit journalists in Israel, and in many articles was referred to as— Ariel Sharon only trusted two people in Israel, Uri Dan and his son. So how do you get more authoritative than that?

It was an interesting conversation, too, because my staff was having trouble getting Uri Dan to say yes. And they asked, “You’re the exec producer, will you talk to him?” So I said, “Sure.” So I’m talking to Uri Dan, and he says, “Have you been to Israel?” I said, “Oh yeah, my sister lived on a kibbutz there for almost 10 years.” And he said, “What did you think?” I said, “Oh, it’s such a beautiful country, it’s so beautiful.” So he decides I’m on his side of the barricades, and he starts talking about greater Israel. He says, “If we have to lose one Jewish life or 1,000,” I know it was a crazy number, “1,000 Jewish lives every year for 100 years, someday, from the river to the sea—” that’s the first time I ever heard that phrase, it was out of Uri Dan’s mouth, “it will all be ours.”

Anyway, we have this debate. Fisk mops the floor with him. Well, my business manager, who did all my business stuff for the debate show and my films, he was an Orthodox Jew, and I made sure if we ever did a show that had anything to do with Israel, he’d sit in on our meetings, and make sure, you know, see if we were being fair about who we booked as guests, because we always were.

Anyway, after this debate between Fisk and Uri Dan, I got these complaints. I guess one of the big Jewish pro-Israel groups in Canada, I can’t remember which one— I think it may have been Bernie Farber’s. Anyway, they complain about the show to CBC. No, they complain to me first, and they say, “Oh, it wasn’t fair, it wasn’t fair, why’d you do this?” So I said, “Well, come and see me,” which is what I always used to do when they complained. “Come see me, and we’ll talk about it.”

So they came, and they went on about how it wasn’t fair, and I said, “Well, first of all, let me get my head of business affairs to sit down here with us.” So David would come in, he had his big black hat on, he had the curls. I mean, he wasn’t always, but he had become quite a serious Orthodox Jew. So he sat down, they looked a little bit shocked, and I asked him, I said, “Listen, you were in our story meetings. Do you think we were fair?” And he said, “Yeah, I mean, you booked Uri Dan. He’s like practically Ariel Sharon’s brother.”

Anyway, we kept doing that. So in all the years we did the show, there wasn’t one serious complaint. But I think it was a little weird moment in time that we got such a show. We were the only independent news show for CBC, and there’s never been one again. It was just this weird moment, because Ron Haggard had worked at CBC, that we got this show. It did very well, and the ratings were great for 10 years. But is such a show possible now? I don’t think so. But if it was, yeah, I’d be hard-pressed not to do a daily show. Now, I wouldn’t have any American impact, but if you offered me a show on MSNBC, or what do they call it, MS NOW, or anywhere, I’d do it on Fox, if you allow me to run the show the way I ran that show, I would do it, and it would have more impact.

Shalaj Lawania
Than—

Paul Jay
Maybe not this movie. This movie, I think, is going to change the way people look at the world in a profound way. If we can do it the way I’m hoping, this How to Stop a Nuclear War film is going to unpack the Cold War and militarization of economies in a way no one’s seen before. But other films, I would do the daily show if I had the right platform.

Shalaj Lawania
Let’s explore this even further because I’m very interested in the power and influence of documentaries, of movies, and the subtext that can be infused in them. Let’s take a very extreme example. You’ve created one of the best documentaries in pro wrestling.

Paul Jay
No, no, I created one of the best documentaries, period.

Shalaj Lawania
Period.

Paul Jay
Don’t say in pro wrestling, it just happens to be about pro wrestling. I got a quote from a reviewer that said, “As bizarre as Kafka and as dramatic as Shakespeare.” So that was from the Ottawa Citizen.

Shalaj Lawania
Well, you’ve created one of the great documentaries, period. Hitman Hart: Wrestling with Shadows about Bret Hart and the “Montreal Screwjob,” and this is exactly what I want to explore, which is, in a way, you’re part of the generation that’s witnessed the peak of pro wrestling. Many people dismiss pro wrestling as, oh, it’s just goofy and the caricatures of some form of entertainment. But how much of even pro wrestling— I’m not even going for any of the serious documentaries— how much of pro wrestling as well was a reflection of the zeitgeist of the time.

So was Hulk Hogan more than just a performer, but also a projection of what American values were? Then, Stone Cold Steve Austin, a decade later, and Bret Hart in Canada, did these wrestlers— did this form of entertainment also stand for something more? There was a lot more subtext, or am I giving too much importance to a goofy entertainment show?

Paul Jay
No, I mean, the writers of the scripts for pro wrestling are very clever. I mean, I have more or less stopped following it after I made the movie. I mean, I wasn’t like a wrestling fan, but the writers are smart. Vince McMahon and others are very politically tuned in. I mean, his wife is in Trump’s cabinet, and they’re very, very connected to the audience, because they do live shows. It’s not like a Netflix movie where you wait to see who watched and there are numbers, and you have to guess; are people going to like this or not like this?

In professional wrestling, night after night after night, practically maybe at least once a week, twice a week, you have a live audience of 15,000-18,000, and sometimes 40,000-50,000 in big stadiums. They fill the places up. You immediately find out if a certain storyline pops, if the audience gets off their feet, if they scream, if they clap, if they boo, and if they yell. If a storyline works and a particular wrestler works, they have immediate feedback. And it’s the same thing the other way, if a storyline’s a dud and such-and-such wrestler gets the mic and makes a speech, and everyone falls asleep.

So they’re very tuned to immediate feedback, and usually what’s working in the arenas, as far as I know, works on television. When I made the film, but it’s still pretty big, and now Netflix has adopted it. I mean, it’s on Netflix all over the place now. But at one point, it’s like half a billion people a week around the world were watching it. So it was quite a phenomenon.

The wrestling characters play emotions. There’s a great— Roland Barthes, who was this semiologist, he had a great essay about pro wrestling in Paris in the 1950s. But he made the point that a wrestler plays coward, another one plays hero, and another one plays villain. Like, they play very primal emotions. But as the storylines had to get more sophisticated, the old good guy, bad guy wrestler wasn’t nearly enough, and what Vince McMahon was brilliant at doing was getting the storylines rooted and responding to popular culture. I don’t think wrestling created the popular culture. That grows out of many, many factors and systems, and television and Hollywood, and it’s a whole complex media system. But they were very good, and they did play politics.

So, during the height of the Cold War, there was always a Russian villain in wrestling, and when it’s about terrorism, there’s some Islamist villain in wrestling. As the society became more and more open for better or worse, to overt sexuality— like in my film, that’s what’s beginning to play out in the World Wrestling Federation, is the— in fact, there’s a— Vince McMahon actually says somewhere, “The days of wrestlers telling you to drink your milk and take your vitamins are over.” They really start going down this road of hyper-sexualized characters, more female wrestlers that are also hyper-sexualized. So what pops for an audience is a reflection of where the culture is at. He’s not driving it, but he really knows how to take advantage of it.

But the more important thing about wrestling and culture is that American politics is like wrestling. There’s a thing called kayfabe in wrestling. So if two wrestlers are in a restaurant and they’re talking about the real— they’re out of character— and they’re talking about the real business, you know, “Vince, he didn’t— you know, he— I wanted to win such and such match, and I needed to climb the ladder, and I’ll get paid more,” and blah blah blah. I don’t know, anyway, they’re having a real conversation about the business, and someone sits down and can hear them in the next booth in the restaurant. Quickly, one of the wrestlers says, “Kayfabe,” and they go into character.

So, kayfabe is this whole culture that wrestling is real, and before my film, the majority of the wrestling audience knew— I should say, didn’t know. They thought it was real. Some knew. It is a real— I mean, Bret says in the film, making it look like you just got smacked in the face is an art, and the good wrestlers— I mean, I’ve been 10 feet from guys having a fight, quote unquote, and I actually thought they’d lost it and were actually fighting. I’m 10 feet away from Shawn Michaels and Bret Hart smashing each other on the cement outside the ring, and I turned to my camera person and I said, “I think they’re actually fighting.” They weren’t.

But in American politics, there’s this whole veneer, and it didn’t start in the Cold War. It’s been there from the beginning, and it predates America. I mean, you know, why did peasants volunteer to go fight in the Crusades? I mean, the lie is a fabric of lies that ruling classes have been telling people throughout class society to get ordinary people to go fight and die for feudal aristocracies, for slave systems, because you’re born into a society, it becomes part of your identity? You believe that the church says such and such, or your religious leaders say such and such, and the king is there because God made that person king? You believe this stuff. And you don’t have much choice but to believe it, because if you don’t go along with it, you’re going to starve or you’re going to get killed.

So American politics is like kayfabe politics. There’s a theater of politics, and the real business of billionaire interest, lobbying, bilking the public treasury through militarization, and other kinds of essentially corrupt practices. The parallel between the theater of wrestling and the theater of politics, that’s the thing I— effectively, I want to make another wrestling movie, a drama, which is really going to explore this.

It’s no accident that Trump learned how to make crowds pop in the wrestling ring. He was actually a WWF storyline. It was called the Battle of the Billionaires. Trump versus Vince McMahon, whoever’s wrestler— they each picked one, and the one that lost, the other billionaire got to shave the other guy’s head. So Trump eventually shaves Vince McMahon’s head. But it was a lot of— that was actually quite a premonition because that’s what we’re living in now, a society run by the battle of the billionaire. They run the society, and then between them they fight and vie for more position and more wealth and more power, but as a class, they rule. But there’s a fiction, which is that they have a political theater in Congress, in the White House, that plays itself out when everybody knows the real powers are with the billionaire.

Shalaj Lawania
I have the actual quote by Roland Barthes from the world of wrestling. He said, “Wrestling is like great spectacles, like Greek drama and bullfights. In both, a light without shadow generates an emotion without reserve. There are people who think that wrestling is an ignoble sport. Wrestling is not a sport; it is a spectacle.” And then he goes on to describe how wrestlers almost position themselves as modern-age gods, embodying moral traits. It’s good versus evil. Like you’ve said, a clear analogy between pro wrestlers and politicians, like candidates in an election.

John Ralston Saul, in fact, says politicians are— they have to be actors. They have to have catchphrases in order to win an election because you cannot commit the cardinal sin of actually talking something sensible, or the public is going to get terrified if someone actually questions themselves in public or thinks critically. So I completely agree with you. You brought up the rule by the billionaires and the elite class, so let’s walk into that.

In 2008, on the George Stephanopoulos show, there was a debate between Donna Brazile and George Will. Donna Brazile was going on and on about, “How could John McCain ever understand what the American people want. He’s got seven houses. How’s he ever gonna know?” And George Will is getting red in the face, and he finally blurts out saying, “Even FDR was American aristocracy, so it’s time to quit being sentimental in a democracy, because the real question that we have to settle in an election is not whether the elite shall rule, but which elite shall rule?”

Paul Jay
Yeah, which section, yeah.

Shalaj Lawania
You have studied politics for over three decades now. So this doesn’t just relate to America. It could go across America, across time. Has it always been this way? Has it always been the elite in power, or has it been different at any point?

Paul Jay
First of all, that is one of my favorite quotes of all time. That George Will quote, I must have referred to it about 100 times. I think he did it— he said something that they don’t say in public. You only get to choose which section of the elites. He says, “Let’s not be naive.” I don’t think he would have said it if Brazile hadn’t so pissed him off about all the stuff about— who was it— McCain’s houses?

Shalaj Lawania
Yeah, McCain.

Paul Jay
Yeah. Has it always been this way? Well, from— I think the way I understand the history of humans, and, you know, I did a film called The Birth of Language. I got to talk to a lot of anthropologists and such. I think the evidence shows, and nobody was there because it’s thousands of years ago, but the evidence seems to show that the early humans, what made us human, why we don’t have big teeth, why we’re not the size of gorillas, is that we started to evolve in a way that collective action was more effective than individual power.

So the key thing is the development of toolmaking, because if you can evolve— if the brain and bipedalism and the opposable thumb, all these random things that adapt and make us more successful as a species started, culminated with, and you can see some of the primitive use of tools in chimpanzees, where they take a stick and they shove it in a thing and get an ant out of a log or something. But it wasn’t the primary way they existed. It wasn’t their economy. It was a little subset, and once in a while, you get an ant out; otherwise, you’re out picking fruit off trees.

Humans— this branch of primates that became humans, the key thing that evolved for us was that we became more and more cooperative. If we hunted cooperatively, we could do way better than any, even one or two individuals of the species, and over time, the random events that then create these adaptations, we became more and more tribal. And then with toolmaking, we start to develop the key thing that differentiates us from animals, which is that we start to think with language. We start to talk to ourselves. We go beyond primitive animal communication. Because if you can look at a rock and you can imagine a spear point in that rock, and then you can start chipping away at that rock and end up with something sharp, that’s the beginning of a kind of consciousness, an abstraction where you can think and think to yourself.

One of the most important things in that language film, I think I learned, is that it wasn’t just about— and maybe not even mostly about communication with others. A lot of it was about communication with yourself. You actually can say to yourself, “Oh, I could make a spear out of that rock.” Now, that obviously isn’t gonna be English, but in some kind of language.

But the critical thing, the demarcation that comes with that, is collective action. It’s pretty clear in early tribal societies, and I mean even up until the 1800s, anthropologists named Morgan, and there were others who contacted and explored indigenous societies that had not yet had any contact with Europeans— the evidence is that there was no private property. The property was tribal, and they were still hunters and gatherers, and they picked berries, and they hunted wild game, buffalo, but no agriculture, no animal husbandry. And in those societies, there’s no evidence of private property, or absolutely minimal, which also means no evidence of classes. Most of those societies, not all, but most, seem to be matriarchies. There’s no property to hand down, so the issue of inheritance wasn’t really an issue.

What the best theory thinking so far that I’m aware of, and, you know, all these things are at best more than speculation because it is based on observation of these tribes, but we weren’t there, so you can’t say definitively, but it seems when agriculture creates a surplus, instead of chasing animals all over the place, you put them in pens and you now have a reliable supply of meat, milk, and hides, you start developing a surplus and society starts to divide who’s going to control the surplus. Because up until then, there was no reason to want to because everybody depended on the tribe for survival. Now, you’ve got a surplus, and somebody who’s stronger starts to think, “Well, you know what, I’m stronger, I’m hunting more than they are, maybe I should own this.”

The objectivity of the development of the economic foundation, the transition to agriculture and animal husbandry, starts giving rise to ideas and consciousness, which is, “Oh, you know, we have more than we need. Maybe I should control that, or maybe I’m the better hunter, maybe I should get a bigger share.”

So society starts to divide who’s going to control the surplus, but the big next beat, the big beat, is when people who are in the stronger category start to see something else they want to own: weaker people. The beginning of slave society is the real transition to the world we’re living in today. Because the original private property that really mattered, that really shaped our civilization, was slaves, and it takes place in, as far as I know, almost, if not all, but there’s always some exceptions, practically all human development went through a slave society.

Western civilization is based on a culture that originated and grew out of a slave society. Whether it’s Greek, Roman, or even the Vikings. The Norse go down into France, and they capture slaves. Like, the economy of that age was all based on slavery. And Western, this thing they want to keep defending, these Steve Bannon’s of the world, you know, “We’re going to defend Judeo-Christian civilization.” What is that civilization? It’s a civilization that was based on slavery.

Of course, right up into modern times, relatively modern times, which is the origin of America, is a slave society. Not just, of course, indentured labor, but then Black slaves. So we are living in a culture today which are just variations on a slave society. We mostly, not completely, but mostly transitioned from outright chattel slavery, and to what others, you know, Marx, but other people, have called wage slavery.

But what ordinary people don’t understand is that the elites who were the slave owners are where the culture originates, it grows, you know, “Where is our culture?” There are some good things to slavery. It gave the elites time to think. They didn’t have to go to work all day long. They didn’t have to be in the tribe every day, out hunting and doing this and doing that. It gave rise to a class of intellectuals. Our ability to understand nature and the origins of science also comes out of the slave system. If you get rid of moral judgments, it is a necessary stage in human development, and, you know, gave us a lot of why we’re thinking, conscious people today, at least some of us are.

But that culture of ruling elites that originated in a slave society looks at the slaves, or the wage slaves, as less than human. How do you justify slavery? How do you justify killing people because they don’t obey your orders? And then extend that to wars. How do you send people off to war to get slaughtered? For what? It’s because you see people as less than human. And we’re living in a world today where the culture of the ruling elites virtually everywhere, with some minor exceptions, were workers, peasants, poor people, they’re expendable. They’re there to be used, abused, or killed. And you can send your own people off to war. I mean, how does the United States live with having killed millions and millions and millions of people since World War II, never mind the genocide of indigenous people and all the killing that took place before World War II?

And the war that started it all, the template for the whole military-industrial complex, the template for being able to justify the slaughter of millions, is a war nobody wants to talk about, and it’s the Korean War. They call it the ‘Forgotten War.’ Well, they want people to forget about it because it’s the beginning of the most aggressive era. The Korean War, in many ways, picks up where the Nazis left off.

Now, I’m not saying the crimes committed by the Nazis were— you know, people don’t like doing comparisons, but the fact is, the only force that has killed more people than the Americans have killed since World War II was the British before World War II, because some people estimate the British Empire, over 300 to 400 years, might have killed as many as a billion people directly and indirectly. Indirectly meaning deliberately caused famines. But the Korean War killed around 3 million. The Vietnam War, I think, in the same 3 to 5 million. The Americans only talk about how many American soldiers were killed, but that isn’t really the issue, is it? Then you go to the Iraq War, and then you go to all the— in Indonesia, an American-backed dictator kills a million people in something under three weeks. Leftist, socialist, communist, like the millions and millions killed in the name of defending democracy, defending freedom, and fighting communism.

That’s part of— I’ll go back to the very beginning of the interview— American identity puts all of that in this compartment, and here’s the name of the compartment: America does bad things, but for good reasons. Everyone else does bad things for bad reasons. We do bad things only for freedom and democracy. We’re here to save civilization, and yeah, you’ve got to break some eggs to do it.

So they have all these justifications where you can mentally put all the horrors that actually are in the news for a while, like during the Iraq War and what’s happened in Gaza. People saw it with their own eyes, it starts to fade away because nobody talks about it, and then there are no conclusions drawn about it. I mean, everybody now knows, I mean, most people know that the Iraq War was based on absolute out-and-out lies. There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Everybody knew it. The inspectors were telling them. They went into Iraq because there were no weapons of mass destruction.

If they really believed it, do we really think they would have invaded? It’s like saying they would invade Korea. Well, we know they won’t invade Korea because everyone knows they have weapons of mass destruction. Colin Powell goes to the UN, and he says, “Baghdad is surrounded by missiles with biological weapons aimed at Tel Aviv.” Well, if you think that’s true, you actually invade, and when your guys are going in on these tanks and Jeeps, half of them aren’t even wearing gas masks.

The Korean War, the mother of all this lying and BS. Total lies. North Korea invaded South Korea. There was no North Korea. There was just Korea. The only thing that started this South and North Korea is that the Americans created this fabrication that there’s a South Korea and got the completely compliant UN to buy in. So we’ve had massive killing based on lie after lie after lie, and I forget specifically what your question was.

Shalaj Lawania
I can bring us back. Initially, when you spoke about the transition from apes to humans.

Paul Jay
Oh yeah, you asked, was there ever a society? The answer is yes, but because of an objective process— oh, this is very important actually. The economic objectivity happens almost spontaneously. It’s not like somebody sat down and let’s say said, “Let’s have animal husbandry.” Over a long, long time, through experimentation, slowly humans learned that you don’t have to chase animals all over the damn place, you can put them in a pen. And then slowly that gets to scale, and it starts changing the economic foundation.

See, there’s a thing I like, this way to look at it. There’s this great phrase from Shakespeare: “All the world’s a stage and all the men and women merely players on it.” Well, all of our— the vast majority of our news, of our academics, of people that study history and stuff, all they focus on is the players. They don’t want to ask who owns the stage, who built the stage, or who commissioned the play. They focus on the players, who are these political figures that are more than half theater. But you cannot understand the play, you can’t understand society if you don’t understand the economic foundations of that society, which is two main issues. How do we produce? Are we picking berries, or do we have industrial production? We have AI. I mean, how do we produce? And then number two, who owns it? Is it a small segment of society that privately owns it, or do we own it publicly?

Now, most modern economies are actually a mix. There’s hardly a modern capitalist country that doesn’t have public ownership. Some even more, like China is, I think, a modern capitalist country in the main, although it’s a complicated hybrid, but with very significant state ownership. Russia’s a capitalist country, an oligarchy, with significant state ownership. Even in the U.S., lots of the hospitals are state-owned, most of the schools are still publicly owned, and the highways are publicly owned. One of the biggest things there is, is publicly owned. It’s called the Pentagon.

So the American economy is a hybrid of publicly owned socialistic elements, but because of private ownership, the state, the government mostly governs on behalf of the ownership class, the slave owners. Not entirely. A certain amount, depending on the country you’re in. This is what the forces around Trump want now. They want a much more unmitigated capitalism. They want to get rid of regulation. They call it the administrative state. They’re fed up with any restrictions on billionaire power.

But why were those restrictions there in the first place? They were there because capitalism worked better with those regulations. Why do they have antitrust regulations? Because the elites know— I mean, when I say elites, their thinkers know— that the natural gravitation of capitalism is towards monopoly. Big fish want to eat little fish. If Coke had its way, there’d be no Pepsi. So they have laws to make sure there’s at least some competition, but they’re very weak. We are very monopolized. By the way, more so in Canada, even. Our telecoms in Canada are more monopolized than in the U.S., but they had to have antitrust, or they would’ve ended up with five or four big banks that owned everything, and they would’ve controlled the government.

In 1938, FDR sent a letter to Congress. Nobody talks about it. A fascinating letter, and essentially, in overt words, says, “If one section of capital gets control of the state, that will be the very definition of American fascism.” That’s Roosevelt in 1938 in a letter to Congress. And that’s where we are. For decades and decades since the end of World War II, there’s a section of capital that’s been trying to get hold of the state and have an unmitigated pre-New Deal America where billionaires— well, he said—

It’s interesting. I did this piece people should watch, it’s called Trump’s Unholy Alliance, and Mark Cuban, who is an American billionaire who’s a little more honest about stuff, he says, “What the American— what these guys want—” by these guys, he’s talking about the billionaires around Trump, “they want the billionaires to be the board of directors, the president to be their CEO, and to get rid of elections. As long as the CEO performs, he’s the president, and if they don’t like him, they can fire him. That’s the society they want to live in.” And Peter Thiel, who’s a billionaire, one of the founders of PayPal, and this militarized AI company—

Shalaj Lawania
Palantir.

Paul Jay
Palantir. He’s one of the great ideologues of this, and he says in no uncertain terms that democracy and modern capitalism are no longer compatible. So a big section of the American elites, that’s where they want to go. And they’re saying— some of them are saying, and this was clear to me years ago— we cannot compete with China if we remain an electoral democracy. If you want to compete, you’ve got to be as arbitrary and have the power that the Chinese Communist Party has. They’ll rail against it, but they want it, because then you can have a command economy that the Silicon Valley billionaires who think they know better than anyone about everything, they’ll create an economy, they’ll create a country with a plan that they will just dictate.

They love the Chinese model; they just want it for themselves. And, of course, they won’t call it communist, they will call it Christian, and they’ll do it in the name of Jesus. If there was anything opposite of what Jesus actually stood for, it’s that. I mean, you know, Jesus says the rich have as much chance of getting into heaven as a camel walking through the eye of a needle. I mean, Jesus was a radical communist, literally. If you put Jesus quotes there, and you don’t tell somebody who it is, they’re going to say, “Oh my God, that’s a raving socialist.” But Trump will say, “That’s a lunatic left.” I mean, in their definition, Jesus Christ is the lunatic left, which is why even Pope Leo and Francis were attacking the Trumpians.

We’re at an existential point in human civilization. We’re culminating. We’re getting to the point now, whether it’s climate crisis or more immediately nuclear war, a new pandemic, and AI on its own as an existential threat, but even more militarized AI, especially militarized within the nuclear weapons framework. We are, in historical terms, moments away from saying humans are done, but all the potential for a new society already exists.

In fact, this is what Marx— most people don’t understand what Marx actually said. Partly because of all the anti-communist stuff and partly because of the mutation that socialism became in the Soviet Union and Stalinism, which was a complete mutation of what Marx and Engels talked about. People should read Lenin’s The State and Revolution, which was an analysis of the Paris Commune when the workers took over Paris in 1871, the most democratic model of government you could imagine. It never happened in the Soviet Union, and Lenin was extremely disappointed, even though he was part of what happened.

But the gist of it was, of Marx and Engels, was capitalism will reach a point where big monopolies will be so internally well organized that if you socialize them, like, imagine a publicly owned Amazon, a publicly owned FedEx, or a publicly owned Walmart, if you take these beautifully internally engineered enterprises that now exist in an overall economy that’s anarchy, chaos, crashes, and then you have a— I mean, unless since last week, as we talk, oil’s up, oil’s down, markets are up, markets are down. It’s chaos. And if you know how to play it, you’re making money when it goes up, and you’re making money when it’s down. Because if you’re inside this capitalist circle, there’s nothing more profitable than volatility, as long as you can predict the volatility. And AI has made predicting the volatility even easier. I mean, they always did it, but boy, can they predict it now. And you have high-speed trading and all the rest of the stuff.

But the plus side of it is, if you have publicly owned AI, you could actually have a democratic, decentralized, planned economy. You could have a myriad of forms of ownership, city ownership, state ownership, provincial or state. It doesn’t all have to be concentrated in the federal government. It doesn’t have to be, certainly not concentrated in one party. It doesn’t matter whether a party starts off with the best intentions or not. Single-party rule has clearly proven to be undemocratic in the end.

But AI changes the scenario. It opens up all kinds of possibilities, only if it’s in the public interest, which is what’s so fascinating about the court case that, I don’t know, by the time this airs, maybe it’ll be over, but it’s such a joke to see Elon Musk fighting with Sam Altman over whether OpenAI was supposed to be publicly owned or not. Of course, it should have been publicly owned. Of course, it’s dangerous to be privately owned. And even Altman and Musk knew it when they created OpenAI. They knew this had better be public, but the pressures of capitalist accumulation, meaning Microsoft, which started funding that little private venture that eventually ate the nonprofit, so it became really, a totally for-profit company.

As I say, it’s a joke that Musk of all people is the one making the case, but on this particular point, he’s right. But if we had publicly owned AI with real regulation on how far we allow AI to go in terms of how autonomous it gets, how powerful it gets, and dealing with issues of the environment, too, these are massive data centers and so on. But it can open up a real possibility for a modern form of socialism that’s actually democratic, and we haven’t really seen that before.

I’ll just add one more point, and I’ll give you a chance to say something. People say, how come we’ve never seen a democracy, a socialist democracy? All we saw was Russia and China. I think Cuba’s a more complex question, but still, it was single-party rule. How come we never found it? The answer’s simple. Excuse me for swearing. Because you fucks killed anyone who tried it. Allende was going to do that in Chile. A democratically elected leader was going to develop a democratic form of socialism, and you organized— you being the CIA— you guys killed the guy. Every time there’s been any attempt to do it electorally, democratically, right back to 1948.

The Italian Communist Party was poised to win the elections in 1948. The Americans poured millions of dollars to sway it to the Christian Democrats, so the communists— and they were not Soviet communists. They wanted to do it democratically. They were going to reform the economy slowly. It wasn’t meant to just expropriate everything. But they didn’t want anything that smelled of socialism.

They created in Italy a secret organization all through Europe, and it was called the Gladio, I think. This crazy thing. The Americans, together with MI6, working with local elites in all the European countries, created a secret organization in almost every country. And the supposed reason to have these things was that if the Soviets ever invaded, these armed groups would have weapons stored all over the place, and they could start organizing guerrilla resistance to the Soviet invasion.

Now, they knew there were no plans for a Soviet invasion. The CIA was telling the Truman administration over and over again that the Soviet Union was in a defensive posture. The whole Cold War was a whole fabric of lies. Anyway, they created this thing, and what was it really? To stop the communists and socialists from winning elections.

So, Gladio helps create an organization in Italy called P2. Berlusconi comes out of P2. P2 was working with the mafia, and they started staging— and not only in Italy, but they did this in other countries— terrorist attacks that were blamed on the left. It was like the Reichstag fire, and it’s well documented. The reason it’s well documented is because one of the Italian prime ministers— I guess it’s in the ’70s, I have to get the exact date— a left-of-center, any guy, finally gets elected, and he actually conducts an investigation into P2. It comes out quite publicly through a parliamentary investigation.

So the role of P2, Berlusconi, and all of this, it all came out. I mean, this isn’t just some internet conspiracy stuff. And the Church Committee that investigated the CIA, I guess that’s also in the mid-late ’70s. Tons of this kind of stuff came out of the Church Committee and the role of the CIA in Europe, and so on. So why haven’t we seen democratic forms of socialism? Because the Americans, the British, the Germans, and then with the help of the Israelis and various other intelligence agencies, either directly militarily intervene— Korea to begin with, then the next big one obviously is Vietnam— and then covertly, the role of the CIA all throughout Asia, in the Philippines, and Indonesia, and it goes on and on.

There was this wonderful thing, we’re going to use it in the film, it was called the— people should look it up— it’s the Friendly Dictator playing cards. And this brilliant artist worked with someone, and it’s 52 playing cards, and on the side of each card is a beautiful artistic rendition of a dictator, an American-friendly dictator. On the back is a little history of that person. There are 52 cards in this deck, but in truth, if you investigate how many dictators who were brutal, vicious, undemocratic dictators have been put in power from World War II to say 1990, for the sake of argument, it keeps going, it’s at least around 200. You know, it goes back, and in Africa, it starts with the assassination of Lumumba in the Congo. I mean, it goes on and on and on.

So every attempt to build a more democratic form of socialism was crushed. So if people want to know why we haven’t seen it, that’s why we haven’t seen it. It doesn’t mean it can’t be done.

Shalaj Lawania
A few comments to add to the stuff you just mentioned. So there’s an article by Friedrich Engels about the transition of man— transition from ape to man, and the role of labor in the dialectic relationship. So that’s one. Two, about the existence of a class society, even for the ones who refuse to believe it. Even someone like Barack Obama had said that he’s fighting for the middle class. Those terms, middle-class economics, Joe Biden was appointed for it, but— we don’t have to talk about whether he was successful or not, but just the admission that there’s a middle class clearly alludes to the presence of an upper and a lower class because you have to be in the middle of everything.

And then the final comment, I guess, if people want to read more, because this is— and if you want to think about it a bit more, the Communist Manifesto starts with the— the opening line of it is, “The history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggle.” So clearly in this historical context that you provided, class conflict is at the root of it.

This is Know Time. If you liked what you just watched or listened to, then please consider supporting this project. You can subscribe on YouTube, follow on Spotify, and rate five stars on Apple Podcasts.

He traces his “red diaper” upbringing, the Cold War myths he didn’t internalize, and the way mainstream and algorithmic media turn politics into a billionaire-run wrestling show while keeping us on the brink of nuclear war. Any honest account of personal identity, Jay says, has to start with knowing the society we live in, how we got here, and the brutal history that continues today.

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Paul Jay
But at the core of Canadian and American identity is a very big lie, and we learn how to adapt to this lie. Most people, understanding of where they are and understanding of history, it’s like they went to a play, but in the third act, and they leave before the final curtain.

Shalaj Lawania
You’ve created one of the best documentaries in pro-wrestling.

Paul Jay
No, no, I created one of the best documentaries. Period.

Shalaj Lawania
Period.

Paul Jay
Don’t say in pro-wrestling. That’s what we’re living in now. A society run by the battle of the billionaires. They run the society, and then between them they fight. But there’s a fiction, which is that they have a political theater.

There’s this great phrase from Shakespeare, “All the world’s a stage and all the men and women merely players on it.” The vast majority of our news, of our academics, of people who study history and stuff, all they focus on is the players. They don’t want to ask who owns the stage.

People say, how come we’ve never seen a democracy, a socialist democracy? The answer is simple. Excuse me for swearing. Because you fucks killed anyone who tried it.

People like Schmidt, who used to run Google, he goes on and on warning of the existential threat of AI, and he’s one of the biggest investors in militarized AI.

It’s very clear what’s happening. Elon Musk said it really well about Twitter. Somebody asked him in one of these sessions he does, “Do you censor people?” He says, “Oh, we don’t have to do that. We just limit reach.”

Shalaj Lawania
This is a conversation with Paul Jay. He’s a filmmaker popularly known for the documentaries Hitman Hart: Wrestling with Shadows and Return to Kandahar, and a journalist who was the former producer of the debate programs CounterSpin and Face Off on CBC. And the founder of independent media platforms like The Real News Network and theAnalysis.news.

In this conversation, we talk about his journey, his childhood, and his motivations. We talk about the problems in mainstream media, why he left it, and started independent media platforms. We talk about the power of films and documentaries and how much impact they have in comparison to the daily news. We also explore the history of the Cold War, the current state of geopolitics, and how we can prevent a nuclear war. So all the light stuff.

These are the type of conversations that I want to have. One, two-hour discussions about the laws of nature, quantum computing, cognitive science, Jungian psychology, geopolitics, journalism, and rationality. This is my idea of a raging Friday night, but this is not what the algorithm thinks is exciting. If I really want to just create a channel that gets a lot of views, I should be making meme videos or compilations of— making dance videos, but I do think these conversations are of value.

But this model is not sustainable. The algorithm will never push it. So if you really want this project to continue, you can either consider making a donation by Super Thanks, become a Patreon donor, or you can just share these episodes because these external links and clicks and shares, they really help videos push past those barriers that are set by the algorithm that looks at a two-hour discussion about Jungian psychology and doesn’t consider it exciting enough for the layman. So if you like this episode, only if you like it by the end of this episode, please consider sharing it around, and now, it’s Know-Time.

Beastie Boys
Check the mic and make sure it sounds right, boys.

Shalaj Lawania
In the About Us section on theAnalysis.news website, there’s a small paragraph that talks about your mission, which says, “We take on important news stories as a way into a deeper examination of the economic, social, and political forces that drive important events. Our aim is to reveal the economic relationships that are the foundation of political and social struggle. We know the world can only be understood in the process of changing it.”

You’ve lived a colorful life, and that’s understating it. You’ve created two independent news networks, you’ve hosted debate programs on CBC, you’ve worked as a truck driver, you fixed railroad cars, you’ve created award-winning documentaries, and I want to cover all of that, but before we do that, I just have to know why. Why do you do this, Paul Jay? What’s the motivation? Why this hunger to both understand and change the world? Where does this drive come from?

Paul Jay
It’s a good question because it’s not an answer I really fully understand. I grew up in a left-wing household.

Shalaj Lawania
You were a red diaper baby, as you said.

Paul Jay
Yeah, I was. My father, well, during the war, he deliberately joined the Canadian Air Force in 1939, explicitly to fight fascism. He knew that’s why he was joining. He joined before there was any draft. He was quite political, left-wing, grew up in Montreal, and was in this crazy, dangerous section of Canadian Bomber Command attached to the Royal Air Force out of the UK. They used to pick the left-wing flyers to do the most dangerous missions because they actually would do the mission.

Most of the ordinary flyers wanted to get the hell out alive, but the left-wingers had an anti-fascist consciousness. My father’s section used to drop supplies and people to the partisans in France, and they, in a big bomber, would go off with a bombing mission headed to Germany, and then his plane would leave and go down into France, drop a person or supplies, and then get the hell out without getting shot down. So I grew up with that and knowing that about him, even though he didn’t talk a lot about it, which I regret because I would have gotten more out of him, because he died when I was 14, so I never got a chance to really get to know him as an adult.

My mother was also a lefty. She’d gone to Hollywood and got involved with the Hollywood Ten, and they left the U.S. because of McCarthyism, and so they left around 1950 or so. On the other hand, it’s not like they ever propagandized me. Quite the contrary, you know, little hints, but I didn’t grow up with an internalized Cold War mentality, which most people I knew did, and certainly most people today still do. We can talk about that more later, but the very deliberate creation of a very false narrative of history has created this same thing we see today, which is a complete exaggeration of the threat to justify the militarization of the economy. But I didn’t grow up in that kind of household.

There was a very famous journalist who was working in the ’50s into the ’60s called I.F. Stone. Left-wing, muckraking kind of guy. I’d come home from lunch, and my mother would read me the I.F. Stone newsletter. Again, it wasn’t a lot, but when we talk about why we do things, you’re really talking about a person’s identity. And usually when people answer that question, it starts with the word “I” or “my.” My father, I did this, this happened to me, I grew up, but very little about the society we grew up in. And at the core, certainly of an American and a Canadian identity, and I grew up in Canada, but I’m a dual citizen, and I’ve lived in the U.S. quite a bit, but mostly I grew up in Canada. But at the core of Canadian and American identity is a very big lie, and we learn how to adapt to this lie.

And the lie is, in 1867, Canada was formed— this is the Canadian lie. I can give you the American version— and they built railroads, and la-di-da, we have this democracy and so on. We know this land was stolen. We know this land was conquered and that Canada came about as a result of a genocide. Now, it was worse in the U.S., and for economic reasons, not because Canadians have better, more moral DNA. Not at all. There’s no such thing anyway. But the economy of the colonization of Canada for many centuries was primarily based on the fur trade, and Hudson’s Bay Company was— Canada and the United States were settled by corporations. This corporate rule of North America begins on day one of European civilization. The Hudson’s Bay Company, like in India, the—

Shalaj Lawania
East India Company.

Paul Jay
The East India Company. Well, the same thing here. Hudson’s Bay got the franchise for settling the western part of Canada. I’m sorry, I can’t remember who got more of the eastern, but Quebec was already here. Quebec existed for almost 400 or 500 years before the British settled. But here, fur trade, and fur trade, because it was the main economy for a long time, required trade with the indigenous people. So there wasn’t the same slaughter for a long time, whereas in the U.S., it was almost from day one about land. To get land for agriculture, settlements, creating towns, and so on, you have to get the indigenous people the hell out. So in the U.S., driving indigenous people further and further west, and then eventually killing and slaughtering in the millions deliberately, and they did some of this in Canada too, deliberately infecting blankets with smallpox and things like this.

But we learn, in Canada and the U.S., we learn to know this history and then forget about it. Even now in Canada, there’s every public event, now practically— I have kids at school, and every day begins with something they call the Land Acknowledgment. It goes like, “We acknowledge we are on the land,” and then they name the list of tribes depending on where you are, then it ends, and then you get on with life. Well, if you acknowledge this is Indigenous land, then how about doing something about it? Because the Indigenous people of Canada and the U.S. are still suffering the consequences of that genocide.

In this lovely supposed liberal democracy of Canada, the majority of Native people live in utter poverty. Reservations where the kids have nothing to do but smell glue. If not the highest suicide rate in the world, one of the highest suicide rates. But we learned from early childhood how to compartmentalize that we are living on stolen land, and that’s the beginning of a kind of very false consciousness.

So when someone talks about who they are, what their identity is, what motivates them, the narrative of the society, the official narrative, is very rarely looked at objectively, critically, because most people, their consciousness and identity is just what they grew up in and what they made of it.

There’s a great quote from Walter Lippmann, who was a famous American journalist; he even advised the Americans on the Versailles Treaty. But he had a great quote. He said, “Most people, understanding of where they are and understanding of history, it’s like they went to a play, but in the third act, and they leave before the final curtain.”

Shalaj Lawania
Right.

Paul Jay
They don’t know how they got there. So how do you answer the question, what motivates you, and who you are, if you don’t know how you got here? And you can’t talk about how did I get here without knowing how your society got here. That’s not just a question in Canada of what happened to Indigenous people.

In the United States, there’s another very, very important denial. Society, first of all, was based on indentured labor. Before there was Black slavery, the majority of settlers in the United States that came from England or came from Holland— New York was more Dutch— they were indentured. They were essentially contracted slaves, sometimes for up to 13 to 14 years, before they could get released from their contracts. And while they were in the indentured contract, they had no rights. They were essentially slaves, and if they tried to escape, they used other, sort of people that had served out their contract and were now “free.” They would create militias to go capture these white European indentured people and make them go back to their contracted places of work.

But the white indentured labor was rebellious. They didn’t want to be in these contracts. Eventually, after some time, they started to realize it’d be a hell of a lot better to have outright Black slaves and use the white workers and split them, because there was a rebellion. And God, I’m terrible on the dates, but probably in the late 1700s, there’s an actual rebellion of Black slaves with white indentured workers who together rise up against slavery and against indenturedness.

That scared the hell out of the American elites. So they started really pushing Black slave labor. Also, this is the development of the cotton plantations. People don’t get how significant the cotton plantations were. By the 1840s, 1850s, prior to the Civil War, the cotton economy, slave economy, was bigger than all the rest of the economy. Banks, railroads—

Shalaj Lawania
Combined.

Paul Jay
Combined. And it was the cotton that fueled the textile trade of England and the northern United States. Anyway, what I’m getting at is personal identity. You grew up in a society that’s in denial about all of this, that never wants to talk about it. Yeah, sure, you learned there was slavery in the United States, but that was then, this is now. Well, no, the consequences of slavery exist today.

I mean, I lived in Baltimore for eight, nine years. You want to see the consequences of slavery, you go to inner cities like Baltimore, where unemployment amongst youth is at 50 and 60%. There are sections of the city where practically every single male has been in and out of prison. Thousands of kids are born already drug addicted in extreme poverty. Why? Because all the institutions. The majority of the Black working class is desperate for work, and so they work for the lowest wages.

Anyway, all these issues you can explore more in detail, but my point is, if someone wants to talk about motivation, you have to understand the society you were born in. So I was kind of lucky. I didn’t grow up in a Cold War household. Not uber political, not super political, but not Cold War. But when I was about eight or nine, and I don’t know— some of this is DNA even, I think. I can’t quite explain it, but I read an article when I was eight or nine years old. There was a famine in northern Canada, and literally— in those days, they would call the people Eskimos, but now Inuit— and there was a famine, and hundreds and even thousands of people were dying in northern Canada of lack of food. It was a shock to me when I read it in the newspaper. I grew up reading newspapers. From the time I could read, I read newspapers.

So I wrote Prime Minister Diefenbaker a letter, and it really was, I think, my own initiative. I said, “Why aren’t you doing anything about the famine in the north?” And I get this bullshit letter back from some aide of Diefenbaker who says, “We’re so pleased that you’re concerned about these issues. You should go to your local church and volunteer to help.” I mean, that was part of the real beginning of my political consciousness, because I knew what bullshit that answer was.

What motivates me? What motivates me is that I understand that what’s in my personal interest is a better world. I don’t want to live in a world that’s about where human civilization is about to end because of the climate crisis. I don’t want to live in a world that’s on the brink of nuclear war. I don’t want to live in a world where probably the majority of people live in poverty and starvation. And I see my interest in that. It’s not— I don’t consider it altruistic. I don’t see it as, I do it for others. I see it in my own interest, and I guess in a word, I learned fairly early on, what makes me happy is to live a meaningful life. I’m always searching for what’s the most meaningful thing I can do.

Whenever I have veered off that path, you know, to make a film just to make some money, or— there’s a great line from Marx. He says, “I don’t live for money, but I need money to live.” Well, for me, you need money to do the kind of work I want to do. So I’m not naive about it. But I never made the pursuit of money or career my objective because anytime I tried it, it didn’t actually make me very happy. What made me happy was trying to change the world for the better. So I do it. I mean, I do my best to do it.

Shalaj Lawania
I love the answer because, in a way, it’s this historical materialist view of your motivations, how the social and political forces end up shaping who you are and what drives you. As you mentioned, you were a red diaper baby, grew up under the wave of McCarthyism in the United States, and your parents decided to move from America to Canada when America started using the excuse of the Cold War to go after the unions; there was the House of Un-American Activities. The slogan back then was “Better dead than red.” You’ve seen all of this, you’ve seen this, and all of that seeps into your motivations.

Interestingly, when I think you were 11 or 13, at that point, you witnessed how close we came to nuclear war, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and possibly the closest we’ve ever come, and you decided to drop out of school because you thought, “I’m not going to make it till the age of 20.” So it’s quite interesting how all of these things seep into making you who you are and your motivations.

I want to jump ahead in the chronology of your life and talk about your work in media first, and then we’ll come back, and we’ll talk about filmmaking and documentaries as well.

You were the executive producer of the debate programs CounterSpin and Face Off on CBC, and you’ve said one of the turning points in your life was 9/11, which is then immediately followed by the War on Terror and the Iraq War, at which point you started questioning the integrity of the media, its function, what it said it stood for, and then what it actually stood for. So take me back to those times. What were some of the gaping holes in mainstream media that made you want to leave it?

Paul Jay
Well, first of all, my rupture with mainstream media started when I wrote that letter to Diefenbaker.

Shalaj Lawania
Okay.

Paul Jay
So when I was about eight years old.

Shalaj Lawania
Okay.

Paul Jay
Long before 9/11. 9/11 was no surprise to me. It was not a turning point. I mean, not like I was expecting it, but it didn’t— it wasn’t sort of out of my understanding of the world why it happened and what took place afterward. I was never really part of mainstream media ever, even though it was— the whole thing was bizarre, honestly. CounterSpin was a debate show. So I’m always looking, as a filmmaker, for stories to make a film about, and it has to be meaningful to me. But I’m watching, in 1992, I guess it is, there’s a National Hockey League NHL players’ strike.

Shalaj Lawania
Yeah.

Paul Jay
And, so they had a guest on. He’s the president of the NHL Owners Association. I forgot his name.

Shalaj Lawania
John Ziegler, and then Bob Goodenow.

Paul Jay
Yeah. How do you know that? Oh my God, you did your research. Anyway, so Ziegler’s on, they interview Ziegler, and he defends the owners. At the end of the interview, I say, “I’m with the owners.”

Shalaj Lawania
Right.

Paul Jay
“Everything he said makes perfect sense to me.” Then a couple of days later, they interview Bob Goodenow, who’s the head of the Players Association, and everything you said made sense to me. I said, “Okay, I’m with the Players Association.” So then it hit me, you know, unless I— the interviewer didn’t know enough to pierce either of them, and I needed to hear them confront each other. And I said, “Well, you know, we need this for politics. You need a legitimate debate, you know, smart, clever, and a host that can make it— not allow it to become propagandistic or just talking points.”

So, eventually, Ron and I pitched it to CBC Newsworld, which was their news cable channel, and they said, “Yes.” And so for 10 years, we had on a daily, the debate show for the country, and we got to shape a lot of the political discourse in the country because anyone who was at all political paid attention to it. Five nights a week, it was prime time at 8 o’clock and repeated again at 11 o’clock. So we had a lot of exposure.

But that’s as close as I got to being part of mainstream media because I wouldn’t even allow our office— it was an independent production, let me start with that. It wasn’t a CBC production. We licensed the show to CBC, we shot it at CBC, but I ensured that our offices weren’t in the building. We had our own offices. I didn’t want to be part of the— even though it’s a public broadcaster, I didn’t want to be part of that corporate culture. So I was never in mainstream media, even though I produced a mainstream media show.

What the debate show taught me is that we would do debates, like for example, in the lead-up to the Iraq War, we would have debate after debate about: are there weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? And we would have somebody defending the American side. A lot of American neocon guests we would get on, even people like Frank Gaffney. I mean, the far right, as long as they were smart, and lots of the far right are quite smart, and we’d have a real debate about it. But show after show, it became incredibly clear there was zero evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Like zero. And then the next night— like we’d have a weapons inspector on our show on a Monday night, clearly exposing this fact, the next night on CBC News, nothing, no follow-up. That would happen story after story, where we would really break news in the debate, but the national news that’s right next to us, where we shot, like through one door, we’re in the national newsroom, they paid zero attention to what we were doing.

The same thing happened after 9/11. About— well, well, after 9/11, about five, six years after 9/11, I interviewed Senator Bob Graham. Senator Bob Graham was the Governor of Florida, the Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, a total intelligence insider, and became the co-chair of the Joint Congressional Investigation into 9/11. He told me on camera over the course of several interviews that not only did Bush-Cheney know something was coming, but they facilitated it. “Facilitated it,” his words, and he gave me examples of how they facilitated the 9/11 attacks.

The last time I interviewed him, he was the most explicit about it. I sent an email to every news organization of any significance in North America, and I wrote, “I’ve got these interviews with Bob Graham. I just did a recent one with him. Here’s what he told me.” And I said, “I can’t tell you whether he’s right. I wasn’t in the White House. I can’t say Cheney said this or said that. But given who Bob Graham is, isn’t this a news story? I will give you my interview with him for free. All you’ve got to do is run it and credit me.” I didn’t get one answer. Not a single answer from any news organization to have access to my interview.

Now, in retrospect, it might be a mistake that I offered it for free. If I’d offered to sell it, they might have—

Shalaj Lawania
Yeah.

Paul Jay
They don’t like it when things are free. Then they’d say, “You have an agenda, and if you have an agenda, we can’t deal with you. You have to be in it for the money.”

So my demarcation or rupture with mainstream media just got more and more as I got older, as I understood it better. But 9/11 wasn’t the turning point for me. It was just a place where I could see more than usual, significantly more than usual, how the media was absolutely terrified to go outside certain boundaries.

Dan Rather said something very interesting after the Iraq War began, four or five, six months, the former host of CBS News. He said it to a British BBC interviewer. He wouldn’t say this in the U.S. He said, “Being in an American newsroom after 9/11 and the beginning of the Iraq War was like being a traitor in a South African township and having a flaming tire of patriotism put around your neck.” That’s Dan Rather, host of CBS News. It was a new McCarthyism.

So what I understood better after 9/11 and the Iraq War is how profoundly terrified journalists were to say what they knew, which is why I started an independent thing. The problem with the independent thing is that they don’t get big enough. At least I didn’t know how to get it big enough.

Shalaj Lawania
Let’s explore that, because you started two independent platforms, The Real News Network initially, now theAnalysis.news, and you’ve said some of the early inspirations for this were, one, when you visited Afghanistan, you were quite taken by how much education had regressed in the country after the war. You came across truck drivers who didn’t know where Canada was. They thought it was next to Germany. You met young boys who couldn’t tell you their age because they didn’t know how to count. And the other inspiration was when you sat down to write the script for a movie set in 2020, and you were quite scared of just imagining that future, so you wanted to try and change it.

So you created these independent platforms, and you created them on what you called a new economic model that was based on a triple no policy— no government funding, no corporate funding, no advertising. When it comes to media, is that a sustainable model in the long run? I’m asking for a friend because, personally, as well, I’ve tried to run this project with no advertisers. I’ve asked for donations, but honestly, it’s not a sustainable model for me. And I’m very— very soon I have to make a decision between either I get advertisers, or I capitulate and I shut the project down completely. So, do you think this new economic model can work in the media?

Paul Jay
I think some people are making a subscription model work on Substack, particularly. I was able to get both of the models I got going, but to a large extent, based on donations that were bigger than just the $10 or $20 a month. To create something at the scale I was hoping to create, we could never have done it without bigger donors. Now, the bigger donors were very progressive. They supported the mission and mostly didn’t affect what we did, but it’s not very sustainable because it’s so dependent on the goodwill of a few big donors.

It’s possible. There are people who seem to be making it work now to some extent. I think it’s mostly the subscription model that seems to be driving it more than donations, but theAnalysis is still going. We publish something once a week, but it’s very marginal. It’s so small. And so I came from having big platforms. My films were on all major networks, from CBC to BBC to ARTE, States, A&E, Discovery, Turner. I came from having mainstream platforms, but I couldn’t do the more direct political stuff I wanted.

The film I’m doing now is funded all through donations and philanthropy, and I’ve raised a good budget, a significant budget. But I think it’s the topic. It’s not a model for a regular news thing. It wouldn’t work for an interview thing like I was doing before. It’s because it’s called How to Stop a Nuclear War, it’s narrated by Emma Thompson, and we’re likely to have a mainstream impact. It’s going to be released in theaters, and we’re going to raise more money to make a lot of noise about it. So I was able to, because you put all these ingredients together, but again, it’s not a model for a regular show. I can’t answer the question, really, other than to say I couldn’t do it. The model, the way I did it, required a few big donors, and in the long run, it’s not a very good way to go.

Shalaj Lawania
Is that why you left The Real News Network? There was a misalignment in the vision moving forward?

Paul Jay
There are a lot of reasons for it, but I would say my primary reason was that I thought it had plateaued. Right in the beginning, I said, “Go big or go home.”

Shalaj Lawania
The concept had plateaued, or the network itself?

Paul Jay
Network. Well, both. When I started it, the vision was to go big. We would become a rival of mainstream stuff. I mean, not as big, but big. And it didn’t get there. There were other platforms, like, for example, Democracy Now, is a much bigger platform than we ever had. So it wasn’t that there were some things that had bigger platforms. But when I said go big or go home, there were a lot of things going on at the time, but the fundamental thing was, I don’t think we’re gonna get any bigger. I had hoped that when we were in Baltimore, we’d be able to really dig into Baltimore itself and get a kind of a real following in Baltimore, and we did some. Again, we didn’t get to the scale I would have hoped. There are other reasons too, but in terms of my personal motivation for wanting to go was that.

Now, when I started theAnalysis, I wanted to keep my hand in, but I knew I’d be working on the nuclear war film. I started that almost the same time I started theAnalysis. So theAnalysis kept my hand in. It gave me a way to interview and talk and say stuff about what’s going on, but I didn’t have any expectations that it would get big. I was quite fine, and now, and for a while, it was actually bigger than I expected.

And then I— it’s very interesting, I did a story on the real lead-up to the January 6th events. The storming of Congress, you know, the Trump thing, and YouTube took it down. Everything in it was mainstream news. I had just connected the dots in a way others hadn’t, and somebody didn’t like it. The gist of it really quickly was that there was a real coup attempt, and it wasn’t January 6th, it was the lead-up to January 6th. There was an attempt by a faction of the military to seize ballot boxes and declare martial law. They had an actual PowerPoint that was actually turned over to the Congressional Investigation Committee that took place later.

No one’s— almost no one’s ever heard of any of this. Even though it was— like what happens in these kinds of things is The Washington Post will do a story, and that’s it. Move on. Nobody follows up on it.

On January 4th, I might as well tell this story. It’s a good story. So on January 4th, 10 former Secretaries of Defense have an op-ed in The Washington Post— this is two days before the events of the storming of Capitol Hill— declaring, warning the military to stay out of the elections. Ten former Secretaries of Defense in a joint op-ed in The Washington Post. On the same day, Admiral Stavridis, who is the former Supreme Commander of NATO, same day has an article in Time Magazine, where he supports the letter from the 10 former Secretaries of Defense. He also says they were planning a coup, and he warns the military to stay out, and he says he understands. He says the phone call from Trump to the Secretary of State in Georgia, saying, “Give me X thousand votes,” that went public, that phone call, he says, “A chill must have gone down the spine of these Secretaries of Defense,” because it was clear Trump was planning a coup and was trying to manipulate the election outcome.

On January 4th, two days before the 6th, the Financial Times has an editorial from the editorial board that ends with saying, “As bizarre as it seems,” it’s close to an exact quote, “a coup is in progress in the United States.” The Financial Times, two days before all the shit hits the fan.

So I do a story about this weeks later, and, you know, it’s very clear what’s happening, and a lot of other people have written about it, but Elon Musk said it really well about Twitter. Somebody asked him in one of these sessions he does, “Do you censor people on Twitter?” Twitter, before it was called X. And he says, “Oh, we don’t have to do that, we just limit reach.” So they just suppress you so nobody knows it’s there, and then we found out from the Twitter Files that Taibbi got hold of, maybe from Musk, I don’t know, but the FBI was directly working on algorithms with Twitter to suppress certain people. I’m absolutely convinced that we got targeted after January 6th.

Anyway, from a personal point of view, I do what I can on theAnalysis and try to give a perspective that you don’t find too many other places, but I’m mostly focused on making the film.

Shalaj Lawania
This is Know Time. If you liked what you just watched or listened to, then please consider supporting this project. You can subscribe on YouTube, follow on Spotify, and rate five stars on Apple Podcasts.

Paul Jay is joined by Prof. Leo Panitch, Jacobin writer Meagan Day, and historian Gerald Horne to break down the presidential debate and the deeper reasons behind the dysfunction in U.S. politics. They also discuss how a people’s movement might respond if Trump attempts a coup after losing the election.

Leo Panitch passed away on December 19, 2020, at the age of 75.

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Paul Jay
Hi, I’m Paul Jay. Welcome to theAnalysis.news podcast.

Michael Buffer
Let’s get ready to rumbleeeeee!

Paul Jay
That was how ring announcer Michael Buffer would start WWF wrestling matches. He should have been on hand to start things off for Chris Wallace at the presidential debate. Donald Trump actually played himself as a character in WWF, fighting Vince McMahon, the owner of the massive pro-wrestling empire. McMahon’s wife now sits in Trump’s cabinet after the couple donated millions of dollars to Trump’s campaign.

In 1954, writing about professional wrestling in Paris, philosopher Roland Barthes wrote that pro wrestling is light without shadow, emotion without reserve, and the master of that storytelling was Vince McMahon. He understood that millions of people want to scream in anger, cheer bad guys, and the more flawed the character, the more people cheered. He understood the era of the good guy was over, and invented characters that were the embodiment of every value people had been taught not to hold. It was a wonderful release for people to express hatred without reserve.

Trump, in front of 85,000 people, got to beat up McMahon and shave his hair off, because that’s what it was, a winner gets to shave the other guy’s hair off. He stood at the center of the ring, soaking in the wild cheers of the adoring crowd, and that’s where he learned his politics.

His unmitigated rage was on full display in the presidential debate on Tuesday night.

He really thought he could win the debate with the kind of trash talk that works in front of a wrestling crowd. And perhaps it would have worked if he was just up against Biden. But at crucial moments, into the ring would run Chris Wallace, the Fox News journalist, who would take Trump on in a way Biden never could. Wallace blunted Trump’s attack, and even asked a couple of real questions that Trump couldn’t handle, especially when asked to denounce white supremacy. Only the manic megalomania of Trump could make the poverty of policy of Joe Biden look good.
And what does this “shit show,” to quote a CNN pundit who actually said that on-air, say about the state of the American state? Why is the political system in such disarray? And what about the real issues that were supposed to be debated and were mostly ignored? Now, joining us to try to make sense out of all of this is Meagan Day. She’s a staff writer at Jacobin and co-author of the book “Bigger Than Bernie: How we Go from the Sanders Campaign to Democratic Socialism.”

Gerald Horne holds the John Jay and Rebecca Moore chair of history and African-American Studies at the University of Houston, and is the author of many books, including “The Counter-Revolution of 1776,” and Leo Panitch is the emeritus distinguished research professor of political science at York University in Toronto, and co-author of “The Socialist Register.” Thanks so much for joining me, all of you.

Leo Panitch
Glad to be here Paul.

Gerald Horne
Thank you.

Meagan Day
Hi. Thanks for having us.

Paul Jay
So, Gerald, kick us off. What was your overall impression of what you heard and saw?

Gerald Horne
Well, first of all, Mr. Trump’s run-up to this debate was inconsistent with the requisites of the debate itself. What I mean is he has spent months talking about sleepy Joe, how he’s on the verge of being senile, how he’s taking performance-enhancing drugs. And so, what this suggested is that if Mr. Biden could string three sentences together without stumbling, he could emerge with a positive glow.

Secondly, on a more profound level, we should pay careful and close attention to the article in The Atlantic by Barton Gellman, who you may recall did journalism on the Edward Snowden case, which suggests that the Republicans are prepping an Electoral College coup, that is to say, in so-called red states, Republican Party dominated states, where the vote may turn against Mr. Trump, speaking of Arizona and Florida, amongst others, that the legislature and/or governor will ignore the popular will, and send to the antiquated, archaic electoral college, which actually determines who is president, electors who will cast their electoral college ballots for Mr. Trump. I should also mention that I haven’t seen any polling as a result of this train wreck of a debate, but it wouldn’t surprise me at all if Mr. Trump’s base was unaffected by his disgusting, despicable performance.

It has remained steady over the years, and at some point, I think, progressive forces in the United States are going to have to take notice of the fact that for more than a half-century, across class lines, there has been a remarkable consistency in the euro-American community voting for the right-wing, including in 1991, when 55% of the community in Louisiana voted for a Nazi and a Klansman, David Duke, for governor of that particular state.

And it took an astounding turnout among the black community to keep a Nazi from becoming the governor of Louisiana. In that light, we should pay close attention to what Mr. Trump was trying to bait Mr. Biden into last night. That is to say, where is your support from the law enforcement community?

Because if you look at this recent study by the Brennan Center at NYU, at New York University, you’ll note that of the 18,000 plus law enforcement police department units in this country, a significant percentage have been infiltrated, if not dominated, by white supremacists and white nationalists, which, of course, brings us to this moment when he asked the proud boys to stand by. He just as well could have mentioned the Michigan militia, which invaded the state capitol in Lansing a few months ago with the instigation of Mr. Trump, or the Boogaloo Boys, or the Patriot Prayer, which is involved in confrontations in the streets of Portland, Oregon, and others too numerous to mention. The GOP, the Republican Party, has become heavily dependent upon an ultra-right fringe to drag them across the finish line, and therefore, Mr. Trump is rather reluctant, shall we say, to denounce or even criticize them. I also think we should note that he has a material interest in terms of trying to pull off an Electoral College coup, because in light of the revelations of the New York Times blockbuster story, talking about how he paid 750 dollars in taxes in 2016, 2017, maybe zero before that, that if he is not re-elected, a pardon will only exempt him from federal charges.

It will not prevent the Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus Vance, from going after him on tax fraud and tax evasion charges, not to mention the attorney general of the state of New York and Albany, Letitia James, who happens to be a black woman who leans to the left. But overall, this debate in some ways reflects the decline of US imperialism. It was shambolic. It was disgusting. And certainly, it does not put the best foot forward for U.S. imperialism, not that that’s possible in any case. That brings us to the nightmare scenario, which is that in order to help to prop up his declining campaign, except amongst his rock-solid base I should add, which is about 40% of the US electorate, about 63 million strong, who when they go to polls, they don’t have to necessarily deal with long lines and malfunctioning voting machines like the rest of us, in order to prop up his campaign he may engage in the so-called “Wag the Dog” scenario, where he launches some sort of war, against Iran, against Venezuela, or the big enchiladas, speaking of the People’s Republic of China. In any case, the issue’s got short shrift over the crosstalk and the insults and the threats and all the rest. But the saddest part of it all, perhaps, is that its further evidence that the United States is splitting. That is to say that after the unrest of the 1960s, President Johnson appointed a commission headed by former Illinois Governor Otto Kerner that came to the conclusion the United States was becoming two societies, separate but unequal, black and white.

Well, we’ve morphed beyond that, sadly enough. What I mean is that it’s becoming a de-facto neo-apartheid society, where a minority that represents and resembles the original settlers and the settler-colonial project are desperately trying to hold on against the rest of us.

Paul Jay
Meagan, what are your thoughts?

Meagan Day
Well, I appreciate that Gerald, and I think a lot of that is quite right. I want to go through some of the points of the debate that I think are the most interesting. The first thing that really jumped out at me is that Trump was very adept at hitting Joe Biden from both sides of an issue in a way that we would consider to be logically or politically inconsistent or incoherent, but it didn’t quite matter because the purpose wasn’t necessarily to make a particular case against Biden.

It was simply to make him look weak, to trigger viewers’ emotions, and so on. So an example of this is when Trump hit Joe Biden for being in favor of socialized medicine, which we, of course, having gone through the primary together, we all know that that’s absolutely not true. And then Trump immediately switched after that to then talking about how he, Trump was the one who was going to battle Big Pharma, he was going to lower the price of insulin, and so on.
So you could see there’s some sort of inconsistency there where he’s essentially saying that Joe Biden has drank the Bernie Sanders Kool-Aid, and forcing Joe Biden to then disavow the left, which Joe Biden did, which was extremely disappointing, though not surprising. And then he immediately, once that happened, he actually switched sides of the position, and started imitating Bernie Sanders himself, even though not in plan or program, but in rhetoric, talking about big pharma, and insulin costs, and so on.

And this same dynamic played out later on in the debate where Donald Trump accused Joe Biden of being soft on crime over and over. He said you won’t say the words law and order because you’re afraid that the radical left is going to jump down your throat if you talk about being tough on crime, and that’s why Democrats cities are burning, and that’s why we have lawlessness in the streets. I don’t know if you all are familiar with a Trump ad that he ran called “Break-In,” which shows an elderly white woman calling 911, and there’s nobody on the other line. The implication being that Joe Biden has entirely defunded the police departments, and there’s no one to help her, right? So he just kind of did that during the debate.

But then, almost immediately thereafter, he switched and started talking, when they went onto the topic of race and racial inequality, Trump switched and started talking about how Joe Biden authored the 1994 crime bill that intensified mass incarceration in this country, especially harming black communities, which obviously has a basis in reality, but it’s the complete opposite position. Whereas first, Joe Biden was soft on crime. Now Joe Biden has been too, quote-unquote, tough on crime.

And Joe Biden, perhaps, I think if he were a more adept debater, I think he maybe could have picked up on some of the logical inconsistencies in Trump’s angle of attack. Instead, I was disappointed to see Biden essentially following Trump’s lead. So Trump would say something and then Biden would try to clarify that, in fact, that’s not at all what he thinks about the matter. And then Trump would say the opposite and Biden would then again try to clarify that that’s not at all what he thinks, whereas I think maybe a stronger debater would have said, “which side do you really come down on the issue? Here’s my position on the issue.” Now, we on the left wouldn’t necessarily have agreed with Joe Biden’s explication of his actual position on these issues, on health care and criminal justice for example, but at least it would have been a display of force, and strength, and coherence. Unfortunately, that didn’t happen.

So another couple of things that I want to point out about the debate that I thought were really interesting was I thought Biden lost this exchange about the so-called manifesto, the Bernie Sanders manifesto.

Donald Trump accused him of agreeing with Bernie Sanders on a variety of issues, having co-authored this manifesto. Those of us who are following that know that Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden did sit down.

Progressives and party establishment figures did sit down to hammer some stuff out. We didn’t expect it to be very fruitful. Ultimately, it wasn’t that fruitful. They put together a document. Joe Biden has already said that he doesn’t really respect the document very much. So in any case, Donald Trump seems to have known that this would be an easy way to trap Joe Biden.

He said, you know, Joe, you agree with Bernie Sanders, you wrote this manifesto together. And then Joe Biden responded by saying, you know, it’s not true. Again, he’s following Trump’s lead here and he says “this is not true. The fact of the matter is that I beat Bernie Sanders, and there is no manifesto, and I am the Democratic Party now.” And Trump just responded and he said, you just lost the left. It was like Trump had laid a trap for Joe Biden, and Joe Biden had walked into it, and then Trump, actually, because he’s so, you know, his performance is so strange, and he actually verbalizes thoughts that are running through his head at the moment, he simply verbalized, “you fell for the trap that I laid for you.” And I thought that was true, and I thought that Biden lost that exchange. That said, immediately after that, things started to look up for Biden because they started talking about the coronavirus response. I was trying to have unbiased eyes when I was watching this.

I couldn’t see how very many people who were at all concerned about coronavirus, not to count the sort of I would say maybe 20% or 30% of the American populace is not concerned at all because, for partisan reasons, they’ve decided that it’s not a real issue, but anyone who actually is afraid of getting coronavirus, or who has been affected by the economic shutdown but also understands the reasons for the shutdown, and understands the sort of logic of the pandemic, would have come away from that exchange feeling that Donald Trump had failed to explain why his response was actually appropriate. Joe Biden managed to marshal plenty of numbers, stats, figures, and it painted a pretty bleak picture for Donald Trump.

And then I want to highlight another exchange that I thought Biden lost, unfortunately. Donald Trump’s taxes were always going to be a key feature of this debate. When they were brought up, Trump said something that’s entirely true. He said, “I’m just doing what rich people do.” He said “before I came into government office, I was a private developer, private business person, and I was operating by the rules. And that’s what rich people do.”

And on previous occasions, he said, “yeah, I don’t pay a ton of taxes, that’s because I’m smart, I know how to work the system.” He’s not doing anything illegal, he’s just sort of jumping through the loopholes that have already been set up for people like him to jump through.

And he essentially said, Joe Biden, you helped write the tax code that I then followed in order to not pay very high taxes, though oddly, Trump was also kind of trying to deny that he had paid low taxes as well, but we’ll leave that to the side for a second.

But that was actually a very effective point because it is true. Joe Biden has been a part of the sort of bipartisan effort to impose austerity, to reduce taxes, to take aim at entitlements, and so on. I mean, as a proud third wave Democrat, this has been his political project for the better part of 50 years. And so when Donald Trump said you wrote those laws that I then followed, that was very effective. And Joe Biden didn’t really have a good answer for that.

He said, you know, “I’m going to pass new laws, and we’re going to close all these loopholes.” And Trump said, “why didn’t you do that twenty-five, twenty years ago?” And Joe Biden said, “because you weren’t president screwing everything up,” which is frankly an awful answer because Donald Trump is not the only wealthy person in the country.
So I think for anyone who’s attentive to or in tune with at least some of the messages that Bernie Sanders was putting forward in the primary about wealthy people taking advantage of the tax code, about upward redistribution of wealth, they would see that in that moment, Joe Biden revealed himself to only care about fixing that, those problems of upward wealth redistribution, simply because Donald Trump is the political enemy at this particular moment. I thought that revealed a lot, and I think it went poorly for Biden.

And then, of course, the last thing I want to touch on is something that Gerald already touched on, rightly so. I think it was the big story of the evening.

I actually stayed up late and hammered out an article about it last night, which is when Donald Trump, on two occasions during the debate, seemed to endorse right-wing violence. So he was asked very pointedly by moderator Chris Wallace, “will you denounce white supremacy? Will you denounce white supremacists and armed right-wing militias?” He bumbled his way through that exchange. At first, he said, I would absolutely be willing to do that. Of course, he did not follow through on that.

He then immediately began talking about how actually Antifa is responsible for all the violence, and it’s the left that’s responsible and not the right. So Wallace pressed him and said, if you’re willing to do that, will you do it right now? And Biden sort of jumped in on this and said, “yeah, do it, like do it, Trump, do it.” And Trump was like, “who do you want me to condemn?” And then Chris Wallace said, “What about white nationalists or white supremacists?” And Joe Biden helpfully offered up the name of a fascist organization in the United States called the Proud Boys. They are self-described Western chauvinists. I think that they would actually not describe themselves as white supremacists per se, but they’re definitely fascists. And Joe Biden, or rather Donald Trump, instead of denouncing the Proud Boys, he told them to stand back and standby. It was a very odd phrasing. It’s a military term, stand by, it means to wait at the ready for further command. And in that moment, Donald Trump seemed to almost lay claim to this right-wing street militia force or street fighting force that is responsible already for a lot of political violence and to ask them to stand down, and to stand by, and sort of await further commands.

Now, I don’t know if Donald Trump necessarily meant to communicate that, a lot of times he just produces phrases from his head and doesn’t think through them. This was obviously unscripted. However, the Proud Boys themselves took it as a sign of acknowledgment, and affirmation, and a call to arms, and immediately on a platform called Telegram, which is where a lot of alt-right figures congregate — it actually has a nickname, Terrorgram, because some sections of the site are where right-wingers congregate to actually hatch terror plots. Whether they’re joking or not is up for debate. I think a lot of times jokes shade into not jokes, and then turn into real violence.

So on Telegram, the Proud Boys posted their logo with the words “stand back and stand by,” which is what Donald Trump had said to them, immediately. So if Donald Trump didn’t mean to imply what he did, he would need to clarify it right now, because everyone has received the message loud and clear on all sides of the aisle otherwise.

And then later on in the debate, Trump was asked by Wallace, essentially, will you pledge to encourage your supporters to refrain from, what he called civil unrest, or to stay calm in the event that we don’t know who the winner is going to be on Election Day, which we almost certainly will not?

And Trump essentially answered, “no, I will not do that, because there’s a vast conspiracy to manipulate ballots.” And then he went off into this rambling answer about this conspiracy to throw away Trump ballots. They’re selling them. They’re throwing them in the river. And he said if the election is unfair, then I’m more or less under no obligation to ask my supporters to not do something about it, was the answer that he gave. And then, of course, he explained why the election was not already not fair, which seemed to indicate support for right-wing political violence in the event of an uncertain result or a Trump loss in November, which I think we should find extraordinarily concerning, especially in light of the fact that Donald Trump campaign has started to wage a multimillion-dollar effort to recruit about 50,000 Trump supporters to be what they’re calling poll watchers, to show up at the polls and to sort of guard against voter fraud, the specter of voter fraud.

But a lot of voting rights activists are very concerned that, in fact, what’s going to happen is 50,000 very hardcore Trump supporters, who already believe his story about a vast conspiracy of ballot manipulation are going to show up to the polls, essentially to intimidate anyone that they come across who seems like they might have non-Trump or anti-Trump views, which is essentially going to result in voter suppression and possibly political violence, which, again, to underscore is something that Trump seems to endorse as long as it’s on his behalf and in his name.

So those are the things that I wanted to touch on from the debate that I found most interesting. Overall, I would say, not a very educational debate. I think that we mostly knew all of this stuff, but certainly a debate with some very disturbing moments.

Paul Jay
Thanks, Meagan. Leo, your thoughts?

Leo Panitch
Well, the first thing I’d like to do is express my sympathy to Meagan and Gerald other Americans on the left, for having to live through this. What we witnessed last night was a so-called debate between someone who is a cross between P.T. Barnum of Barnum and Bailey, and Mussolini, who is the real comparison that ought to be made here to Trump, not Hitler. And he was standing up against, it seemed, watching it, the ghost of Christmas past.

And it was an appalling spectacle in which I thought Biden did not rise to the occasion, and that poses a very difficult question when, as Megan so astutely was commenting, when Trump revealed his strategy, which was to try to show that he had lost the left, that he couldn’t engage the enthusiasm of the left to secure Trump’s defeat. This is a significant question, and I couldn’t help but keep thinking as I was watching this, what the “debate” would have looked like, and I put debate in quotation marks, because if it had been Bernie, would the dumbing down of discourse that Trump is engaged in, the dumbing down of political discourse, which Umberto Eco, who grew up under Mussolini, described as the other characteristic of fascism in the Italian sense, would Bernie have been able to salvage some rationality, some substance out of this? I don’t think Biden did, and that worries me a great deal, especially in the context of it being so important that people swallow hard, engage in a popular front tactic for the moment in the election, and get people out to vote against Trump.

And I’d like to hear from Gerald and Meagan what they think the effect will be. But my great fear is that he’s being very open about not adhering to the outcome of the election, and he’s preparing people for that. And as Megan said for his poll watchers, which was something that Netanyahu did in order to discourage Arab voters, Israeli-Arab voters in the last series of Israeli elections. And this will likely lead to the kind of punch ups, even on Election Day, and then when he refuses to accept the outcome afterward, that will make the demonstrations in the last few months look like a Tea Party, and I don’t mean the Boston Tea Party. And in that case, perhaps the most frightening thing Trump said was that if he was able to unleash his repressive apparatus in court to win the whole thing, the whole thing would be solved in half an hour. So clearly, what one needs to take away from this, in combination with the dumbing down of political discourse, for which America has never been very noted, and perhaps the one thing that we can say in favor of Obama was that he did raise the level of political discourse, certainly in comparison with Bush, and even Clinton, you know, is will we see the type of undisciplined protest that will give an excuse for the unleashing of the repressive apparatus of the kind that he already sent into a number of states, but perhaps beyond that. This is the great danger out of which will come, of course, the closing of political space. Not just the maiming and jailing of protesters, but the closing of political space that would follow people like Meagan or Gerald saying things in support of the protesters.

This is very frightening, in my view. We’ve seen nothing like it. And what it shows, since you indicated you wanted me to speak to this, Paul, is once again that the main contradictions in global capitalism today are not between states.

It’s not China’s threat to the American empire as a rising new capitalist power that is destabilizing global capitalism. It is contradictions within states, whether it’s the contradictions that led to Brexit in the U.K., or what we see in the United States today. And that is at the core of what this may mean in terms of the instability of all of this for global capitalism, although our concern needs to be how do we turn this in a way that produces a unified left response that goes beyond the mere united front of getting Trump out?

If you could give me one more thing to say, as a Canadian watching this, I couldn’t help but recall a passage I remember from Sinclair Lewis’s “It Can’t Happen Here,” his tremendous novel on the rise of fascism in the United States, the election of a right-wing senator, and then his replacement by a president who was the secretary of war who introduces an explicit fascist regime, the result of which is that the hero in the novel, the journalist, escapes the concentration camps and comes to Canada.

I’ll just read you these few sentences. When he arrived in Canada, he expected that everyone was thrilled to his tale of imprisonment, torture, and escape. But he found the ten thousand spirited tellers of woe had come before him, and that the Canadians, however attentive and generous hosts they might be, were actively sick of pumping up new sympathy. They felt that their quota of martyrs was completely filled, and as to the exiles who came in penniless, and that was the majority of them of course, the Canadians became distinctly weary of depriving their own families on behalf of unknown refugees, and they couldn’t even keep up forever, a gratification in the presence of celebrated American authors, politicians, and scientists when they became as common here as mosquitoes. I keep hearing from Americans that they want to come to Canada if Trump is re-elected. I keep jokingly saying we’re going to build a wall and make them pay for it. But this is a very serious question, which I don’t want to make light of in the wake of what happened last night.

Paul Jay
Gerald, let me pick up on Leo’s question then.

Certainly much of the left, I don’t know in terms of actual numbers, but certainly in terms of influence and being vocal, was less than less enthusiastic about Biden before this debate.

And as Megan said, he really made a point of distancing himself from the left. In fact, at one point, Trump actually says, “I don’t know what to call you. Do I actually call you left?” Because, as Megan said, he was trying to have it both ways with what to call Biden. But Gerald, what does this mean in terms of developing a broad front against Trump? Is this, the debate and the way Biden is positioning himself, is he losing the left, or is the left going to see past Biden?

Gerald Horne
Well, I really don’t think so, because I think that the fascist threat is focusing and concentrating the mind, as is often said, when you’re facing execution in the morning. The problem in the United States, amongst others, is that in order to effectuate this broad front, what you would need to do is focus like a laser beam on the communities that tend to vote against the right by nine to one, speaking of black Milwaukee, black Detroit, black Philadelphia, etc., and of course, try to speak to their issues, which Mr. Biden has done intermittently. The problem is that oftentimes when you try to address black issues, the bloc that votes for the right in Dixie by a rate of nine to one, and nationally by a rate of 57 to 43, oftentimes feels that that is preferential treatment to the victims of bias and they react very negatively to it.

History clearly shows that when you have steps, no matter how halting, toward some sort of reform with regard to what has been called the national question, for example, the overthrow of slavery in 1865, followed by reconstruction, and an attempt to effectuate voting rights, and then the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, U.S. apartheid, etc., oftentimes these measures of reform were greeted rather violently by a counter-reform, a counter-revolution. And what concerns me is that in the wake of the protests post-May 25th, 2020, over the lynching on camera of George Floyd, that there will be a revolt at the ballot box. That is to say, there will be a high turnout by that year old American bloc that votes across class lines, that obviously takes more seriously the white supremacist origins of the United States of America, more so than many of our friends on the left, for example, who tend to have a rather naive view, and a rather Pollyanna like view of the origins of the settler state.

Which reminds me that, interestingly enough, a number of mainstream journalists have been calling me lately to discuss issues concerning the possibility of the vanquished, if Mr. Trump pulls off an electoral coup, appealing to international bodies for assistance. For example, like the person who says that she is now the actual leader of Belarus, that is to say, going to the United Nations, the Organization of American States, etc.

And what I find striking about that is one more example of how some of these mainstream forces in some ways are more advanced than folks on the left. They’re taking this threat very seriously, and are willing to revise the otherwise rosy view of the United States, which I would like to see emulated with regard to the so-called poll watchers. You saw what they have in store when you witness early voting in Virginia just a few days ago, when they were engaged in a concerted campaign of harassment of those who were lining up to vote, even though I’m not sure if they realize who these people are going to vote for, I assume they assume that if you’re voting early, you must be voting against Trump.

And with regard to ripping off the blinders and trying to look at this country the way it is, as opposed to some sort of naive view, we really need to move away from this idea that these folks would vote differently but for Fox News and Rush Limbaugh, because the bloc that votes against Mr. Trump and the GOP nine to one, Fox News is part of their cable package. On their AM radios they have Rush Limbaugh, and they don’t seem to be affected by it.

So we really need deeper explanations. People need to put on their thinking caps. Otherwise, we’ll have a lot of time to discuss this in the concentration camps in Yankee Stadium.

Paul Jay
Again, the same question. You talked about Biden distancing himself from the left, and as you said, Trump says you just lost the left.

Well, did he?

Meagan Day
I don’t think so in reality, because if you looked, for example, in 2016, the actual percentage of Bernie Sanders primary voters who then went on to vote for Hillary Clinton in the general election, that number was, in fact, higher than the percentage of in 2008 Hillary Clinton primary voters who went on to vote for Barack Obama in the general election.
So I think that if you’re concerned about low turnout, or the sort of like resentful protest vote from the wing of the party that loses the primary, you actually have more of a problem with centrist Democrats in that regard because they tend to actually vote Republican, whereas leftists have nowhere else to go. They can either stay home or not. And a lot of leftists, a lot of people who supported Bernie Sanders are actually very politically engaged, which means that staying home doesn’t feel like an appropriate option for them.

So there’s going to be a lot of clothespin votes for Joe Biden on the left. I think the numbers will bear this out. I feel pretty confident about this. I see no reason to believe otherwise. You know, you sometimes hear conversation, discourse about expressing sort of criticism or disappointment in Joe Biden. I’ve certainly done that. I mean, I’m doing it, you know, I’m still doing it. I don’t see any reason to stop criticizing Joe Biden between now and November.

But it’s certainly a matter of emphasis, and trying to figure out how to message effectively to the left that we do need to, especially in battleground states, show up to vote for Joe Biden. There’s a season for everything, and there will be a season for protesting Joe Biden and his attempts to sort of back away from the promises that he made to the left, which I’m sure he will do immediately upon entering office if he is to win. So I think that in order to make this case to the left, and like I said, I don’t think it’s it’s urgent.

I think that if you’re concerned about our electoral prospects in this election, the place to look is disaffected black voters in places like Milwaukee, as was just mentioned, or, you know, the sort of Obama to Trump converts in the Rust Belt, not the people who voted for Bernie Sanders, who might go on Twitter and criticize Joe Biden. But I do think that there’s a conversation to have on the left about this that I think is really important, and I think that it starts with Trump’s identification of Antifa as the number one threat facing the United States. And a lot of people on the left don’t identify as Antifa. I identify as a socialist, I certainly identify as an anti-fascist, but Antifa tends to refer to people who are anarchists, who are black bloc, who participate in street protests in a particular way using particular tactics. And because I don’t, I don’t go around calling myself Antifa. However, those of us on the left, even if we don’t call ourselves Antifa, need to be very alarmed by Donald Trump’s identification of Antifa as the number one threat facing the United States, because what is actually happening is that he’s trial ballooning a third red scare.

I know that sounds hyperbolic, but when you really break it down, it’s not hyperbolic at all. You would expect that after the third resurgence of socialism in the United States, you would see a third red scare. I think that that’s probably in the cards, and I think that it’s just taking an unusual form right now because I think the term socialism has lost quite a bit of its toxicity, in large part due to Bernie Sanders’s two primary campaigns.

And so Donald Trump is casting about for another boogeyman that can sort of fill the space that socialism might fill. And furthermore, it should be noted that immigrants and terrorists were the boogeymen of yore, of the last two decades, but that seems to have lost its cachet. I think maybe that people think it’s just kind of played out. It seems a bit cliche, and it’s not triggering the emotions of people in Trump’s base. I think that Antifa is right now.

And furthermore, I would say that this summer, something very concerning has started to happen, which is that the right has started to use the term Marxist more than it ever has in my entire lifetime. I’ve actually rarely even heard the right use the term Marxist. When I came to Marxism as a Marxist myself, that term was introduced to me by the left, and not as something scary, maybe as something passé, maybe as something that we’ve grown out of, but not as a sort of looming threat.

So this is a new development and I think it’s one that we really have to keep an eye on, because when the right talks about Marxism, they don’t actually mean the writings and the ideas of Marx and Engels. They’re actually using it in the sense of the term cultural Marxism, which has emerged from something called the intellectual dark web. It’s a neo-reactionary intellectual current on the right that has this term cultural Marxism that they use to refer to enforced egalitarianism, which cuts against their ideas of the natural hierarchies between people. They have a sort of like social Darwinist or social free-market approach to letting people dominate each other, and that’s how society is going to function best, is if you let dominant people fill dominant roles. And they perceive any attempts to intervene or correct against that, including, for example, anti-racism or feminism, they call that cultural Marxism, as in cultural egalitarianism. That’s where the use of the term Marxism is coming from in the right-wing.

So Donald Trump has started talking about Marxism. All of the right-wing figures, including right-wing congresspeople, have started talking about Marxism this summer. You can imagine as an open Marxist who writes for an American socialist magazine, the largest American socialist magazine, I find this quite concerning because we weren’t talking about this seven or eight months ago on the national stage. And Donald Trump is explicitly tying Marxism to Antifa.

We actually on the left are able to draw out distinctions and differences between different currents on the left, but they are lumping them all together, and they’re painting them all with this anti-communist brush, linking everyone on the left to a sort of legacy of terror and authoritarianism, and sort of portraying the left in general, including Black Lives Matter. So Black Lives Matter, Antifa, something called Marxists, and even Democrats, are lumped into this, are all sort of one pulsating mass of potential authoritarianism that must be crushed in order to preserve the nation.
And I think that we have to be very careful about that, and we can’t be naive about that. That is a major threat to us. And if we are able to get Trump out of office, then we can neutralize that threat somewhat, which is very important because we want, as a matter of strategy, to be able to open up as much political space as possible for us to maneuver in. And an incipient third red scare is not a fruitful backdrop for the kind of class struggle and class political organizing that we know that we’re going to need to do in order to actually transform this country into a habitable one.

Paul Jay
When I said in my opening that the teacher of Trump’s politics was Vince McMahon, another one of his teachers was Roy Cohn, who was the lawyer for Joe McCarthy, and later became an actual adviser for Trump.
In fact, I’ve got a piece on the website now about how McCarthyism was a model for Trumpism. And people usually associate McCarthy with the Hollywood Ten and the tax of that sort, but if I understand correctly, that was actually more the House of un-American Activities Committee. McCarthy’s attack was on the left, especially the left in the trade unions, but also left individuals in government.

But, yeah, for those on the left who want to sort of be standoffish about this election, and not consider the defeat of Trump a critical step towards creating a more favorable field for battle, as you just said, Meagan. It’s beyond naive.
It’s like they don’t even believe their own analysis, because some of that section of the left to go on and on about how fascist the United States is, it seems like they don’t believe it because they’re going to be the target along with the rest of the left.

Leo, let me ask you a sort of different question.

In the major capitalist countries, Germany, Russia, I would include China more or less in that, maybe a little different but still, most of the major big capitalist countries are not in such political disarray. I mean, they have their problems and crises and so on, but not, a commentator on CNN called it this, too, not the “batshit craziness” one’s seeing in American politics. Maybe the closest is Boris Johnson of the UK, and even there, there was a strong American influence that helped create the conditions for the rise of Boris Johnson.

Why? Why is the United States, even in terms of how they’re dealing with the pandemic, it’s so much more irrational than most of the other countries, I mean, other than maybe like a Brazil or something?

Leo Panitch
Well, we are seeing this in other countries, a collapse of the center-left and the center-right political parties, where you have proportional representation. This was reflected, of course, in the Democratic Party and the Republican Party, where you don’t have proportional representation, in insurgencies within those parties, from the Tea Party in the case of the Republicans, and the Sanders insurgency inside the Democratic Party. There is an instability of the political institutions of advanced capitalism, and that political instability is reflected as well in the way in which a xenophobic nationalism has rushed in to occupy the space of those collapsed centrist institutions, partly appealing in good part to the working class, in nationalist, patriotic terms, at a time when the natural representatives of the working class politically were burdened by their own embrace of neo-liberalism.

And as with the Democratic Party, their lack of authenticity any longer when they speak to defending the working class. In that sense, the most astonishing thing that Biden said, having been a proponent, as Megan said, of third-wave politics through the Clinton era so manifestly, was that the first thing he would do would be to require the American state to be purchasing, only purchasing goods produced inside the United States. This is something that the American state has worked very, very hard at getting other states not to do, and to declare that as not consistent with free trade treaties.

So this is turning the world on its head now, in terms of the long tradition of American exceptionalism. In the other sense, it is the absence of a mass working-class party which goes all the way back to the 1896 election, the exclusion of not only blacks from the voting system effectively, but also a good many new immigrants who were the basis of the formation of working-class socialist organizations around that time, and up to World War One. It has to do with a certain dumbing down of American political discourse, which we know goes back a very, very long time, to the know-nothings of the 1840s.

It has to do with, as Marx put it very astutely, that America was the first state to have freedom of religion, but it certainly did not have freedom from religion. And for a very long time in the 20th century, the only really mass political organizations were the evangelical churches. And we’re seeing the effect of that to some extent. So sure, the extremity of it in the form it takes from Trump, and it’s very interesting that Trump is really the first president who is a capitalist.

There was never another one who had been a capitalist. And what was he created by? He was created by reality television, and a great many working people siding with him when he so crudely said, “you’re fired.” You know, you’re seeing here the effects of the political culture of the American dream, whereby those who couldn’t conceivably succeed, have not having been very wise in the selection of their parents, somehow hope they’re going to win the lottery, and emulate the type of capitalist, the type of businessman who is a shyster, in the hope that that’s the way they can get the success. The Republican Party has become the location of that; in Florida at the time of the mortgage meltdown.

And we need to remember that Clinton and his presidency took great credit for the use of derivatives to help black people buy mortgages. They saw that as a way of solving the endemic racism of the American housing system. Well, you know, in Florida, almost everybody, as the inquiries done after 2008 show, who were selling mortgages, were people who had been convicted of financial fraud. And when you remember what the base of the local party, local Republican parties, is everywhere, you know, the base of it starts in real estate, amongst real estate developers, and brokers, etcetera.

So, yes, there are specific explanations that need to be brought up here. But I would like to raise something else that Megan was pointing to, which is how significant and important the short passage from Occupy was with its own crude, but very necessary class map of 99:1, to the Sanders candidacy, the growth of the DSA from being a few thousand people with an average age in the late 60s, to what it is today of 60,000 people with an average age of under 30.

The entry of socialism into the discourse. Jacobin has just celebrated its 10th anniversary and, as Megan says, is the largest socialist magazine in the country now, with almost anywhere these days, explicitly socialist of a non-sectarian kind. This is a remarkable development, and I’d like to hear from Meagan and Gerald, I mean, I realize that this is fantasy, how that debate would have gone last night if Bernie had been there. What could Bernie have done to have prevented the further dumbing down of discourse that occurred last night?

Would he have been successful? And what effect would that have on American political culture? And I’d like to ask a further question, which seems to me very, very important. It has been the case through the 20th century that the strongest expressions of the left have come in the form of social movements, which then fade away at every election, and you’re faced with this appalling alternative between the Democrats and Republicans, more appalling now than ever of course.

But one has to ask whether the protest movements, which have reignited this year so impressively, and have been so biracial in their composition, whether they will have the discipline, in the current critical moment, to unify in such a way that the protests be of a kind that does not invite the kind of repression that Trump is pointing to. And especially, I’d like to ask whether the discourse of white supremacy, which is partly intended, of course, and rightly so, to remind people of the history that the United States was built on as a full democratic capitalist society, whether that discourse of white supremacy does not undermine the ability to create the popular front we need, because people resent and fear, especially working-class communities, resent being guilted by this. Of course they shouldn’t, but they do, and I do think we have to face this in a very different context than 1932 in Germany.

Whether the divisions that exist around this question of class versus race, which should not be divisive since it is a racialized capitalism, whether that is not going to replicate the divisions between the Social Democrats and the communists in 1932. These are serious questions which, it isn’t just a matter of dealing with morally, it’s also a matter of dealing with tactically in the weeks to come.

Paul Jay
Gerald, go ahead.

Gerald Horne
I’m not sure what that means. I mean, should we stop talking about white supremacy? Should we stop talking about the fact that black preschoolers are more likely to be suspended from school than other preschoolers? There was a letter in The New York Times that suggested that perhaps we’ll move to saying that black infants are more likely to cry louder than other infants. See the problem is really reframing the history of this settler-colonial state, a term curiously and conspicuously absent from a lot of leftwing discourses, and recognize that the so-called Enlightenment project was racially flawed. From its inception, the vaunted Bill of Rights did not apply to a significant percentage of the population. There was no Second Amendment right for enslaved Africans for example. If there had been, as the Manhattan Mussolini might say, believe me, slavery would have ended before 1865. A strategic ambition of the settlers was to keep arms from the hands of the indigenous population. So I’m not sure how we can do an end-run around the white supremacist issue, particularly when, as noted, also conspicuously ignored by too many analysts, that those most likely to confront the left, excuse me, confront the right or the blacks who vote against the right, nine to one.

And that brings me to your question Paul, which is why the United States? Well, I think that has already been noted. England, the so-called mother country for some of you, has similar problems with Boris Johnson violating international law by trying to break out of the divorce arrangement with the European Union, the shambolic reaction to the COVID crisis, etc., the demagogy, the racism, etc. And I think that London and Washington were the tip of the spear during the preceding epic. Speaking of the Cold War, and as a result, particularly Washington, found it necessary to engage more directly and profoundly in repressive measures, particularly against the left, and those effects have yet to be dissipated.

At the same time, there was a kind of contradiction, because at the same time there was a curbing of civil liberties and freedom of expression and all of the rest, there was an opening with regard to Jim Crow, that is to say, eroding the more egregious aspects of Jim Crow. How a significant percentage of the Euro-American working class and middle class greeted this was that this was unleashing more competition for their particular positions, which then leads to these mass revolts against desegregation and equality in Little Rock in 1957, in Oxford, Mississippi, in 1962 when there were deaths because of the potential entrance of one black student, James Meredith, to the University of Mississippi. It was not a sectional issue, you had similar uprisings in the Irish-American and Italian-American communities in Boston in the 1970s over school desegregation. And so then, at the same time, the so-called white working class and middle class, from their point of view, when there was the overture to China in the 1970s, from their point of view, this allowed jobs to be exported to China, creating more of competition for positions, which has now led us to this trifecta of racism, of white supremacy, which we would not be able to ignore unless you want to keep more black voters at home in Milwaukee, Detroit, and Philadelphia.

If that’s your goal, that’s the way to go, which the white supremacy issue and which, of course, will then redound to the detriment of all of us. But in any case, I think that we have to sort of take seriously sort of our rhetoric. The rhetoric is, oh, it’s the people who make history, except when it comes to the Euro-American working class, and they’re all dupes of Fox News and Rush Limbaugh. I think that we have to look at those supporters, the 63 million strong across class lines that vote for Trump. We have to see that they are voting for Trump, not least because they recognize that in order to conceive and develop the settler-colonial state, it did not take Dana daintiness and good manners to take the land away from the Native Americans, and enforce slavery on the Africans. It took crudeness. It took the obstreperousness. It took ultimately violence. And if we try to ignore that on behalf of some sort of, I’m not sure what, I think that we’re going to end up in worse trouble than we are today.

Paul Jay
Megan.

Meagan Day
Well, this is a very interesting and really big conversation. I guess I’ll start by saying that I believe that it’s probably inevitable between now and November that white working-class Trump supporters, which I would say I think it’s important to note that’s not the stronghold of his base. But we know that they exist, and we know that they’re animated in large part by racial prejudice. I don’t think that between now and November, we’re going to be replacing their meaning-making apparatus with one of racial solidarity instead of racial bigotry.

I think that it’s possible that if Bernie Sanders had been the nominee, we could start to see the tectonic plates shift a little bit, because each white racist who wants to build a wall to keep the immigrants out, or believes that black people are running amuck and burning down distant cities, and believes all the lies that they’re hearing, each of those people also struggles with health care costs. And they are also, in many cases, unable to afford rent, or afraid that they’re not going to be able to afford their mortgage, or worried about their job security, or unable to pay for their children’s college tuition, or even unable to pay off their own student loan debt if they were lucky enough to go to college to begin with, and so on and so forth.

And so I do believe that if Bernie Sanders had been the nominee, I don’t think that we could consider it a deus ex machina, and I don’t think that it would have happened over the course of one election, but like I said, I do think that the tectonic plates could have begun to shift. I think we could have begun to see the potential for a new realignment that breaks out of the two-party stranglehold that we have right now where the Republican Party is basically committed to extreme and open racism, and the Democratic Party continues to push policy that harms people of color and particularly black people, while also committing itself rhetorically to anti-racism, but not following through on those commitments.

That’s the stranglehold that we’re in right now. And I think that if Bernie Sanders had been the nominee, we could have seen a loosening up of that. We could have started to see a new type of identification. People could have started to identify more with their class along racial lines. It would not have happened overnight, but it would have been, I guess, a step down the road. And crucially, I think it’s important that someone like Bernie Sanders never backs away from his rhetorical commitment to anti-racism either. He got a lot of flack for this in 2015-2016 for not doing enough to just lay down the law on racism and say, I oppose racism.

Honestly, I think a lot of that was pretty unfair to Bernie Sanders. I was following his campaign very closely, and I think that the media was misrepresenting that in order to gin up controversy that didn’t necessarily need to exist for their own purposes. That said, he smartly understood in the next election that that’s an obstacle that he needs to figure out how to work with, right? If the media is going to do that, they’re going to do that, and so he needs to figure out how to behave strategically in relation to that. And I think he really stepped up his anti-racist rhetoric in 2020 in a way that wasn’t divisive, to the point that Leo was talking about, there are certain ways to go about acknowledging what Gerald is correctly talking about, the need to identify white supremacy and identify racism as a major harm in itself, and an obstacle; a harm in itself, to black people and people of color, and an obstacle to multiracial solidarity along class lines.

And Bernie Sanders, I think, did a really good job of that in 2020.

Leo Panitch
One of the reasons that anti-communism was so virulent in the United States, so much more than in Britain, or in Canada, or in Europe in the 1950s was, it did reflect the success of the Communist Party in its popular front strategy, after the rise of fascism abroad. Until then, it had run a class versus class, crude kind of line. But by turning to unifying the labor movement around the struggles to create industrial unions, which was explicitly oriented to organizing black workers alongside white workers to break the inherent racism in the craft unionism of the AFL, that proved to be a success.

And as we know, a great many of the people who became leaders in the civil rights movement were people who had been schooled in the broader protests, as well as in the union organizing that the Communist Party engaged in in the United States through the 30s and even the 40s. So there was in that sense, the beginnings of the type of politics that we need to have. The, you know, Roy Cohen, I think Paul was absolutely right to point to that legacy.

Roy Cohn became the mentor of Donald Trump. They had a falling out before Roy Cohn died, and one of Roy Cohn’s last sentences was “Donald Trump pisses ice.” No, for someone like Roy Cohn to say that is an indication of who we’re dealing with and what we’re dealing with in terms of the capacity of Trump and the people around him to ruthlessly exploit the lack of discipline on the left in the short run. The lack of organized coherence, the divisions that develop, understandably, during the civil rights movement between those oriented to peaceful protest and those oriented to expressing a degree of physical resistance to the repressive apparatus, which, of course sustains more than anything else, racial oppression in the United States.

But this is now a matter of weeks. We are dealing here in weeks without a disciplined political organization of the type that the three of us see as necessary to address the development of a coherent opposition to this racialized capitalism. We’re dealing with it as a matter of weeks, and we have to think tactically. We have to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time with regard to what discipline we will need in the face of the onslaught. I mean, we, I really shouldn’t be saying that as a Canadian, but this is understandable, given that the fate of the world so much depends on what happens in the American empire.

But this needs to be addressed.

Meagan Day
Leo’s right here that we don’t have a disciplined organization that can behave in concert, or even set out a program and follow it between now and November. So I’m a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, which is the largest socialist group in the United States in the last half-century, and I’m enormously proud of the growth that we’ve had and the strides that we’ve made. I see the campaigns that we’re doing and they’re excellent. I see the, you know, the political education that we’re doing, and it’s miraculous to watch people go from essentially no political or class consciousness to, you know, devoting their lives to the fight for socialism and being genuine socialist cadre. But I know that we don’t have what it takes right now to be able to lead some kind of popular front between now and November, and I don’t think anybody else does either. We simply weren’t able to get it.

Paul Jay
Just between now and November, Meagan, it’s not just about, well maybe you’re suggesting this, too, but if, in fact, this plays out the way some people think it could play out, which is that after November 3rd, states controlled by Republicans simply don’t certify the results, or what they do certify is the vote that took place on 3rd in person, and won’t certify the ballots that come later.

So essentially a coup, essentially, if the Supreme Court then certifies that, supports that, I don’t see how this stops or is prevented without a massive, massive movement in the streets in response to it.

Meagan Day
I’m afraid that it won’t be a disciplined movement, though, which is what Leo’s talking about. I think that we will, if this happens, there will be mass street protests. I think that they can be somewhat effective on their own without leadership, I mean we’ve certainly seen the Black Lives Matter movement over the summer has essentially been unplanned and undisciplined. I should say that there are individual leaders in individual cities, but overall, on a national scale, there’s not a lot of coordination happening. A lot of this is very spontaneous. And I think that that would be the same in the event that Trump tries to steal the election. However, I will say that during the Bernie Sanders campaign, DSA and four other progressive groups joined together to support Bernie Sanders. This was actually mentioned a couple of times, or maybe just once, in the Democratic Party’s primary debates.

In fact, Bernie Sanders was accused of having a super PAC that supported him, which, of course, would be rank hypocrisy on his part were it true. But it wasn’t true. It was actually five progressive organizations and one nurse’s union that was being referred to. So what I’m trying to say is that the Bernie Sanders campaign did at least give us a dry run for how to coordinate between organizations, and I think that we’re going to have to tap into that once more if Trump tries to steal the election.

But I still don’t think it’s going to be enough to be able to have marching orders on the streets. I think it’ll be mostly spontaneous, and we have to cross our fingers, and hope that people have decent instincts.

Paul Jay
OK, well, what I’d like to do is invite the three of you back again, and let’s pick up the conversation about what kind of organizational form is needed, and how do we get there, and deal with some of the other issues of facing the movement. So if that’s all right with the three of you, I don’t know if any one of you wants one final thing to say.

Meagan Day
No, that sounds good, though. I’m happy to come back.

Leo Panitch
It was great to be on with you.

Paul Jay
So my guests are have all agreed to come back. Gerald, did you agree?

Gerald Horne
We’ll talk.

Paul Jay
Okay, so thank you, all of you, for joining me on theAnalysis.news podcast. And thank you for listening.
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Barry Stevens

Welcome to theAnalysis. I’m Barry Stevens. I’m joined again today by international law expert Michael Byers in the second of a two-part conversation.

Michael Byers is Canada Research Chair in Global Politics and International Law at the University of British Columbia and co-author of Who Owns Outer Space?, which I would recommend. I just finished it last night. Please don’t forget to subscribe on YouTube and, of course, on theAnalysis.news website where, if you like this kind of content, you can contribute if you feel inclined. We’ll see you in a moment.

Hi, I’m back with Michael Byers for the second part of a two-part conversation. If you want to see the first part, it’s up on the site where we talk about the Golden Dome, Donald Trump, and space.

Michael Byers

What I want to get people excited about is the fact that we already have a tragedy of the commons in low Earth orbit. It’s not created by military activity. It’s created by companies like SpaceX launching thousands of satellites. It’s created by the proliferation of debris. We may already be seeing chemical changes to the upper atmosphere as a result of thousands of these satellites reentering the atmosphere at the end of their operational lives and burning up into billions of particles of things like aluminum.

Barry Stevens

How many are there up there right now?

Michael Byers

Well, I haven’t counted in the last month or so, but in terms of—

Barry Stevens

Approximately, was it 10,000? Is it 20,00?

Michael Byers

No, it’s more than that. We’re up around 14,000 operational satellites now. But then, you know, in addition to that, literally millions of pieces of space debris in orbit. Some of the pieces are really small but still potentially lethal, and some of the pieces of space debris are very large. There are more than 2,000 abandoned rocket bodies in low Earth orbit. Some of them are up to 10 tons of metal.

There’s a lot of junk in low Earth orbit that has accumulated over the past 70 years, and that’s a problem because it creates collision risks for operational satellites. It’s a problem in terms of all of this debris. Some of it creates reflections that interfere with ground-based astronomy and with just the average person’s ability to enjoy the night sky. The night sky is getting brighter because of all this debris, and then you can sometimes see actual satellites, visible crossing your field of vision to the point where it’s becoming difficult to tell what’s a satellite and what is a star. Then you have the issue that this debris comes down over time, and so we’re seeing more pieces of debris impacting the surface of the planet. It doesn’t all burn up. And so there’s now a casualty risk, which extends to a risk to airplanes in flight.

Barry Stevens

So you’re saying that a satellite could come down and hit a plane that was flying here on Earth, a piece of a satellite?

Michael Byers

Yeah. So a satellite or a rocket body that was reentering Earth’s orbit did not burn up entirely. There could be surviving pieces, and as they came down to the surface of the planet, one of them could strike an airplane in flight. Engineers have told me that as little as 300 grams of space debris impacting a Boeing or an Airbus could cause a catastrophic accident. The probability of this is really, really small. Let me be clear.

Barry Stevens

Yeah, that’s what I was going to say.

Michael Byers

Yeah, statistically, you’re much more likely to be struck by lightning. But the point is that this very, very low risk is increasing as more and more objects go into space, more and more debris is created, and more and more objects start to reenter the atmosphere. We’re already at the point where, in November 2022, France and Spain closed areas of their airspace because of a re-entering Chinese rocket body. So those two countries deemed that the risk to aviation was high enough to actually close airspace, which interfered with 600 commercial flights.

So this is the new reality. You know, space is not out there. Space is starting to come here. Whether it’s light pollution, whether it’s reentering space debris creating casualty risks, whether it’s changes to the upper atmosphere caused by all the stuff that does burn up and injects billions of particles into the upper atmosphere, potentially affecting climate change or the ozone layer. So the new reality is that Earth and space are the same environment. And we are loading up space with stuff that is going to affect the upper atmosphere and is going to affect the surface of the planet.

That’s just a consequence of this exponential growth driven first and foremost by SpaceX, which, because of their reusable rockets, which they developed 11 years ago, 12 years ago, now gives them the capacity to launch thousands of satellites each year, and have plans to launch, you mentioned 70,000. SpaceX has filed for permission to launch one million satellites as space-based data centers for artificial intelligence.

Barry Stevens

Well, just hold for a second. Like Elon Musk, the boss of SpaceX, I saw somewhere he said that you could have a billion satellites out there, and there wouldn’t be a problem because how many cars are there on the surface of Earth? Occasionally, there’ll be a crash, but there are far more layers in space. So he seemed to suggest it was safe. But you’re saying that these satellites can bump into each other?

Michael Byers

Elon Musk is supremely confident of his own knowledge, and we’ve seen his knowledge fail in many domains. He has changed the paradigm. I give him some credit. He drove the electrification of the automobile market worldwide with Tesla, and the reusable rockets are exciting, and they’ve lowered the cost of spaceflight. But on stuff like this, he’s dreaming. He’s not taking into account those millions of pieces of debris that are too small to be tracked and therefore too small to be avoided. He’s basing this assumption on the fact that you can do collision avoidance maneuvers with all of these satellites. He’s also ignoring the risk from solar storms, which can raise the atmosphere and create additional drag for satellites, therefore pulling them out of their orbital shells and complicating that whole collision avoidance situation.

So if I were the President of the United States and had a united Congress behind me, I’d be cracking down on Elon Musk and saying, “You don’t need a million satellites. You don’t need 70,000 satellites. You’ve got the best engineers in the world. Build your system with 5,000 satellites. That’s all you get.” And they’ll do it.

I mean, the reason they’re going for tens of thousands or even a million satellites is because they’ve adopted the consumer electronic model of rapid disposal and replacement. They take the view that space is so big that it doesn’t matter, and if you can launch thousands of satellites every year, then why not avoid the redundancies, to do cheap mass-produced satellites, use them for four years, and throw them away, and it doesn’t work.

I mean, I’m old enough to remember when we thought the oceans were so big that garbage in the ocean didn’t matter. We now have a plastics crisis in the ocean. I’m old enough to remember when the atmosphere was so big that it didn’t matter how many smokestacks you had, how much carbon you were throwing into the atmosphere. It was big. It would absorb it all. Now we know that we’ve created climate change. This triumph of optimism, of entrepreneurship, over a careful assessment of risk and a failure to recognize that the idea of precaution is important. If you don’t know whether something could be insanely dangerous, perhaps you should stop and figure out whether it’s going to be insanely dangerous before you start to do it. That’s the precautionary principle.

Barry Stevens

Precautionary principle, absolutely, and the ocean metaphor is a really good one. You talked about stuff falling down out of space and causing danger to the Earth. In fact, I think in your book there was a photo of a Chinese bit of a rocket which fell in India. But there’s also this matter of things crashing into one another in space. I don’t know if viewers will remember the movie Gravity, where a cascade of collisions was caused. And it has a name, right? The Kessler Syndrome, or [crosstalk 00:10:06]—

Michael Byers

Yes, the Kessler syndrome. It’s a collisional cascade. So every time you have a collision, you increase the surface area of the material. Like, if you take two objects and you break them into 20 objects, you’re going to have a much larger surface area collectively. And surface area is what creates collision risk in a place where objects are moving at 17 kilometers a second in different directions, which is the situation in low Earth orbit. Everything’s moving at 17 kilometers per second, and it’s all moving in different directions. So the impacts are very high energy and create a lot of fragmentation, increasing a lot of surface area. Now, the thing I need to say—

Barry Stevens

I’m reading that a couple of satellites have already collided, Iridium and Cosmos, I think.

Michael Byers

Oh, yeah. There have been a number of collisions and an awful lot of close calls. Now I need to say, about the movie Gravity, that they dramatically sped up the process for the purpose of entertainment. We weren’t prepared to sit in the cinema for 10 years to watch the process unfold, so they sped it up into just a couple of minutes, but the risk is real that you could get a collisional cascade. In fact, we might already be in the early stages of this.

There are different ways to respond to this risk of a collisional cascade. One is to actively deorbit your satellites at the end of their lives. Now, we realize that this then creates further problems, like possible changes to the upper atmosphere, but that’s the approach that SpaceX has been taking to actively deorbit at the end of operational lives. There are others who want to go up and actually grab a hold of large objects in low Earth orbit, and bring them back into an atmospheric reentry to get them out of space. That’s really an expensive thing to do and very challenging from an engineering perspective, but it might be a partial solution if we got some of the really big objects out of orbit that might help.

Barry Stevens

But the little ones you’re talking about, they’re still flying 17 kilometers a second. Even something the size of a fingernail could certainly do some damage.

Michael Byers

Yes, and that leads me to the final sort of mitigation option, which is to stop putting so much junk up there. If you want to solve the ocean plastics problem, the first thing you should do is stop putting plastic in the ocean, stop adding to the problem. So we need to find a way of agreeing on some limits on the amount of stuff we’re putting into low Earth orbit. As I’ve said, one thing that governments could do is tell satellite companies, you can’t have 20,000 satellites, you can’t have 100,000 satellites. You have to get your engineers to make do and build your system with a smaller number, and that smaller number can have redundancies. They can have longer lifespans. They can have higher capacities. But you have to limit the number of things that you put up. And we do this.

Barry Stevens

And a Kessler syndrome would also knock out all of our communication— I mean, if it was huge, it could knock out all of our communication or knock out GPS, knock out— you were talking about the search and rescue operations.

Michael Byers

Yeah. Now, GPS is higher up. It’s in mid-Earth orbit.

Barry Stevens

Right. Geostationary. Right.

Michael Byers

But the areas that we’re talking about— so SpaceX’s Starlink at the moment is at 550 kilometers. It’s really busy between about 350 kilometers up to around 900 kilometers, and that’s where we’re getting into a debris crisis. That’s where we’re starting to see a lot of collision avoidance to try to avoid these problems, and that’s where a lot of these companies want to build additional constellations.

There are two Chinese companies that are beginning to construct so-called megaconstellations of communication satellites, and they’re putting them up around 800, 850 kilometers above the surface. They’re also just dumping the rocket bodies in low Earth orbit, adding to the problem. They’re not even bringing the rocket bodies back at the end of the mission in a controlled manner, which is the best practice today.

So the simple thing here is that we’re approaching a tragedy of the commons. Governments so far are letting companies put up as much stuff as they want. They’re doing so based mostly on the desire to support their domestic space economies. They’re also doing so because a lot of these satellites are so-called dual-use satellites. They’re also useful for military communications or military surveillance. And yeah, we’re operating in a domain where there are, at the moment, very few limits.

The only effective organization of any kind is something called the International Telecommunication Union, which coordinates the use of the radio spectrum, and every spacecraft needs radio spectrum. But even that mechanism is having challenges keeping up with the pace of what’s happening and keeping up with governments that are just 100% behind these companies as they expand into space.

Barry Stevens

That’s very interesting. They’re 100% behind the companies. But why— you mentioned that they have dual use, military and commercial, and Elon Musk’s SpaceX is involved, both in commercial operations with Starlink and also military. He’s part of the Golden Dome, which we talked about in the last episode. Isn’t that a violation of the Outer Space Treaty that all this militarization combined with commercialization isn’t that, if not the letter, the spirit?

Michael Byers

Arguably, it is contrary to the original spirit of the Outer Space Treaty. But since, certainly, the early 1960s, the use of satellites to support military operations on the ground has been treated as legal, as permitted. And satellites are incredibly useful for surveillance, for arms control verification, and not just for food production or search and rescue. Communication satellites are enormously important. There are lots of remote communities, for instance, in the Arctic that are entirely reliant on satellites for communication. There are no cables going to any of the 28 communities in the Canadian territory of Nunavut. There are 28 communities in Nunavut, and none of them has a cable going to them. It’s all satellites. So—

Barry Stevens

Is it fair to say that the great expansion of the number of satellites, both by China and the United States, is motivated in part by, in the case of the United States and the Golden Dome, or am I exaggerating that? I mean, 70,000 satellites plus data centers and so forth, and Elon Musk’s company being so bankrolled by the United States government.

Michael Byers

Yeah, so it’s interesting when SpaceX went to the U.S. Federal Communications Commission initially for permission to launch the first Starlink satellites; the business model was to provide communications to rural and remote communities, and Starlink is really good at doing that. But then in February 2022, Russia launched the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and on the day of the invasion, someone, probably Russia, conducted a cyber attack against the American company Viasat that was providing satellite communications for the Ukrainian military, and so that company, it’s services went down on the day of the invasion. And Elon Musk stepped up and said, “It’s okay. I’ve turned on Starlink coverage over Ukraine, and I’m shipping thousands of these pizza box-sized ground stations to Ukraine, like right away.” And within about 48 hours, the Ukrainian military was using Starlink, and Starlink proved resistant to Russian attempts at jamming and became the communications backbone for the Ukrainian military effort. Were it not for Starlink, there’s a very good chance that Ukraine would have been overwhelmed. But all of a sudden, they had reliable real-time communications.

So, just to give you an example, you could have a drone operator on the front line with a GoPro camera on his drone and line-of-sight communication with the drone that’s scoping out where the Russian tanks are a couple of kilometers ahead. He gets his line-of-sight video feedback from the front line and transmits it instantly on a small Starlink terminal. The signal bounces down to the artillery unit that’s 30 kilometers behind the front line, and all of a sudden, they’ve got a real-time video feed of the Russian tank with the GPS coordinates. So all of a sudden, you’ve changed the balance of power because you have this real-time communication.

Now, I have a lot of problems with Elon Musk, but it was still, in terms of helping the Ukrainian military, it was an important and, I think, laudable thing. But the problem with it then is that every country in the world looked at this and said, “Oh my God, these like communications constellations are very powerful military tools. We want this capability too.” And all of a sudden, overnight, SpaceX’s business model changed, and the primary customers for Starlink are now militaries because their budgets are huge.

The small Inuit community in the Canadian Arctic isn’t a big customer. It doesn’t compare with the Pentagon, the government of the United Kingdom, or the government of Israel, which wants to have this as a military tool. And so that’s where the change occurred. It was driven by people realizing the incredible power of this technology. It’s still a dual-use technology. I’m still happy that my friends in Arctic Canada can have the same quality of broadband that I do, but it’s a changing landscape, and Elon Musk, unfortunately, is an unreliable partner in all of this.

Shortly after these developments happened in Ukraine, he was persuaded by the Russian ambassador to Washington that he needed to limit the extent of Starlink coverage because the Ukrainians were being too effective in its use. He stopped coverage over the Black Sea, where the Ukrainian military was using Starlink terminals on small unmanned Zodiac boats to go hunting Russian warships. Elon Musk was persuaded that this was destabilizing, so he cut the Ukrainians off.

Barry Stevens

Behind that conflict, of course, is the very real possibility of a global thermonuclear war. And it’s not—

Michael Byers

And behind that is— yes, and that was what Elon Musk said he was worried about, and I don’t know. I mean, people who say that we don’t want to be pushing back too hard on Russia because they have nuclear weapons sometimes forget that it was Russia that invaded Ukraine. Balancing that situation is difficult. All I’m saying is that commercial space-based assets are part of the picture.

Another thing that’s important to mention here is that by using these commercial satellites to support the Ukrainian military in frontline operations and things like targeting, these Western companies have made their commercial satellites legitimate targets under the laws of war. And so now we’re into a very confusing situation where we have literally thousands of satellites that, under the laws of war at least, could be legitimately targeted by Russia. Russia has shown restraint in this respect. It clearly doesn’t want to escalate into a direct armed conflict with NATO countries, but it’s a precarious situation. And again, it’s driven by the technological change, and it’s driven to a disturbing degree by one individual, one unpredictable individual named Donald Trump, in collusion with another unpredictable individual named Elon Musk.

Barry Stevens

If you’re going to start attacking commercial/military satellites with what, anti-satellite weapons in space or an anti-satellite weapon from Earth? And is anybody planning that? Is anybody practicing that?

Michael Byers

There have been a number of tests over the years of ground-based missiles against satellites owned by the same company or country that’s conducting the test. So yes, India has—

Barry Stevens

They’re shooting at their own satellites?

Michael Byers

Shooting their own satellite as a test, usually a defunct satellite. So the United States has done it, China’s done it, India’s done it, and Russia did so as recently as November 2021. They create debris. It’s not a great thing to do. But they are restrained to some degree by the fact that a collisional cascade would take out everyone’s satellite. So, you would lose from your own action if you started to use ground-based missiles to target more than one or two other satellites.

Barry Stevens

But since there’s so little cooperation and so much hostility between great powers at this point, I was wondering, like, isn’t there any world governance organization that can manage or have rules about this? And does the United Nations administer or have something to do with the Outer Space Treaty of 1967?

Michael Byers

It does. There are—

Barry Stevens

The Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space, I think.

Michael Byers

The United Nations General Assembly created a committee of the General Assembly in 1958 called the Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space. That’s where the multilateral space treaties were negotiated in the 1960s and early ‘70s, and this body is still functional. I attend meetings in Vienna at the United Nations complex there, and the Russian, Chinese, American, and Indian delegations are present and engaged. It’s called the Spirit of Vienna. Progress is very slow, but there is progress, and it’s always better to jaw-jaw than it is to war-war. They don’t deal with security issues. That’s part of the reason that the dialogue continues. The security issues are supposed to be dealt with at the Conference on Disarmament, which is a permanent body based in Geneva. And like the committee in Vienna, the Conference on Disarmament uses consensus decision-making, and that has resulted in essentially a number of vetoes or blocking of progress in the Conference on Disarmament.

Barry Stevens

And that’s where Russia and China have proposed banning all weapons in space, and the United States vetoed that.

Michael Byers

Yes, and there are competing visions for what arms control should look like in space. The Russian and Chinese proposal, which has been around for well over a decade now, on its face looks perfectly reasonable. The problem isn’t so much the content of the proposal. The problem for many people is whether there’s actual goodwill behind it or whether this is a bit of a ruse. But the American proposal isn’t all that attractive either. They basically say you have to deal with the ground-based missiles; you can’t just deal with what’s in space. So they’ve created a kind of false dichotomy where they’re not really moving forward together on space security.

But the good news is that when the Conference on Disarmament becomes blocked, as it became blocked on, for instance, anti-personnel landmines or on cluster munitions, then people move the negotiations elsewhere. I mean, we got a landmines convention, we got a cluster munitions convention, because countries said, “Look, you know, the Conference on Disarmament is not working. Let’s try something else.”

Barry Stevens

Well, then perhaps there’s a role for middle powers, as they call themselves, such as Canada or, I don’t know, Indonesia, to put together some rules of the road, to put some brakes on this militarization in space or other problems? Is that a possibility?

Michael Byers

Yeah. We have to try, right? And even if you—

Barry Stevens

Are we trying?

Michael Byers

There are efforts being made. There was, for instance, a British diplomatic initiative roughly six or seven years ago now that resulted in the creation of an open-ended working group under the United Nations General Assembly to try to shift the conversation away from weapons to threats and behavior in space. That started a new conversation. It hasn’t resulted in a treaty, but again, this is the realistic international lawyer speaking here: a treaty is a means to an end, but it’s not the only means of getting to coordinated action. Sometimes you can have de facto agreements, implicit agreements. You can get simply restrained behavior across different countries. And again, I point to the fact that no country has, in the entire history of human activity in space, struck another country’s satellite.

Barry Stevens

So far.

Michael Byers

So far. But isn’t that amazing?

Barry Stevens

Yes.

Michael Byers

Is my point, right? And so far, we still have the International Telecommunication Union, the world’s oldest international organization, founded in 1865 as the International Telegraph Union, still coordinating the use of radio spectrum in Earth orbit. We have some mechanisms in place. We still have cooperative institutions like the International Space Station or the Cospas-Sarsat satellite system. Compare—

Barry Stevens

Yeah, I’m sorry, I take your point that there are some really positive cooperative things, but it raises the question for me. I’m not actually clear who’s managing, who’s the traffic cop, because you’ve got all these satellites moving around very rapidly, 17 kilometers a second. I read somewhere that the kind of wonderfully named 18th Space Defense Squadron of Space Force at Space Base Vandenberg is managing 50,000 things flying around and telling them when they’re going to bump into each other. That’s what I imagine anyway, crudely.

Michael Byers

But yeah, no, it really is—

Barry Stevens

And if it’s a unit of the U.S. military, doesn’t that itself raise some problems?

Michael Byers

Well, it’s interesting that you mention this because, yes, the U.S. military has been sharing information about collision risks with satellite operators from a wide variety of countries for a long time. It’s a little bit like GPS, right? The GPS satellites are owned by the U.S. military, but we use them for a whole range of civilian purposes, including the timing of banking transactions. It’s not just navigation. It’s easy to look at the U.S. military as simply a large, threatening, warfighting machine. But from time to time, they actually do some stuff that’s positive from a civilian perspective. And sharing this information to help others avoid collisions is in everyone’s interest.

Barry Stevens

But is it sufficient? Is it—

Michael Byers

Oh, it’s—

Barry Stevens

Is this Space Defense Squadron in California sufficient to manage this proliferation?

Michael Byers

It’s not sufficient, but it’s a heck of a lot better than the situation would be in its absence. This is where I want to come to. Perhaps the most important point I can make in this conversation is that space is far from perfect, and we are entering a phase where one country in particular, under Donald Trump, is changing the paradigm, talking about a warfighting domain, and investing up to a trillion dollars and potentially putting missile interceptors in low Earth orbit. That’s a big concern, and the fact that other countries now feel they have to respond to this is an equally big concern.

But overall, there is more cooperation and coordination in space than in any other domain of human activity. So it’s not all bad. It’s not all threatening. We get trapped into a way of thinking that’s been conditioned by science fiction, of wars in space, of conflict, to think that this is an entirely pessimistic situation. It’s not. We have functioning treaties, we have functioning bodies, we have a lot of coordination, we still do things together, and that creates opportunity. So yes, it’s going in a negative direction right now, but it’s not catastrophic, not yet.

So part of the reason that I’m attracted to space, coming with my skill set as someone who works on international cooperation and international law and the intersection of those things with technology and science, is that this is something we can turn around. We can maintain, \Earth orbit that’s accessible to everyone, that doesn’t have a collisional cascade that results in a loss of access for good things as well as bad things. We can actually promote cooperation with China to build that radio telescope facility on the far side of the Moon. The idea of doing missions together with the Soviets in the 1960s and 1970s was an idea that deserves to be revived today with the Chinese.

So I’m actually, you know, the glass is one quarter full, right, but the point is there’s still some water in it. And you can look at it in an entirely cynical way, and it’s really tempting to look at it in an entirely cynical way given the catastrophe that occupies the Oval Office at the moment. And given—

Barry Stevens

And, it should be said also that Congress, because Congress has banned NASA from cooperating with the Chinese Space Agency.

Michael Byers

They have, but they’ve also, over the years, given a number of waivers that have allowed some cooperation to happen. But my point is that, yeah, the glass is only one quarter full, but let’s work to make it a little bit fuller. Let’s not throw it away. How we talk about it affects the future. If we’re entirely pessimistic, entirely cynical, then we undermine the possibility of good stuff happening.

So let’s be realistic. Let’s talk about the threat of weaponization. Let’s talk about the Golden Dome as a really dangerous thing. Let’s talk about all of the risks associated with having a commercial monopoly in space run by Elon Musk. That’s a really bad thing, but then let’s find the cracks in all this. “Let’s find where the light can still come in,” to paraphrase Leonard Cohen. There’s still reason for hope, and myself and literally tens of thousands of other people around the world are trying to make those good things happen in space.

Barry Stevens

Yeah. Thank you, Michael. It was a very, very good conversation, and I look forward to speaking again, maybe in a year or two, when hopefully there’ll be a little more light that’s moved through those cracks. Thank you.

Michael Byers

Well, thank you. Thank you for the great conversation. Thank you for doing your homework. You’ve clearly learned a lot about outer space, and I’m very appreciative of that.

Barry Stevens

I was up late last night.

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Barry Stevens
Welcome to theAnalysis. I’m Barry Stevens. I’m joined today by international law expert Michael Byers, and we’re going to be talking about outer space. Don’t forget to subscribe on YouTube or on theAnalysis.news website, where, if you like this kind of content, you can also contribute. I’ll see you in a moment.

“The exploration and use of outer space shall be carried out for the benefit and in the interests of all countries, and shall be the province of all mankind.” Now, that’s Article I of the Outer Space Treaty, signed in 1967. So, at the height of the Cold War, the communist Soviet Union and capitalist United States managed to agree that space belongs to everyone in peace.

Well, maybe not anymore, because behind the breathless media coverage of astronauts circling the Moon and rockets landing by themselves is the militarization of space, especially by the U.S.A., which is looking, of course, to build what they call a ‘Golden Dome’ to protect its homeland.

Rival Moon bases are planned by both China and the United States. Meanwhile, a single company, Elon Musk’s, is looking to have 70,000 satellites in orbit. Space is getting crowded with very little traffic management. Basically, no one’s in charge.

So, my guest today is Michael Byers, who is Canada Research Chair in Global Politics and International Law at the University of British Columbia and co-author of Who Owns Outer Space?, which I would recommend. I just finished it last night. So, Michael, what worries you most about what’s happening in space right now?

Michael Byers
What is the worst thing happening in space? I have a choice of different bad things that I could talk about in my response, but I want to start by saying it’s not all bad. So, for instance, Earth imaging satellites in low Earth orbit have enabled humanity to dramatically expand food production over the last half century by monitoring moisture levels, insect infestations, things like that. Space has certain utility to it, but you’re right, there are some dynamics underway that threaten our continued peaceful access to space. We’re also in a situation where a tragedy of the commons is emerging in low Earth orbit because of the exponential rise in the number of human-made objects there.

So what’s the worst thing? I would have to say that it’s the adoption of the language that outer space is a “warfighting domain.” And that language was first articulated by Donald Trump during his first term as president when he announced the creation of the U.S. Space Force. As you mentioned, when you quoted Article I of the Outer Space Treaty, humanity has been in agreement since the 1960s that space should be a peaceful domain, and indeed, the 1967 Outer Space Treaty can be seen as an arms control agreement. It prohibits the deployment of nuclear weapons in space. It talks about peaceful use. It was essentially the Soviet Union and the United States coming together to draw a border around their geopolitical and military competition on Earth and saying that space would be different, that the Cold War would not extend there.

Donald Trump, as he has done on so many other things, has ripped up this decades-long consensus, adopted the language of warfighting domain, poured tens to hundreds of billions of dollars into the militarization of space, including for the Golden Dome, which in its most expansive plan includes missile interceptors based in low Earth orbit. When you start talking about a domain like space as a warfighting domain, that almost becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. How would you expect the Chinese government to respond to that kind of language and that kind of spending? Well, to invest more in the Chinese militarization of space.

You can very quickly get an escalatory cycle where, again, up until 10 years ago space was peaceful. It was reserved mostly for civilian functions. And insofar as it was used for military functions, those functions were simply to support military operations on the surface of the planet. So facilitating communication, using Earth imagery for surveillance purposes.

Barry Stevens
GPS, for instance, was a, I guess, a military—

Michael Byers
GPS, the Global Positioning System, is owned by the U.S. military, but the decision was made to open up those signals to anyone to support and promote the terrestrial economy, and also things like civilian navigation, and search and rescue. I guess my point here is that there’s been a character change in how the world thinks about space as a result of Donald Trump. I worry that this peaceful domain, where no country has ever struck another country’s satellite with a physical object, and no one has ever shot down someone else’s satellite with a ground-based missile, that more than half a century of restraint could now be crumbling as a result of Donald Trump reframing the situation and choosing to weaponize it.

Barry Stevens
Yeah, I think that, if I’m not mistaken, that executive order where he launched Space Force as a semi-independent branch of the services, didn’t he also explicitly say that space was not a global commons? Am I wrong about that?

Michael Byers
Yeah, so the first Trump administration explicitly denied that space was a global commons. It just so happened that the executive director of the Space Advisory Council set up under Donald Trump, a man named Scott Pace, whom I like and respect, had a bit of a bugbear with the term global commons. So he took a potshot at it when writing the executive order. But that’s not so important.

Space is prohibited from becoming subject to national appropriation. You can’t claim sovereignty of orbits or of the Moon or of asteroids; that’s explicitly prohibited. There’s a freedom of exploration and use that’s set out explicitly at the front end of the Outer Space Treaty. So the—

Barry Stevens
And rescue, right? There’s an obligation to help each other in space as well as just not attack each other.

Michael Byers
Yeah, and a lot of these rules still work very well today. But my point is that reframing the domain as a warfighting domain instead of a domain of peace and cooperation has shifted the mindset of other countries also. China doesn’t want to get into an arms race with the United States in space. China is fully integrated into the global economy. It’s the world’s largest trading state. It doesn’t stand to benefit from provoking conflict with Western countries, and it certainly doesn’t want to do that in space, but it’s been dragged into it by the rhetoric and the actions of Donald J. Trump, and that’s a cause of great concern. It’s very destabilizing.

Barry Stevens
It may be just Donald J. Trump, but one sees a tremendous number of people and institutions, including the Space Force, of course, jumping on board and private industry. Just to what you were saying about this new direction. I’m reminded of, and was reminded in your book, of the ISS. There was also a moment when I think Apollo and Soyuz had a kind of meeting in space. But the International Space Station was this pretty extraordinary co-production of several countries, but especially the Soviet Union and the United States, or Russia and the United States, and that was remarkable, I thought.

Michael Byers
It continues to this day. So, when I talk about Donald Trump, I have to be clear that there are people in the U.S. space system, including NASA, who recognize the value of having cooperative mechanisms like the International Space Station.

So in the last couple of years, after the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine and a serious breakdown in Russian-NATO relations, American astronauts, several of them, have launched from the International Space Station on Russian Soyuz rockets from the Russian cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. And several Russian cosmonauts have launched from Cape Canaveral on SpaceX Falcon 9 rockets to the International Space Station. Neither NASA nor the Russian space agency, Roscosmos, had to do this. They’re perfectly capable of launching their own people. They did the switch simply to demonstrate to the world that they’re still cooperating with each other. I’m not sure whether Donald Trump has been aware of this or not, but the point is that some cooperation continues.

Now, to give you another example, there’s an international organization based in Montreal called Cospas-Sarsat that was created in 1979 by the USSR, the United States, Canada, and France to pool their satellites for the purposes of receiving emergency signals from search and rescue beacons on Earth’s surface. This system has saved tens of thousands of lives since the 1980s.

Barry Stevens
Right.

Michael Byers
It’s still functioning today. Russian satellites, Chinese satellites, American satellites, Canadian satellites, we’re all in this together. We’re using the satellites to save lives, and the beacons themselves are now mandatory on every aircraft and every boat or ship above a certain size. So it’s part of the international safety system for aviation and for navigation. It started in 1979, and it’s the International Organization, a small international organization, but it’s the international organization that no one has ever heard of because it works so well.

Barry Stevens
On the other hand, I just read the acting NASA administrator— I don’t remember the name— recently said, “The goal is to beat China to the Moon, not just to leave footprints, but this time to stay.” Well, that’s not particularly aggressive, but on the other hand, you have the Artemis Accords. Maybe you could talk about that, because when I was reading about the Artemis Accords, which are kind of an agreement between the United States and its allies, including Canada, to have their own set of rules, which seem— and I believe Russia and China were not happy about that. It does seem to be sort of— is it making an end run around the Outer Space Treaty?

Michael Byers
On the American program concerning the Moon, when Barack Obama became president, he wanted the United States to go further, to do something new, and he announced that Mars was the goal for human spaceflight for NASA. At the same time, a brash young entrepreneur named Elon Musk got seriously into space, very successfully into space, with the explicit goal of taking human beings to Mars. So it was all about Mars until Donald Trump became president in his first term and rejected everything that Barack Obama had done, and so it couldn’t be Mars anymore, it had to be back to the Moon. The Moon had the additional attraction that it was at least plausible that Americans could return to the Moon while Donald Trump was still president.

The whole obsession with the Moon is driven by Donald Trump’s insecurity vis-à-vis Barack Obama and his successes. Of course, the media loves astronauts. It loves rockets. The Moon is baked into our collective self-conscious as a result of the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs back in the ’50s and ’60s.

So everyone has got on board with the Moon, but realistically, the Moon is a waste of time. It’s got very little water, it’s got very little in the way of natural resources, it’s covered with tiny particles of razor-sharp dust, and it’s only got 1/6th of Earth’s gravity. It’s not an attractive location. Whereas Mars is much more interesting. Mars has 1/3 of Earth’s gravity. Mars used to be a watery planet. There’s still lots and lots of water frozen into the permafrost and under the poles. There’s even, quite possibly evidence of ancient life forms, microscopic life forms on Mars.

So when I look at the whole Artemis program and astronauts flying around the Moon, I feel like I’m in a time warp. I feel like I’m back in the 1960s. I mean, almost expecting JFK to pop up on the television screen. So I have trouble taking this seriously, apart from the fact that governments are spending hundreds of billions of dollars trying to do this, and they’re seeking to justify it as a race with China, which is basically where the United States was during the 1960s, trying to develop its space capabilities, looking at the Moon as an easy first step and waving the flag. But again, they’re chasing an object, the Moon, that really isn’t that valuable.

Barry Stevens
That’s very interesting. I’m not quite sure why we need to go to Mars except for scientific curiosity, which is great, of course. But the way Elon Musk frames it is sort of like Earth II. Once this place goes to shit, well, we’ll go to another planet, which of course is offensive to anyone who cares about this planet dealing with its major crises, especially, of course, climate change.

Michael Byers
Yeah, well, let’s be clear: there is no Planet B. Earth is a uniquely hospitable location for life, and we have evolved specifically for this planet and the conditions here. Mars is really hard. You step outside without a spacesuit, you’re dead. If you don’t have an air conditioning system in your habitation, you’re dead. If there’s a major solar storm and you haven’t tunneled underneath the surface of the planet, you’re dead from radiation. The list goes on.

So, in order to have any human beings on Mars for any length of time would cost quite literally trillions of dollars. It’s not an economically feasible option. But I should say, and you mentioned it, the scientific attractions of Mars are enormous. Imagine if we were to retrieve the samples that have been collected on Mars by NASA’s Perseverance rover over the last few years. If we were able to bring them back to Earth robotically, study them here, and were to get 100% confirmation that life had existed on Mars, that arguably would be the greatest scientific discovery in human history. Donald Trump has canceled that sample return mission.

Barry Stevens
I didn’t know that, actually.

Michael Byers
He wants to build the Golden Dome at a cost of a trillion dollars, and to help pay for that, or because he’s not interested in science, or because he doesn’t want something from Mars that could challenge organized religion, he’s canceled that sample return mission and thus denied us the opportunity to learn something potentially quite profound about the origins of life, about our place in the universe. Mars is primarily a science destination. That’s also why the big space companies aren’t interested in Mars, because there’s not much to do there except science. Whereas if you go to the Moon, well, then there’s this race with China, and you’re going to be trying to develop some mining of helium-3, which is going to be preposterously expensive.

The opportunities to collect around the massive government trough of funding for a space race, for a competitive situation, are very attractive not just for the SpaceXs of the world, but the Lockheed Martins, the Palantirs. I mean, they’re all in it. Ultimately, it’s just another way of taking money out of the taxpayer’s pocket, whereas Mars doesn’t cost as much and is about something useful, something interesting. It’s about advancing our knowledge. And that’s where the divide really comes down. It’s between money-making versus learning more about the universe.

Barry Stevens
Well, let’s talk about the Golden Dome. A colleague of mine, the editor of this channel, actually, likes to say that it’s more about the gold than the dome. But as you were saying, it’s a trough. And space, you know, before all this high-flown talk about peace, has always been involved with the military, right from the V-2 rockets fired by the Nazis onto London and right up to now.

So the Golden Dome is— the idea is to protect the United States with a shield like Israel’s Iron Dome system and protect it from nuclear weapons being fired from China, Russia, North Korea, wherever. The problem, the critics say, is that hitting a bullet with a bullet is always going to be more expensive than just firing a bullet. You know, the offense can always saturate the defense at a fraction of the cost. So is that— is there any technical feasibility to this? Has that cost exchange ratio changed at all, or are they just spending a trillion dollars to learn the same lesson that Reagan learned 40 years ago?

Michael Byers
I’m careful to never say never. Technology, especially space technology, has been developing at an enormous rate. Elon Musk’s pioneering of reusable rockets has changed some of the cost equations in pretty fundamental ways. But you’re absolutely right that it’s difficult to imagine a space-based missile interceptor system that, first of all, would work, and secondly, would be in any way protected against attack on that space-based system.

To give you just one specific example, in response to Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, the so-called Star Wars, which included the idea of placing interceptors in space, so-called bright pebbles. Some Soviet scientists came up with an attack system, which they published, called the pellet ring. With one large rocket, a Proton rocket, they could launch half a million tiny 3mm steel pellets into a curtain across the orbital plane of all of these missile interceptors and essentially have a curtain of shotgun pellets just knocking these missile interceptor satellites out one by one, not by blowing them up, but by penetrating the machine and destroying the electronics.

I haven’t heard any astrophysicist explain why this wouldn’t work. It would work, and so for the price of half a million steel pellets and a single rocket, this entire Golden Dome space-based system could be rendered inert. Of course, people who are selling a product don’t want to tell you about the potential problems with the product. They want to tell you about how amazing it’s going to be. How this is going to be the best thing ever. Why you should give them money and acquire this product. And so, discussions about the vulnerability of the Golden Dome. So it’s not just, could it work if you throw enough money at it, but could you actually protect it against attack?

Of course, if you’re not interested in that, if your goal is simply to get massive government contracts to develop technologies to launch satellites, well, this isn’t about the end goal. This is about the voyage and the massive profits that will be accumulated along the way. This is happening at a time when you’ve seen the Trump administration and Elon Musk, when he had his Department of Government Efficiency, cutting USAID, the U.S. International Development Program, at the cost of several million lives in sub-Saharan Africa. I mean, this is the other irony of all of this, is that there’s this explosion in military spending on what looks like sci-fi to the profit of these massive corporations at the same time that the same government and the same people are making choices that are killing millions of vulnerable people here on Earth.

So, yeah, you can get really angry about it, and I try not to. My job is not to take on the whole system. My job is to say, have you thought about risk? Have you thought about vulnerabilities? Can we identify why cooperation might work better than conflict in this particular domain? And part of this is in the hope that whoever follows Donald J. Trump might actually be interested in expert advice and be interested in rational decision-making. Right now it’s pretty chaotic. There’s not a lot of room for policy advice. But I want to do more than just shout into the void.

Barry Stevens
The Golden Dome and, indeed, Star Wars were in violation of the old Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. I just want to ask for your comment about that, being an international law expert. That seemed to me to be the cornerstone and a very important part of cooperation, as you said, arms control. The idea being that since you can always find ways to evade a defense, a missile defense, whether it’s pebbles, missiles coming over the South Pole, or any number of other things that Russia is coming up with, that your vulnerability is in the sense your best security in this nightmare of nuclear weapons, and so the ABM Treaty was the two sides agreeing not to put up a defense which could be overwhelmed and create an arms race which could be very, very dangerous. But that was thrown out 25 years ago, I guess, by George W. Bush. I just wondered if you could comment on that, on the ABM.

Michael Byers
Yeah, well, the ABM Treaty was part of a package of arms control treaties between the United States and the Soviet Union. You’re absolutely right, its goal was to preserve mutually assured destruction, to ensure that no country would be protected from retaliation in the event that they launched a first nuclear strike.

Barry Stevens
And you can see where that’s attractive too. I mean, you can see why Reagan thought, “Wait a minute, I don’t like mutually assured destruction.” It is an attractive idea to be protected.

Michael Byers
I don’t like mutually assured destruction, but it may be the reason why you and I are here. We avoided a nuclear war between the Soviet Union and the United States, in part because of those arms control treaties, in part because of submarine-launched intercontinental ballistic missiles, which are the second strike. They operate deep under the ocean or under the ice cap in the Arctic to precisely survive a first strike and be able to deliver that response.

I don’t like that, but arguably it worked, and the George W. Bush administration was riding high on not just the end of the Cold War, but the economic collapse of Russia and the diminishment of Russian military power. They had their own logic. Unlike the current administration, people like Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney had a logic, not one I agreed with, but they made that decision. They invested in ballistic missile defense, directed, at least in the first instance, at North Korea. Some of their allies, including Canada, thought it was a bad idea and refused to join, and it turned out not to be as effective as they’d hoped. But fortunately, it’s never needed to be used in anger.

Some kind of balance was still maintained because ballistic missile defense could never deal with the thousands of missiles held by Russia, the hundreds of missiles held by China, and missiles carrying multiple warheads. So you couldn’t deal with the numbers involved. But the Trump administration seems to be influenced by these 1990-2000 fantasies or the earlier ones from the Reagan administration, and has embarked on the same horrendously expensive folly. It’s destabilizing, first and foremost. Even if it doesn’t work, it’s destabilizing.

Barry Stevens
Yeah, there’s— you could say that it’s extremely dangerous if it doesn’t work. It’s also extremely dangerous if it does work, which may be more dangerous.

Michael Byers
Yeah, it’s unlikely to work. My concern is destabilization during the construction, and all the rhetoric associated with it. I have no sympathy for the Chinese regime or the Russian regime. They are— those governments do horrible things, including committing genocide. But I do try to understand how they might see these developments in the United States, and the Golden Dome cannot help but create some paranoia in Beijing and Moscow. Paranoia is a recipe for escalation and should be avoided if we can.

Barry Stevens
The motivation, of course, is one— you want to stop it before it becomes operational, because if it did work and it became operational, then the United States would have a total defense and could go on the offense. So if you were on the other side of that, disregarding, as you say, the moral qualities of the regimes, you would want to attack and destroy it before it became operational. That’s what I would think.

Michael Byers
And even then, you’re living in a fantasy world because a large-scale nuclear attack is going to spread radiation around the planet. I mean—

Barry Stevens
Or use the pebbles, but if you use the pebbles, aren’t you also destroying your own satellites? Or, in fact, it has been brooded around that you could use a nuclear weapon to destroy the Golden Dome. I mean, I don’t mean on the surface, but way up high where you’d create, I think, just a flash of radiation which would destroy all the satellites, your own satellites too. But isn’t that being discussed?

Michael Byers
It has been discussed, and there was a lot of media reporting a couple of years ago about a potential Russian nuclear weapon launched on a satellite. The more credible reports suggest that there wasn’t actually a weapon launched, but that Russia has a program that’s developing the idea of a space-based nuclear weapon. Of course, militaries have thousands of programs; whether they actually are fulfilled is another question.

But I just want to emphasize here that it’s important we don’t get sucked into this fantasy game that military planners and pro-military think tanks are playing in our intellectual space, on the internet, or in the mainstream media. A lot of this stuff is just money-grubbing by big companies and gullible politicians who want to look tough and want to have a foil in an aggressive China, for instance.

No country has ever attacked another country’s satellite. So we had a de facto arms control regime in space for all weapons since the 1950s. I’m an international lawyer, but quite frankly, you can have norms of behavior outside of treaties, and sometimes those norms can be just as effective in terms of restraining state action. I think this is an instance where we’ve had a norm of non-weaponization that has held very well for a long, long time, and that’s what Donald Trump is now upending.

We haven’t done joint missions with the Chinese because of the stupidity of Republicans in Congress, who banned NASA from cooperating with the Chinese Space Agency. That hasn’t stopped all cooperation. NASA periodically gets waivers from that restriction so it can do specific projects with the Chinese. But I think it was an opportunity missed. I think Chinese astronauts should have been welcome on the International Space Station. That was the whole purpose of the International Space Station. It was partly about supporting science, but it was mostly about creating more international cooperation. It’s not too late. Let me just say this. It’s not too late.

Barry Stevens
What can we do to get back to a spirit of cooperation and pull away from this military confrontation?

Michael Byers
Well, let me give you one specific example. Astronomers are very concerned about preserving the so-called radio quiet zone that exists on the far side of the Moon. So, we human beings produce an awful lot of noise on our planet, not just noise that we can hear, but noise we can’t hear in terms of all kinds of transmissions. Just our global cell phone network alone, we are a really noisy place. If you are a radio astronomer, the kind of astronomy that uses radio waves to probe deep into the universe, you need a radio-quiet zone. We build radio telescopes in deserts in South Africa. We try to get away from all the noise. But the best place in terms of there being no noise is the far side of the Moon because the Moon acts as a big shield.

So the dream of radio astronomers is to build radio telescopes on the far side of the Moon. And radio telescopes are interesting because the bigger they are, the better they are generally. This is big infrastructure, or it has— you need multiple nodes. There’s even one radio telescope under construction right now that has nodes both in South Africa and Australia to get the maximum sort of triangulation of coverage.

So the idea is, well, why don’t Western countries partner with China to, first of all, protect the radio quiet zone, but then to construct facilities that are coordinated to work together to essentially create a massive multilateral radio telescope capability on the far side of the Moon? It would only be for science. It would be challenging and expensive. This is not something that one country could do on its own, or at least do well on its own. And it’s feasible because the Moon really isn’t that far away, and this wouldn’t involve putting boots on the ground. This could all be done robotically.

The Chinese are really good at Moon landing with robotics. They actually returned a sample of lunar soil from the far side of the Moon a few years ago. There’s been a little bit of cooperation already. That lunar soil retrieval mission that the Chinese ran had an instrument from the European Space Agency on board.

So this is, to my mind, the positive opportunity. You don’t need to stop all the militarization stuff in order to cooperate on a certain thing. We did the handshake in space at the same time that the United States and the Soviet Union were building thousands of ICBMs. You can walk and chew gum at the same time, but you need to be chewing some gum. You can’t just be walking, or the other way around.

Barry Stevens
I think it’s the other way around, yes.

Michael Byers
Yeah, but my point here is that there are opportunities for cooperation, and they’re focused on science, and science is international. So that’s where I would want to go, and I’d also, obviously, want to get rid of the rhetoric about the warfighting domain and get realistic about Golden Dome space-based interceptors not being a viable component of any such system. Start to dial back some of those things, and dialing back on some of those things will almost certainly take a new administration in Washington, but we can prepare the ground now.

So again, I come back to my point. It’s easy to just shout at the Trump administration and say, “Look, this is all bad.” And I do that, but I also want to be putting forward positive ideas that the next administration or current governments in other countries could take up to create some positive elements within what is a pretty dark space.

Barry Stevens
Thank you. That’s great. Thanks to Michael Byers, my guest. We’re going to take a break here, and we’re going to continue this conversation in a second part on theAnalysis.news and on YouTube, so please watch out for that. Please don’t forget to like and subscribe, and if you feel inclined, on theAnalysis.news, to contribute if you like this kind of content. See you next time.

The Pattern of Manufactured Crisis

Donald Trump’s “preemptive” and illegal war against Iran, launched in February 2026, did not come from nowhere. It is the latest expression of a system embedded in the political economy of American empire — one built during the wars and massive militarization of the Cold War, extended through the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and operating today in the profiteering from Ukraine’s struggle against the brutal and illegal Russian invasion, and the containment strategy against China.

The pattern is old. A real conflict is inflated into an existential threat. Fear does the rest: it opens the Treasury, expands executive power, disciplines rivals, rewards contractors, and binds Washington more tightly to its favored client states. Then, when the evidence fails to match the rhetoric, the definition of victory shifts and the machinery moves on.

The Iran Pretext: Collapsing the Distinction Between Risk and Certainty

From its opening decapitation strikes, the administration framed the February war as an act of absolute necessity, a desperate measure to prevent a catastrophic Iranian nuclear weapon. But there was no public evidence that Iran possessed a nuclear weapon, nor that it was operating a structured program to manufacture one. The IAEA had not found evidence of Iran building a bomb, even as it warned that Iran’s enriched uranium stockpile, reduced transparency, and refusal to grant inspectors full access created serious safeguards concerns. U.S. intelligence assessments likewise continued to indicate that Iran was not building a nuclear weapon and that Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei had not authorized the nuclear weapons program Iran suspended in 2003.

Iran’s nuclear program may have been a legitimate proliferation concern. Iran was enriching at a 60% level, more than needed for civilian needs, and used its 60% enrichment stockpile as a negotiating card in talks with Washington. But enrichment capacity, degraded transparency, and unresolved safeguards issues did not amount to proof of an imminent Iranian nuclear weapon, much less a justification for launching a regional war. Trump himself claimed that the first strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities in June “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear capacity. So where is the imminent threat? The administration collapsed the distinction between capability, intent, and possession. It treated uncertainty as certainty, and risk as inevitability.

The mainstream U.S. media, even those that critique the war, fail to mention that Iran had a right to enrich at a 60% level and was not in violation of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. It’s the United States that remains in chronic violation of Article VI of the NPT, under which it committed to pursue nuclear disarmament in good faith — a commitment Washington has ignored for decades while maintaining and modernizing an arsenal of thousands of warheads.

Israel, which actually possesses nuclear weapons, is not even a signatory to the NPT and has not accepted IAEA safeguards on some of its principal nuclear activities. That’s another obvious fact mainstream media ignores.

Following the Cold War playbook, a phantom crisis was built around a real geopolitical conflict. Trump kept repeating that “there will never be an Iranian bomb,” using a triumphant claim over a weapon Iran did not possess to justify a devastating kinetic war.

The Permanent War Economy: Origins in the New Deal and World War II

Why pursue such a reckless adventure that now appears to be another failure in the mold of the Iraq War? To understand the attack on Iran, we have to look at the machinery around it: the contractors, generals, bankers, lobbyists, client states, and politicians who know how easily fear can be turned into consent. In other words, the Cold War still shapes our world today.

The Great Depression shattered the belief that markets were self-correcting. By the late 1930s, after a decade of mass unemployment and stagnation, it was obvious that private investment and the New Deal alone could not sustain employment or industrial output.

What finally ended the Depression was the massive, centrally directed mobilization of the war economy. Between 1940 and 1945, federal spending exploded as a share of the economy, unemployment effectively vanished, and industrial output surged.

The lesson was not that military spending could abolish the capitalist crisis. It could not. The lesson was that the state could intervene on a massive scale to sustain demand, protect profits, and prevent the crisis from reaching the revolutionary intensity of the 1930s. The periodic crises of capitalism continued after 1945: recessions, financial panics, deindustrialization, and asset bubbles. Capitalism survived not because markets became self-correcting, but because the state repeatedly stepped in to rescue them.

After 9/11, during the 2007-08 financial crash, and again during the pandemic, the state used monetary expansion, emergency lending, and bailouts to prevent cascading collapse. Military Keynesianism was not the whole architecture of state-managed capitalism. It was one especially durable and politically protected part of it.

The problem, as postwar planners understood, was political. Full employment through peacetime public spending on housing, healthcare, education, and infrastructure would shift economic power toward workers and away from capital. Strong unions, high wages, and an activist state beholden to popular demands posed a threat to corporate interests.

Military spending offered a way around that problem. It could sustain aggregate demand and corporate profits without empowering labor in the same way, without building social infrastructure that might become the basis for redistributive politics, and without threatening the hierarchies of private ownership.

This was the insight behind what Seymour Melman later called the “permanent war economy.” Military Keynesianism became a hidden consensus of postwar American capitalism: public spending defended as national security rather than redistribution, employment support without the same empowerment of labor, corporate profit without the political danger of universal social provision.

For the corporations inside that sector, the Pentagon became not merely a customer, but a guarantor of demand. Defense production became extraordinarily profitable and unusually stable because so much of the risk had been shifted onto the public.

Eisenhower’s Warning — and His Complicity

By the time Dwight Eisenhower delivered his farewell address in January 1961, this arrangement had grown into something far more formidable. Eisenhower warned of “the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex,” a force felt in “every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government.” But he was not an outsider to the process. As general and president, he helped preside over the very architecture he later warned against. His concern was not to dismantle the permanent war economy, but to manage its political danger while preserving the basic machinery of American military power. Eisenhower cut overall spending from the Korean War peak but locked in a permanent peacetime military spending floor that had never existed before in American history — and did so while shifting massively toward nuclear weapons. Pre-Korean War spending never exceeded $60 billion in real terms between 1947 and 1950. After 1952, it never fell below $143 billion.

Defense contracts flowed into congressional districts across the country, creating a political constituency for military spending that crossed party lines. Aerospace and weapons manufacturers became anchors of regional economies. Any serious reduction in defense spending became politically toxic. The spine of the system was the threat of a nuclear attack on the United States. Trillions of dollars could be justified to defend America, from fantasy anti-ballistic missile systems to strategic bombers to ICBM’s and nuclear armed subs, all for weapons that can never be used without ending human civilization.

Cold War Threat Inflation: The Gaps That Weren’t There

Frank Kofsky’s research on the war scare of 1948 showed the mechanism operating in real time. Aircraft manufacturers facing postwar demand collapse lobbied for a crisis atmosphere that would justify emergency appropriations. The inflation of the Soviet threat

helped provide it.

It was within this context that the Cold War threat-inflation apparatus was built. The image of a monolithic, globally dominant Soviet military threat was not simply propaganda. It was an economic necessity.

Again and again, whenever defense budgets faced pressure, a new Soviet “gap” appeared: the bomber gap, the missile gap, and later the recurring claim that the United States had fallen dangerously behind. Each gap was inflated. Each was later complicated or debunked by better intelligence. Each served its political function before the correction arrived, unlocking billions in new appropriations.

The most audacious institutionalization of this machinery came with Team B in 1976. Sponsored by the Director of Central Intelligence and led by Richard Pipes, Team B was mandated to produce an alternative assessment of Soviet strategic objectives using the same intelligence base as the official estimates. Its conclusions were dramatically more alarming than the CIA’s professional analysis — arguing that the Soviet Union sought global hegemony, rejected nuclear stability, and believed nuclear war could be fought and won. They were also, as subsequent history showed, dramatically wrong.

In 1917, the Soviet Union emerged from a revolution that overthrew a brutal czarist dictatorship, delivered real social gains, and with losses of as many as 27 million lives, was the decisive military force that broke the Nazi armies.

It did become a bureaucratized, increasingly stagnant, and authoritarian mutation of a socialist state, but it was not seeking global military dominance. Its control over Eastern Europe was brutal and coercive, but it was shaped by the memory of invasion and the demand for a defensive buffer. Publicly, the Truman administration and those that followed claimed there was a Soviet plan to militarily conquer the globe. But there was no such plan. Team A of the CIA said so at the time, and researchers of the Soviet archives have confirmed this.

From the War on Terror to China: The Threat Manufacture Continues

The system needed a new threat. The 1990s offered interim justifications — rogue states, regional conflicts, humanitarian interventions — but none could sustain Cold War-level expenditure. September 11 solved the problem with terrible efficiency. The Global War on Terror provided an open-ended, geographically unlimited, inexhaustible threat that could justify military spending at any level, indefinitely.

The Iraq War was the purest expression of this logic. The Iraq Survey Group found no WMD stockpiles and concluded that prewar convictions had been wrong. Fabricated and distorted intelligence performed the same function as the Soviet gaps of the Cold War: it turned speculation into certainty, fear into policy, and threat inflation into war. By the time the occupation was acknowledged as a strategic catastrophe, the contractors had already been paid.

Since 1945, with the limited exception of the 1991 Gulf War, the United States has failed to achieve durable political victory in every major war it has fought. Korea ended in stalemate. Vietnam ended in defeat. Afghanistan ended with the Taliban back in power. Iraq destroyed a state, killed on a mass scale, and destabilized a region without producing the democratic client regime promised by its architects. While victory would have been preferred, war itself is a systemic objective.

The drawdown from Iraq and Afghanistan created another demand problem. The solution was Obama’s pivot to Asia and the systematic inflation of the Chinese military threat. Like its Soviet predecessor, the China threat narrative contains a real core — China has become a peer economic competitor. It has modernized its military and built capabilities that challenge U.S. freedom of action in East Asia. But that reality is wrapped in exaggerations calibrated to justify procurement programs already on the drawing boards. Generals and military contractors are telling Congress and the public to get ready for war in 2027. The House Select Committee on China warned that “2027 is not an American date but a Chinese one,” with Chairman John Moolenaar declaring “deterrence delayed is deterrence denied” and calling on Congress to urgently build up forces in the Indo-Pacific.

The F-35, the B-21 Raider, hypersonic missiles, next-generation destroyers, and sprawling Pacific basing initiatives and massive AI data centers are products of an acquisition system that requires a peer competitor to justify itself. So is the Sentinel ICBM program, which suffered a critical Nunn-McCurdy breach after estimated acquisition costs rose to $140.9 billion — an 81 percent increase over the 2020 baseline — yet was certified for continuation as essential to national security. This was during the Biden administration. Military boondoggles are one of the few bipartisan efforts in DC.

Now there is the Golden Dome, Trump’s missile defense architecture, being built out as a major Pentagon acquisition effort, adding another generation of guaranteed contracts to the permanent war economy’s ledger. The weaponization of space is the new frontier of massive war machine profiteering.

China does not pose an unprovoked, existential military threat to the American homeland. Neither did the late Soviet Union. But the perception of threat is the system’s lifeblood, and the system has spent decades building the institutional capacity to manufacture that perception on demand.

The Iran War Windfall: Who Profits

Against this backdrop, the financial architecture behind the Iran war looks less like an aberration than a routine operation of a system working as designed. The material beneficiaries are not hidden. They are listed on the New York Stock Exchange.

The escalation has triggered a windfall for the premier merchants of the military-industrial complex.

Under Trump, that system has expanded dramatically. The old primes remain dominant, but a new Silicon Valley defense bloc has emerged alongside them — Palantir, Anduril, SpaceX, OpenAI, and others competing to turn artificial intelligence, surveillance systems, drones, battlefield data platforms, and autonomous weapons into the next generation of Pentagon dependency. This is not a break from the military-industrial complex. It is its modernization.

The language has changed from bombers and missiles to AI, autonomy, and “warfighter innovation,” but the structure is familiar: private firms inside guaranteed public spending streams, using claims of existential technological competition to demand larger budgets, faster procurement, and weaker oversight.

The Iran conflict produced violent swings in global markets. Oil supply anxieties tied to the Strait of Hormuz sent crude prices lurching. Equity indices whipsawed between relief rallies and war-driven selloffs. For working people, this meant higher prices, battered retirement accounts, and economic insecurity. For institutional speculators and political insiders, it means opportunity.

Volatility is cash. The war does not have to be won to be profitable. It only has to continue.

Trump’s Personal Portfolio: Statecraft as Day Trading

Nowhere is this conflict of interest more brazenly embodied than in the Oval Office itself. In May 2026, disclosures filed with the Office of Government Ethics revealed that financial accounts linked to Trump reported thousands of Q1 transactions with disclosed values running from at least $220 million to approximately $750 million. Reporting on the disclosures identified 3,711 trades, including 625 marked “unsolicited,” with more than 2,000 occurring in March and unsolicited purchases spiking on the first trading day after the U.S. attack on Iran. The same reporting cautioned that the filings used broad value bands, did not show profits or losses, and appeared to reflect multiple portfolio-management strategies, including automated trading. That does not prove Trump personally placed each order. But it punctures the cleanest version of the “hands-off” defense, especially when the portfolio was moving through Nvidia, Broadcom, Dell, and Palantir — firms directly exposed to export controls, procurement policy, AI policy, and presidential publicity.

The Palantir example is especially stark. Trump purchased Palantir shares in the first quarter, including at least seven March purchases totaling as much as $530,000, then praised the company on Truth Social for its “war-fighting capabilities.” The White House maintained that assets were held in accounts managed by third-party institutions without Trump or his family influencing specific investment choices.

This is statecraft transformed into day trading. A president can lift or scuttle a corporation’s fortunes with a tweet, a tariff threat, an export-control waiver, a public endorsement, or a drone strike — making a mockery of public accountability while treating regional instability as a private hedge fund strategy.

Iran as Regional Power: The Real Contradiction Behind the Manufactured Crisis

In the case of Iran, the manufactured threat also serves a deeper geopolitical purpose. Iran is not an imaginary actor. It is a large country with a substantial population, a developed state, energy resources, military capacity, and a long civilizational history. It has the size and strategic position to function as a regional power, and that fact alone places it in contradiction with the United States.

A global hegemon cannot tolerate independent regional powers beyond a certain point. Any state that asserts a sphere of influence outside the American-managed order becomes a problem — not necessarily because it poses an existential threat to the American homeland, but because it limits American freedom of action.

Iran seeks regional influence in competition with Israel, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf monarchies, and the United States. It has built alliances, armed partners, and projected power across Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, and the Gulf. That does not make Iran innocent, progressive, or harmless. But it does mean the conflict is rooted in a real struggle over regional order.

The deception begins when that real contradiction is transformed into a fantasy of imminent annihilation. A regional power challenge becomes an existential threat. A proliferation concern becomes a ticking nuclear bomb. A rivalry over influence, oil, sanctions, and shipping lanes becomes a civilizational emergency requiring immediate war.

Israel, Gaza, and the Architecture of U.S.-Israeli Integration

Israel plays a central role in that transformation. For decades, the Israeli security establishment has viewed Iran as the principal obstacle to its own regional dominance. Any American-Iranian rapprochement threatens the strategic architecture that gives Israel extraordinary freedom of action. The Gaza war made that relationship unmistakable: American diplomatic protection, weapons transfers, intelligence cooperation, and constant military replenishment enabled the genocide in Gaza and the attacks on Lebanon.

When Iran and its allies retaliated, U.S. destroyers, aircraft, radar systems, and missile-defense networks helped defend Israel, turning Israel’s regional war into a U.S.-backed military system. That is what client-state politics looks like in practice: not merely influence over Washington, but integration into the operational machinery of American power.

The relationship is not one-directional. Israel wants to weaken Iran. The United States wants to prevent any independent regional power from limiting its command over the Middle East. Defense contractors want the contracts. Oil and financial markets profit from the volatility. Political leaders exploit the fear. The war emerges from the convergence of these interests.

The result has been catastrophic: thousands of casualties, an unstable global fuel crisis, and a soaring bill handed to the American taxpayer — wealth extracted from public infrastructure, healthcare, education, and wages to enrich defense contractors, subsidize speculative fortunes, and preserve an imperial order where oil, shipping routes, arms sales, and strategic dominance remain bound together.

Weakening Iran was an objective. Reasserting American dominance was an objective. Reassuring Israel and the Gulf monarchies was an objective. Feeding the contractors, the markets, the tech firms, and the permanent war economy was an objective. But stopping an imminent Iranian nuclear weapon was not the objective, because there was no imminent Iranian nuclear weapon to stop.

Defending Iranian’s human rights is certainly not the objective either. No doubt, the Iranian state suppresses political opposition with brutality and extreme violence. But Trump loves the Saudis and other authoritarian governments around the world. His concern about the thousands of people killed in Iranian anti-government demonstrations is like President Bush’s concern for Afghan women. It’s a paper-thin pretext for what amounts to war crimes.

The Nye Committee and the Road Not Taken

This is a system in which real geopolitical conflicts are inflated into existential crises, diplomacy is treated as appeasement, and peace becomes a threat to the revenue stream. The military-industrial complex does not need to invent every contradiction. It simply converts the contradictions that exist — over influence, resources, regional order, and imperial control — into budgets, weapons systems, and permanent threat narratives.

The answer has to be as concrete as the danger. In the 1930s, the U.S. Senate’s Special Committee on Investigation of the Munitions Industry, chaired by Senator Gerald Nye, examined why the United States entered World War I and how bankers and arms manufacturers profited from the conflict. From April 1934 to February 1936, the committee held 93 hearings and called more than 200 witnesses, including J.P. Morgan Jr. and Pierre S. du Pont, putting the titans of finance and munitions directly under public scrutiny.

The committee exposed a system in which private finance and private arms production were deeply entangled with war policy. The House of Morgan served as a principal Allied purchasing agent, handled as much as $3 billion in Allied purchases, and organized loans that bound U.S. finance to the Allied war effort before American entry. The committee’s argument was structural and damning: American finance had become so tied to Allied victory that neutrality became increasingly incompatible with the interests of the country’s most powerful banks. Nye’s own formulation was careful rather than conspiratorial: “It would not be fair to say that the House of Morgan took us to war to save their investment in the Allies, but the record of facts makes it altogether fair to say that these bankers were in the heart and center of a system that made our going to war inevitable.”

The committee’s conclusion was blunt: take the profit out of war. They proposed nationalizing the arms industry and/or taxing wartime profits so heavily that war would no longer be a business opportunity. Remember, that’s a committee made up of Republican and Democratic Senators. Nye was a Republican from North Dakota.

Taking the Profit Out of War: A Program for Survival

It is time to make that program a reality — starting with artificial intelligence and nuclear weapons, the two technologies most capable of ending civilization and the two least suited to private profit-making. Why do we accept a world where billionaires risk Armageddon for dollars?

At the very least, to start, AI should be owned by non-profits, which is how OpenAI was originally created by Altman and Musk. Altman converted it to a primarily for-profit and accepted military contracts, even when many of his employees objected.

There should be strong regulatory safeguards. AI should not be used for military purposes. There should be no AI in nuclear command and control. There should be a freeze on data centers. All this will slow things down and avoid the reckless charge into what even leading AI investors like Eric Schmidt say will be an existential threat. Taking profit out of war applies to AI too.

We must demand an end to the Iran war. Demand an end to support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza and its attacks on Lebanon. We must organize to elect representatives who will commit to taking profit out of war.

We will hear the familiar cries: it’s un-American, socialist, a threat to liberty. It’s not patriotic.

Sending working-class kids off to kill and die while the rich stay home, is not patriotic.

Defending an economy that starves schools, hospitals, housing, and public infrastructure while pouring trillions into weapons is not patriotic.

Public ownership under democratic control is not the threat to freedom. It is the only way to defend freedom from industries and banks whose profits depend on permanent danger.

Here’s a secret hiding in plain sight. The largest economic institution in American life is already publicly owned and centrally planned. It is called the Pentagon. The wealthy have no problem with that “socialism,” because as part of the system of a militarized economy, the Pentagon serves to funnel taxpayers’ money to privately owned arms and AI industries.

Trump’s Iran war and his kleptocracy of an administration is not an aberration of American values. It is the inevitable product of a system that relies on militarization and war as its lifeblood.

Taking the profit out of war is not utopian. It is a condition of survival. You could even call it patriotic.

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Patrick Lovell
Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, and welcome to Patrick Global Truth Bomb Riffs the Con. This is my 821st offering over a four year period, desperately trying to give information from some of the greatest sources that exist about truth, justice, and all things corruption at the end of the line here.

Today’s guest is really a special sort of offering by way of— I’ve been aware of Paul Jay from theAnalysis.news, a Toronto-based and United States (for quite some time), journalist, but also maybe I call him muckraking journalist, a documentarian, and there are many credits to his name including his most recent offering, which is How to Stop a Nuclear War. I can’t wait to catch up on that.

Paul Jay is also the purveyor of theAnalysis.news. I would encourage everybody looking for a robust understanding, academic to emotionally charged relationship with all that is going on now. There are probably a few sources that I’ve come across that provide a more nuanced and robust opportunity to understand how things work and ultimately what we’re all in the midst of.

For those of you who listen all the time, you know that I’m saying that really the end of the line is nee. I thought that it would be very important to reach out to Paul to get his perspective on what he’s looking at and, ultimately, how he prioritizes what he’s looking at today. We’re recording this on Wednesday, May 27, 2026, at approximately noon my time.

Paul, welcome back to another great conversation. It’s been some time since we’ve seen each other.

Paul Jay
I like robustly nuanced, though.

Patrick Lovell
Good. I appreciate that. I should say, in addition to everything else, by being a documentarian— if my lips can keep up with the idea in my mind— you’re also one of the innovators and creators behind what I think is one of the greatest documentary film festivals on the planet out of Toronto called Hot Docs, which I think you were on the board for the first five years of it.

Paul Jay
Yeah, I was the founding chair.

Patrick Lovell
You were the founding chair, no less. And boy, when I went there, I was just amazed at how beautiful the University of Toronto campus is. But, you know, we find ourselves really deep in it at the moment, and there’s a lot to cover. I’m just going to kind of leave it open-ended at first, and I’ll react to kind of whatever direction you go. What’s top of mind for you, Paul?

Paul Jay
Well, I don’t know. I was working on an essay last night putting the war on Iran, against Iran, in the context of the militarization of the U.S. economy, but then you just talked about your data center thing in Utah.

Just this quick thing, you told me that you’re working on a project about this massive data center that Mr. Wonderful, who sometimes is called Mr. Horrible, Kevin O’Leary, is involved with. I’ve just been working, reading, and doing some research about it. What they’re not telling people, it seems, is that the real plan for data centers is, sounds like a science fiction fantasy, but they’re really planning to put them on the Moon. They need a 10-15 year stopgap to drive this massive capital infusion into AI. They have to build these big data centers, but they know that anything longer than maybe 10-15 years is going to become obsolete.

There’s already a company— and I’m sorry, I forgot the name— but they’re already developing a system of perhaps 1,000 satellites or so that are going to test data centers in satellites. But it’s a step towards creating them on the Moon.

The reason to create them on the Moon is because there’s so little atmosphere on the Moon. Solar rays get through to the surface far more robustly and not nuanced to the surface of the Moon. So if you build massive solar farms on the Moon, the power you can generate is beyond anything we can imagine. They can create data centers beyond anything we can imagine.

Now, in a sense, it sounds like not such a bad idea. It’s far more, at least for Earth anyway— I don’t know how the Moon people think about it— but for Earth, it’s far more environmentally friendly to get it off the planet and stick it on the Moon.

I am not, what I would say, a Luddite about AI. I think there’s tremendous potential for good for AI, but only if it’s publicly owned and democratically controlled. For-profit AI is an existential risk all on its own. But the thing about this project on the Moon, it’s really linked to the whole Golden Dome project, which is really part of the militarization of space. That is the next biggest, not only a boondoggle, because it’s going to be trillions and trillions of dollars, but it’s also a grave threat. If they come even close to creating this massive network of satellites that will be governed and directed by massive data centers on the Moon, that gives them what they think is the possibility of a defensive shield that isn’t really that.

See, they know there’s no such thing as a defensive shield because it’s just too easy to defeat. What it really is is a first-strike weapon, or at the very least, the ability to threaten a first strike from space. So if there’s this massive network of satellites that can create a supposed defense against, for example, Chinese ICBMs, and then if you can hit things on the ground with laser weapons and perhaps other weapons from space, they think they’re going to get the upper hand. Or do they?

See, I don’t think they even think that. Because what does it leave the Chinese as a way to defeat this? Well, either compete with their own thousands of satellites, their own Moon-based data center, in which case they can have some war on the Moon over who’s going to have data centers. In fact, I think there’s even some sci-fi movie where they’re blowing each other up on the Moon. The Chinese aren’t going to do that because there’s a very simple way to defeat all of this. You blow up one or two nuclear bombs right above the upper atmosphere, and they create electromagnetic pulses that wipe out tons and tons of satellites.

In the film, we’ll be talking to an astrophysicist from Princeton who’s going to break this down quite scientifically in the movie. They’re actually creating a scenario where the only defense the Chinese have is nuclear weapons.

So what does it really mean? What it means is that the objective isn’t that it should work. They know the Chinese will have a deterrence. The Chinese will say, “Well, go spend your trillions of dollars, build all this crap. And if you ever try to use it, we’ll blow the shit out of it.” So what does it really mean? It means they actually don’t even plan to really use it. See, the point that people don’t get when they say, “Oh, it’s going to unleash an arms race, an AI arms race, a nuclear arms race,” the point is the arms race is the objective because it’s about the money-making. It’s not about deterrence.

If you wanted deterrence, you would go to the Chinese and the Russians, and you would negotiate: 1) Every country gets about three subs; 2) the Americans commit to reducing their expenditure on conventional weapons significantly, because how is Russia and China going to give up on nukes or reduce nukes if the U.S. has such conventional superiority? But this is rationality.

See, if your objective is human survival, it’s one set of logic. But if your objective is, we’re all gonna die anyway, we probably won’t all blow up in my lifetime, and all I need to do now is make money, have an arm of the White House in my name, and build an arch somewhere— and this is just one guy. I mean, there’s a whole class of these people who are so cynical about the future that they figure if they get by, their grandchildren get by, and maybe they think someday there’ll be a society where they can live in domes somewhere, robots do all the work, and fuck everyone else.

I’ve said before, you may have heard me say that if we ever get to that society, there’ve been predictions that these AI robots might take over, and the elites are actually scared about that. They’ve actually done studies about that. Stephen Hawking actually said, “If you keep going down this road, that’s where it’s ending up.” If we get to that kind of society where the rich are in domes, robots are doing all the work, and we’re living, if we’re still alive, outside those domes— I don’t think I’m going to be in one— and the robots start to take over, I’m rooting for the robots.

Patrick Lovell
Well, I didn’t expect all of that, but wow, talk about symmetry. I feel like there, I wish, in fact, I probably do have an emoji down below that I might wanna play into this shortly. I feel like my brain is a nuclear reaction emoji to everything that you just said as you were laying that out.

Paul Jay
Wait till the film comes out. The film’s coming out in September 2027. We are retelling the history of America. I’m talking about this to very well-informed people, historians even, except the specialists that we’re working with, and they don’t know three-quarters of what we’re gonna be exposing.

Patrick Lovell
Wow. Well, it tapped into my cinematic recall. I’ll throw Total Recall as one of the metaphors, but I saw obviously Orwell. I saw Specter and all of the James Bond panoply of this being the endgame. The Terminator certainly came to mind. From where I’m sitting at the moment right now, I can totally see all that because we know Elon, SpaceX, welfare queen—

Paul Jay
You know that Elon has a contract now, apparently a signed contract. This is why he’s testing this massive rocket ship, because he’s got a contract with the Pentagon where his rockets will be able to deliver, I believe it’s 40 tons of equipment anywhere on Earth within 40-45 minutes. There’s the actual contract to do it. If they want to have a war in the middle of Africa, in 40 minutes, they can drop 40 tons or so. I mean, this all sounds like these science fiction movies. The important point about those movies is that they’re all dystopian. It all ends up in shit. We are headed there, but there is an alternative. At some point, you gotta ask me the alternative ’cause there is an alternative that we better start demanding.

Patrick Lovell
Well, I’m in the midst of that every day. And that’s why my platform’s called the Clean New Deal, but maybe I’ll mention that at the end. Everybody who watches this channel knows that.

From where I’m sitting in this new development of what I’ve been in the midst of now for the past several months, I’m looking at Mr. Wonderful, i.e., the data center, which they’re calling Stratos, which is obviously not so subtle, just straight out of a Marvel comic book. I’m configuring that Thanos is going to be there to destroy the world. But it really is these giant issues of what the environmental impact is going to be, not to mention what the actual usage is on the economy, and all of these things that there is no planning for. There’s just this insane backdoor budget scenario that parallels what we’ve seen in my backyard for ICE, where we’re seeing this insane ‘griftopia,’ where you have the likes of— before they were voted off the island— but Kristi Noem and Lewandowski, as they’re doing the Mile High Club pilfering $200 million, they find an extra $50 million to offer developers locally to pay over market for what purpose exactly?

Patrick Lovell
These empty warehouses are going to be— what I’m seeing right now from other social media that’s covering this out there— literally torture centers and these giant gulags. We’re going down the path of all the things that Putin has obviously shown us for the last 25 years, but it goes much further back than that, and we could talk about all sorts of theaters.

To think that the money itself, in this insane way, is literally being funneled in my backyard through what’s known as MIDA, which is the Military Installation Development Authority, hence again, another Specter-like scenario. So, as it turns out, this isn’t for military installation development. Literally, we have financiers in our state that involve some of the biggest names in hedge funds and private equity. Goldman Sachs has its second-largest facility on the planet in my backyard, in addition to all of these, the top five technology companies that exist.

I guarantee you Peter Thiel and Elon Musk are involved with state senators and governors. They’ve worked out this whole situation where last weekend, Lee Zeldin, the Secretary of the Environmental [Protection] Agency, just got rid of all of the endangerment clauses. Of course, John Roberts, in the nature of the shadow dockets, we’ve learned that, of course, the Supreme Court was nothing but lobbyists for the dirty fuels industry. They have been in concert for a very long time.

This didn’t just happen during the second incarnation of the Trump nightmare, post-January 6th and whatever we want to call the Biden in between, which had some major upsides. The long and the short of it is these guys have been doing, as you well know, from the savings and loan crisis through to the Enron era. Well, let us go back to the junk bond scenario, Michael Milken, Predator’s Ball, all of these types of things that precede Epstein. What we have learned from the tech bubble, Enron era frauds, and the Great Financial Crisis. Now, on the other end of this, we’ve got private credit that’s about to roil the markets once again on top of all things crypto. The corruption in this— what’s happening in terms of the evil behind the power—

Paul Jay
Can I interrupt you for a sec?

Patrick Lovell
Yeah.

Paul Jay
Here I’m going to pick a fight with you.

Patrick Lovell
Okay.

Paul Jay
I think you exaggerate the role of corruption, meaning this: of course, there’s corruption, but the systemic foundations are far deeper. Like, it depends on what you mean by corruption. Most of what we’re calling corruption, first of all, is legal. So it’s built within the legal framework that it’s okay to do all this stuff. But go back to the beginning of America.

Patrick Lovell
Can I respond to that before you go into this, real quick? Just because you picked a fight with me, I’m gonna—

Paul Jay
Let me make my point because if we’re gonna fight, I have to make my point.

Patrick Lovell
Absolutely.

Paul Jay
Was slavery corruption? The slave plantation system, would you call that corruption?

Patrick Lovell
I would.

Paul Jay
Why? What’s corrupt about it? [crosstalk 00:17:06]. Virtually every human society went through a stage of slavery.

Patrick Lovell
Absolutely. But it’s corrupting the soul of the intent of the separation of powers that led to the Bill of Rights, period. That, that was the—

Paul Jay
The slave system came before the Bill of Rights.

Patrick Lovell
Well, absolutely. Please continue.

Paul Jay
Was the genocide against indigenous people— now that’s official government policy.

Patrick Lovell
Yes.

Paul Jay
Was that corruption, or was it a systemic, almost need for the expansion of industrial capitalism?

Patrick Lovell
It was power. It was might equals right. So corruption was maybe the—

Paul Jay
I’ve been wanting to have this fight with you for a long time.

Patrick Lovell
I appreciate that.

Paul Jay
Because here’s the thing. If it’s corruption, then through some kind of oversight, you can correct it.

Patrick Lovell
Right.

Paul Jay
But we’ve never seen— I mean, we’ve seen mild oversight, mild pulling back. Like, Milken or some guy who creates a pyramid scheme. The odd antitrust suit, the odd this and that. But it’s all nibbling around the edges of what is systemic.

Patrick Lovell
Okay, but it’s the triangle or the triad. Let’s just call it a billionaire apparatus, which is tyranny. And then it’s the ‘hive think’ of full-on white supremacy— let’s just call it Nazism— but its connection to the megachurch apparatus, right. So this is the sociological history of white supremacy, is it not? Is that what you’re describing as the founding of the United States, which is a continuation of all imperialism?

Paul Jay
No, what I’m saying is capital, whether it’s in capitalism, feudalism, or even during a slave society, whether it’s Roman, Greek, or whatever, it goes where returns are the best.

Patrick Lovell
That’s right.

Paul Jay
And the system that evolves will be what’s the— as soon as we begin the development of class society, and I think more or less people agree these days, it comes out of once we have an agricultural surplus, animal husbandry, the society starts to divide to instead of what’s good for the tribe, now you start getting, well, you know what, I’m bigger and stronger, I want more of our surplus. Then you start getting classes, and the more powerful.

Most importantly, the biggest development in human development was the next stage of private property. And that was when you started to realize, well, you know what, we’re bigger, stronger, and we have more. Now we can own people. So the whole foundation of today’s society was a slave society. Our culture is all rooted in— like, why do we venerate Roman and Greek philosophy and teaching? Bannon and all these guys talk about the defense of either Western civilization or Judeo-Christian civilization, but it’s a civilization rooted and born in a slave system. Now, I’m not making a moral judgment on it. In a sense, we actually had to go through that.

Patrick Lovell
Yeah.

Paul Jay
If we hadn’t had that— you know, why do we have philosophy, mathematics, and medicine? Because a class of people was able to sit around and think while everybody else was slaves and worked themselves to death.

Patrick Lovell
So true.

Paul Jay
Now, within that, you can have corruption at every stage, people who violate the kind of norms to enrich themselves. It’s there. What Trump is doing in the White House now, you could call— I don’t know what else you call it, but kleptocracy and corruption. But it’s built on a structural foundation that gave rise to a class of billionaires and a class of massive concentration of ownership. It actually has a good side to it.

What I mean by this is the same way slave society gave us a class of people who could think and had time to imagine, this economy has given us enterprises that are so efficient, so well planned, so ripe and ready to be socialized. Like, imagine a publicly owned Walmart, a publicly owned Amazon, where right away— and you could do it tomorrow if you could actually have a progressive takeover of Congress and a president. You could just create a— you don’t have to nationalize Amazon; just hire their best people, or just buy Costco. The starting wage could be $25 or $30 an hour. So many people employed there would affect the entire wage scale of the country. So even as much as this society is driving us over the cliff of human civilization, if we start demanding publicly-owned, democratically controlled, then we actually have the potential for a whole new stage of human civilization.

Let me add one more thing before you go. What is the largest economic institution in the United States?

Patrick Lovell
The central bank? The Federal Reserve?

Paul Jay
Not even close. And it’s publicly owned. It’s called the Pentagon.

Patrick Lovell
Oh, well [Laughter].

Paul Jay
The Pentagon is socially owned. It’s publicly owned. It’s all public money. The thing is, they take public money, and they privatize the profit side of it. They take workers’ lives who kill and die for the American way, but if you demand some kind of rational foreign policy, now you’re not patriotic. If you talk about public ownership, you’re a villain. You’re threatening our liberties. Except that the Pentagon is publicly owned. Nobody wants to say that.

When I talked about the alternative, even in terms of dealing with corruption, which has so much to do with— especially when you have, in some states, elected judges and elected prosecutors, and then you get the whole bullshit kind of funding, and where you have appointed— who’s appointing them are people who are also getting funded; their campaigns are getting funded. And of course, now this ridiculous fund Trump wants, $1.8 billion.

I mean, I would agree with you at the level of Trump; he’s taken it so far past the kind of norm that’s at the level of corruption. But we need to understand that the whole system has created Trump, first of all. Why are they putting up with him? He isn’t even good for the system, but they’ve gotten so cynical that everyone’s in it for the absolute shortest term, and Trump’s giving them short-term, although some of them are starting to break off.

So my fight with you is not that there isn’t corruption, but I think we have to always talk about how corruption is like a cancer, which is the system of concentrated private ownership, militarization, and financialization of the economy, which has happened over the last few hundred years. And then you have this tumor or tumors, many of them, you could say, and that’s corruption. And so, yes, they become the most visible, like the tumors are the most visible, but the underlying cancer, if we don’t deal with it, and fundamentally dealing with it is especially private ownership of sectors of the economy that can end human civilization, AI, and nuclear weapons. Those are the two most prominent. Why are we allowing— like, would anyone agree with privatizing the Pentagon itself? They wouldn’t. Nobody. I mean, you got close with that guy who had that private company. What’s it called? Black something.

Patrick Lovell
Blackwater.

Paul Jay
Yeah, they have one that— like, he came close.

Patrick Lovell
That guy, Erik Prince? Yeah.

Paul Jay
Yeah, Erik Prince. He came close to wanting to at least privatize sections of the Pentagon. But nobody would really talk about, let’s privatize the Pentagon. But if you won’t privatize the Pentagon and you think that has to have some public scrutiny, seeing as it’s all public money, why are we allowing the arms industry to be private, especially those sections like nukes and AI? But I’d say the whole thing.

You know, in 1933, there was a bipartisan Senate committee called the Nye Committee, and they came into being because it started coming out in the late ’20s, early ’30s. In fact, this guy, Smedley Butler, who was in line to be the head of the Marines, started talking publicly about it. But the Nye Committee, which is actually called the Select Committee Investigating World War I, something or another. The question they were asked to answer is: Why did the United States join World War I? And they actually concluded, after tons of witnesses, including one of the du Ponts had to testify, one of the Rockefellers had to testify, after this whole process, they concluded the solution to going to war for profit, which is what they said was the motivation for the U.S. joining World War I, is to take profit out of war. They suggested two things: nationalize the arms industry and/or, but mostly and, tax any war profiteering at 90%, so war is no longer a business opportunity.

Butler had his own thing, which was not a bad idea, but impossible. He wanted the only people who could authorize a war and could vote on it to be the soldiers who were being asked to go fight it. Nobody else could vote on it. I don’t know, but anyway, the point is that a bipartisan committee of Democrats and Republicans advocated public ownership of the arms industry and massive taxes on war profits. So why don’t we pick up on that today and apply it to the existential threat of AI and nuclear weapons?

Patrick Lovell
I love it. I’m curious, did you see the movie Amsterdam, directed by David Russell?

Paul Jay
Yeah, it didn’t— I’m actually working on a dramatic movie on the Smedley Butler story. I bought the rights to a book called Gangsters for Capitalism, which is Butler’s biography, and I’m working on it now. When I finish the nuke film, that’s what I want to do next. But yeah, the Butler story is tacked on there. It’s not— it doesn’t do it justice, let’s put it that way.

Patrick Lovell
I enjoyed it. Maybe I guess anything with Margot Robbie—

Paul Jay
Oh, I didn’t mind the movie. I just didn’t think it did the Butler story justice.

Patrick Lovell
Well, fair enough. But I want to say, based on your really thought-provoking position about picking a fight with me, that there’s really not that much room between what I actually think and what I continue to do from this perspective. I hope I can put this together in a meaningful way that matches your thought-provoking sentiment there. I’ll quote my favorite seer of all time, not Jesus Christ or Moses, which is basically built into the whole Western Judeo-Christian sort of scenario of liberation from tyranny, obviously. That’s one side of it, but that’s not what I’m hanging my hat on. I’ll just hang my hat on who we’re seeing all over the place perform for the first time in a long time because of life during wartime. The great David Byrne, who once said, “Same as it ever was.” Yeah. Mark Twain said, “History doesn’t repeat, it rhymes.” Okay, sure, so that’s where I come from in the pattern recognition.

When we talk about this being baked in, oh, yeah, natural law. Well, I don’t know if we should call it natural law; we should call it human nature, of course. But the nature of we need society, society creates some sort of structure, and more times than not throughout history, it’s exactly what you described, with, as you said, small pendulums in context. We’re talking about the entire Middle Ages of European history, going from aristocracy to the Holy Roman Empire, the convergence, but what undergirded it all? Corruption. That’s what led to—

Paul Jay
What is your definition of corruption? Because I always thought corruption really means illegal. If something’s legal, why is it corrupt?

Patrick Lovell
Well, that’s true, but I’m going to take a broader, more philosophical stance on it based on our conversation at the moment. Corruption is when a system is sabotaged. Systems can be designed to work. We know how to design very complex machinery. We know how to fly, but sometimes things can be designed to fail. Now, they might fail without being designed to fail.

Paul Jay
Monopoly capitalism is working.

Patrick Lovell
For the people that are-

Paul Jay
If you’re a monopoly capitalist.

Patrick Lovell
That’s right, but see, this is where I argue completely now, and I will challenge you. I will say that the largest— how did you frame the largest— the Pentagon is what in your vernacular? It’s the-

Paul Jay
The largest economic institution in America, as far as I can find out.

Patrick Lovell
Okay, fine, but it still requires— we could go into the whole litany of what macroeconomics is, particularly monetary policy within fiscal policy, within the construct of A) the power of the purse with Congress. But what I reveal all the time is the reality of the subterfuge and the smoke and mirrors of what the Federal Reserve has been involved with since 2009, which has provided tens of trillions of dollars to this criminal class. I might argue, and I know the definitions of capitalism, I know the definition of socialism, communism, and the whole gambit.

I’ll ask you the question: what happens if the full faith and credit of the United States is, through smoke and mirrors, used to completely guarantee what we both might call late-stage capitalism, gangster capitalism, monopoly capitalism, which is, of course, illegal and has all those nodes of corruption that you identified. But what if they have endless amounts of financial support? And we could talk about fiat currency, we could talk about sovereign currency and the dollar’s position as the world’s reserve currency, and obviously, oil commoditization post-1971. We could go into all of those details. But we used the entire capacity of that engine to flood tens of trillions of dollars illegally. I know the statutes, and I know exactly what happened after the Great Depression, and I know exactly what the Pecora findings found out that gave us Glass-Steagall and the Securities and Exchange Act, etc., but they just—

Paul Jay
It wasn’t really illegal until they had Glass-Steagall.

Patrick Lovell
Absolutely. We also didn’t have sovereign currency in the way that we did until Bretton Woods. We could go on. So I turn the question to you, what do you call it if—

Paul Jay
I call it monopoly capitalism.

Patrick Lovell
Why can’t it be socialism for criminals?

Paul Jay
Well, that’s part of monopoly capitalism.

Patrick Lovell
Okay, fair enough.

Paul Jay
Part of monopoly— a feature of not just monopoly capitalism— frankly, it’s been a feature since the Industrial Revolution at least, and maybe before.

Patrick Lovell
Sure.

Paul Jay
Because you socialize risk, like even like the railroads. Who put up a lot of the capital? In Canada, it’s the same thing. The risk of building railroads was largely based on government contracts, and so on, whereas the benefit went to the private railroad companies. This is a feature of how the system works, and it works well if you happen to be a monopoly capitalist. So you’ve got to look at this from a class point of view, and this is where the deception is.

Patrick Lovell
I do. You’re right.

Paul Jay
No, no, I’m not saying you don’t. Rhetorically.

Patrick Lovell
Sure.

Paul Jay
See, if you question the way we are both questioning, we are unpatriotic. To question private ownership of anything is unpatriotic, which is such a joke because the Pentagon, like, I say, is publicly owned, the biggest economic institution in the country, with like millions of employees. I was looking somewhere. If you look at just the assets, resources, and employment, not the cap value on the stock market, the Pentagon’s more or less more than Microsoft, Amazon, and Nvidia put together.

Patrick Lovell
Wow. Wow.

Paul Jay
Now, if you privatize the Pentagon, it may probably be worth even in cap value on the markets more than those things. So it’s okay to have a socialistic, massive economic institution driving whole sections of the economy. But of course, as long as you’re privatizing the profit that comes out of all that.

You have example after example, like part of the film, we’re gonna do a story about something called the SAGE radar system. Mid-1950s, this is the mother of boondoggles. It’s the mother of the Golden Dome bullshit. You know my line about Golden Dome, it’s not about the dome, it’s about the gold. In fact, at theAnalysis, we have a t-shirt for sale. It says, “It’s not about the dome, it’s about the gold.” So in the 1950s, and this is the thing about the Cold War that we’re still living in, which is to exaggerate the enemy with out-and-out lies that you know are lies, and then scare the hell out of people. We need the military complex to defend us, and you get your boondoggle on the other end.

So the mother of the anti-ballistic missile system boondoggles was actually a system called SAGE, S-A-G-E, which was going to be a defensive dome sort of thing that would take massive radar stations in northern Canada. When Soviet bombers come in, they’d be identified, and then Bomarc missiles, mostly stationed in Canada, would shoot these things down, and America would be defended. We have propaganda films made by the DOD, but most importantly, by IBM, because this is where IBM became this massive company out of SAGE. Warehouses and warehouses of IBM computers connected to MIT, creating this complete bullshit boondoggle, and I’ll tell you how bullshit it was. Mid to late 1950s, and in the film we have interviewed a guy who was a senior scientist working in command and control at SAGE, and he had told us the whole story of what BS it is.

Anyway, just to stick to this one point, mass— get this, how much it costs. Now, the Manhattan Project was the biggest industrial project in the history of humanity in terms of the number of people. Always at least 100,000-150,000 employees of the Manhattan Project. As many as 600,000 worked at one time or another. Get this, nobody knows what I’m about to tell you. When I say nobody, most of the experts don’t know. SAGE cost four times the Manhattan Project.

Patrick Lovell
What?

Paul Jay
You ever heard of it?

Patrick Lovell
No.

Paul Jay
Never heard of it?

Patrick Lovell
No.

Paul Jay
Why’d you never hear of it? Well, I’ll tell you why, because it never worked. So this guy, Lester Earnest, who’s in our film, he’s there working a week or two. He’s one of the more advanced computer guys. He got his computer training in the Army and then got hired by MIT and SAGE to work on the project. He’s there for about two or three weeks. I have him on camera saying this. He says, “I turn,” I’m being him now. “I turn to one of my colleagues here. I say, ‘Hey, by the way, how did you guys deal with radar jamming?’ It’s a long silence. And the guy says, ‘Well, we don’t talk about that.'” They never did. They never solved the problem of radar jamming till 1965, and by that time, SAGE was obsolete, because now it was all about ICBMs and the issue of the bombers.

And what justified this massive expenditure? You may have heard of the missile gap. Well, before the missile gap, it was the bomber gap. The Soviets had a 40-to-1 advantage in the number of strategic bombers over the United States. So we had to build this defensive shield called SAGE. It was all bullshit. It was 40-to-1 in the American favor. The Soviets didn’t have close to the number of strategic bombers that the U.S. had.

Number two, here’s the big lie. I mean, I can’t say the big lie because there are so many big lies here. It was never a defensive shield. It was always an early warning system at best. So what does an early warning system do for you? So you know the Soviet bombers are coming. Okay, if you can’t knock them— because it never worked; that was nonsensical. So now they move into something called BMEWS, B-M-E-W-S. It was the next big project that came out after the bomber gap and SAGE. Now, when the Soviets got a Sputnik up in the air, what was the real message of Sputnik? Not that we’re winning the space race. The real message of Sputnik is, “We can now fire missiles into space that can come down and land on your head.” So it’s the beginning of the era of the intercontinental ballistic missiles. Okay? So now they sell the American people, “We’re going to create a defensive shield against ICBMs.” This is long before Reagan’s SDI and now Trump’s Golden Dome, and it’s an extension of SAGE and BMEWS.

Well, it never worked. They started spending tons of money on these radar stations and all this. At the very best, and this applies to today too, as an early warning system, maybe you find out 30 seconds, a minute, even if it’s 10, 15 minutes sooner, that something’s coming. Well, here’s the big lie. I keep saying that because there are so many of these big lies. Of all of these supposed defensive systems, you don’t know if what’s coming is actually a missile. There’s only one way to know if what your system, whether it’s radar or today’s satellites and sophisticated sensors and all the rest, you won’t really know if what’s coming at you is actually an ICBM with a nuclear warhead. It could be misinterpreted sensor data. Now we’re going to be relying on AI to interpret the data. It could be an AI hallucination. It could be geese.

You know, when they first started this BMEWS thing, day one, they turned it on— I have Ellsberg telling us this story in the film. They had these congressmen and senators in the command and control center, and they were going to show off how the whole thing worked. Day one, the system goes on and says we’re under attack. Day one. And they take the congressmen, and they put them in a safe room, and they’re getting ready. “Do we fire back? Do we launch?”

One Canadian officer who’s in the NORAD Center, he says, “Are we so sure this is real?” And then he thinks to himself, he says, “You know what? I’m sure on the news this morning I read that Khrushchev’s at the UN today speaking. Are they really going to hit us when Khrushchev is in New York?” So he says, “We’re not firing, let’s see if this thing’s real.” And of course it was some geese or something, right, or may have been. There’s another one that happens like that where the radar is bouncing off the Moon. There are so many of these near-miss examples. But anyway, these are all so— they’re systemically needed, and this is where I get to the system side, and then the corruption’s built on it.

At the end of World War II, they had a big problem. The massive crash of the 1930s, the New Deal didn’t fill the hole. It just mitigated the consequences. What really filled the hole was spending at the levels of World War II. That massive government expenditure. So after the war, they’re facing three economic threats that are practically existential to American capitalism.

Number one, you’re gonna go right back into the crisis of the ’30s if you can’t keep the government spending going at the level it was at. You have two choices: a new New Deal or militarization of the economy. Somebody called it military Keynesianism. Well, if you go back to a New New Deal, it gives the workers too much leverage. Now they’re not terrified of being unemployed because there’s good unemployment insurance, and there’s social security. You’re actually encouraging unionization, and wages are going up. That’s a real stimulus for the economy that could avoid at least the worst of the crashes. You don’t wanna do that. Not if, you know, imagine that. Fuck, that’s socialism. We’ll lose our liberty. No, you militarize, and you start spending like hell.

Then number two, short-term threat. The aerospace industry was massively built during World War II with guaranteed government contracts. Now it’s over. What happens to your aerospace industry? We have a quote from Gross, who was the head of Lockheed. He actually says— we’re gonna have an actor play this guy in the film— he says, “If we have a real peace, we’re—” now I’m paraphrasing, “—we’re all going bankrupt.” Meaning the aerospace industry. “We’ll be down the toilet. If we have an armed truce, they’re gonna need a lot of airplanes.” That’s the birth of the Cold War.

Number three, the European and Japanese markets are absolutely critical for the future of American capitalism to sell these tons of products that are being created. Enter the Marshall Plan and enter helping Japan rebuild. All in, what I’m getting at are systemic reasons. Now, within that, you get $15,000 toilet seats. That’s where the corruption comes in, because once you create this monstrosity of a military-industrial complex, within it, everybody’s in it. I mean, structurally, everyone is in it for themselves, and so the ideology is, one, I have to play along, or I won’t have an advancement in my career. Two, everyone else is cashing in, I might as well, because— and today, when the president’s creating a kleptocracy, why shouldn’t everybody bloody go out and do something like that?

So I’m not really arguing with you that corruption’s an important layer, but it’s inevitable. If we really want to have prosecutors like Bill, yours and mine, but he’s a good friend of yours, Bill Black, but I love Bill. Even just years ago, we actually had some actual prosecutions that would take place. After ’07, ’08, you know better than I do, there wasn’t one serious prosecution. Nobody went to jail for committing forgeries, robo-signing bloody contracts. I mean, you can’t get more and more out illegal, fraudulent, and yes, corrupt, but it’s the inevitability of the system.

So at a systemic level, we have to get at some of the roots, and I would start with— nationalize, certainly, anything to do with the militarization of AI, and maybe all of AI, because if it’s for profit, they’re going to have no guardrails, no control at all. Trump just lifted what little oversight there was. He just said he’s going to suspend it, just a few days ago, and anything to do with nuclear weapons.

Like, do you know now, Los Alamos or the Manhattan Project, it’s still not only going, it’s on super high speed creating a whack of new plutonium with a target that they must— I can’t remember the date, I mean the amount, but it’s a significant amount of new plutonium, and they need to do it by the end of 2027. You don’t want to talk about the economic things of this. The county Los Alamos is in is one of the richest counties in the United States. Best schools, best hospitals, everything’s fantastic. The next county over is one of the poorest counties in the United States. Worst infant mortality, worst schools, worst everything. The amount of money that’s going in to create all this new plutonium. For what? You can’t use the stuff.

In the same way, just to go back to the ICBM thing, you know, when I’m saying this stuff doesn’t work, there’s only one way to know if ICBMs coming at you are real. You’ve got to let them hit. And why would you let them hit? Because you can’t damn well stop them anyway. So you might as well make it real because if you fire on early launch on warning, you’re ensuring something’s coming back your way. And what if it is just another miscalculation, another stupidity? But they don’t tell people that because you can’t make money out of that.

It’s the same thing with what’s going on. Why create all this plutonium? You can’t use it. You can’t. If you use it, it means you’re in full-scale nuclear war, which means we’re all gone.

There’s a guy named Stanley Weiss. He was a mining guy, a real mineralogist who was a very successful miner, and he got rich as hell. He understood nukes, and he started his own campaign to get businessmen to be against nuclear weapons. He had this wonderful line; he’d go around speaking, and he would look at these guys in the audience, all corporate executives and all this, and he would say, “Do you guys know being dead is bad for business?” It’s a great line, eh? Anyway, that’s me. That’s what we’re working on.

Patrick Lovell
You just triggered another several nuclear explosion emojis in my mind. I mean, you went from Khrushchev, which reminded me of Dr. Strangelove. You’re talking about this unbelievably limitless budgeting for stupidity, and I thought of Contact with Jodie Foster and Matthew McConaughey. Why build one when you could build two? So many other— maybe Breaking Bad entered my mind when you started talking about Los Alamos and the nature of all things, Randall White, Mr. White. Anyway, I’m thinking of the character in Breaking Bad, but here’s my point. Okay, you can’t trust people. How about that? People are evil inherently, I guess.

Paul Jay
I don’t buy that.

Patrick Lovell
Okay, how about this? Power is inherently evil. Most people are good, right? So you’re bringing this sort of contextualization because everything that you’ve said, in my mind, I’m like, okay, but what if we had the control of the power of benevolent leadership that believed in, let’s just say, dynamism, exploration of integrity, science, and aspirational leadership, so where this intellectual and economic capacity, what could society look like in the event that we didn’t have these diabolical Epstein-class villains that we’ve seen in the movies our entire lives, but now are playing out in a situation that to me looks like the Doomsday Clock is right here.

The war in Iran, I wanted to talk to you right when all of this triggered, but we’re what, 60-some-odd days later, and I’d like to get maybe a comment on your observations of this insanity of Trump and the Pentagon after getting rid of all the professionals in this liquor cabinet apparatus, given everything that you’re talking about with the privatization and the kleptocracy. Is it something we laugh at, or is it something that’s like, we’re right there for the whole thing to trigger and the whole thing to just ‘poof,’ that’s it, end of story?

Paul Jay
Well, you might want to laugh at it, but we are there. We are approaching ‘poof.’ In fact, from a nuclear weapons point of view, ‘poof’ could happen tonight. Any time the systems are such, an accident or miscalculation could take place.

I’ve talked now to about 130-140 really leading experts: nuclear historians, military people, scientists, and so on. Not a single person could honestly say, and I don’t even think the head of STRATCOM could say, and we actually interviewed off the record ’cause he wouldn’t go on the record, a former head of STRATCOM, but the risk of miscalculation and accidental nuclear war, nobody can say is zero. Nobody who knows anything would be able to say that it isn’t far from zero. You can’t put a number on it. How do you put a number on it? But if it isn’t zero and it’s not far from zero, how come we’re not even talking about it? Why is the subject of American nuclear policy taboo? When’s the last time anybody in any presidential election since maybe the ’60s, Reagan in the ’80s, but now nobody talks about it except Trump’s Golden Dome BS.

Our entire posture, it’s not just about the Golden Dome, our entire posture at any moment threatens the annihilation of human civilization. What are we doing? We’re modernizing nuclear weapons. We’re spending billions and billions on a new system called Sentinel of ICBMs that is way, way over budget.

In fact, there was a piece of legislation, I can’t remember the name of it, [Nunn-McCurdy], something [Nunn-McCurdy] maybe. If any weapons program goes a certain percentage over budget, it has to be reviewed by a congressional committee. Well, the Sentinel was going way over budget. This is all new silos, all new underground communication systems, all new missiles, all new warheads, like billions and billions of new investments started going way over budget. They were supposed to have a committee hearing. Well, one of the committees that was going to review it, a congressman from Northern California, north of Richmond, Garamendi, he got ill, so they had to postpone the hearing. This is under the Biden administration. Austin, Secretary of Defense, instead of waiting for the hearing, which he was supposed to do based on the legislation, greenlights the thing anyway. They never have the hearing, they never had the review, off it goes, and it’s in progress. Billions and billions, a boondoggle.

ICBMs are the most dangerous piece of the whole nuclear puzzle. It’s a use them or lose them. If you think something’s coming, you’ve got to fire because you’re afraid that these silos, which everybody knows where they are, it’s not like it’s a secret where they are. The silos are well known, and the new ones will be too. In fact, one of the ways they sell these silos is that it creates employment in the community. So, you know, the Chinese, [Russians], whoever, they know. So they’re going to get hit. So if you think something’s coming, you’ve got to fire before they get hit.

There are two arguments they give. One is, well, our sensors and everything are so good. We won’t make a mistake, and they’re needed for deterrence. What if something isn’t really an ICBM and it’s coming at you and you fire? So the launch-on-warning thing is insane. Now they’re saying, get this one, have you ever heard the term nuclear sponge? They’re justifying these systems, billions and billions of dollars of new missiles and warheads, because they want them to be targets. If an attack comes in, they’re gonna try to take out these ICBMs, and they actually use the term nuclear sponge as part of the vernacular of the war hawks. They’ll have to waste missiles knocking out our Sentinels and ICBMs. I should say yours, ’cause here, I’ll put my Canadian hat on. Less missiles are available to hit cities. I mean, it’s beyond insane. So either you’re going to fire them, launch on warning, and end human civilization because now we’re into full nuclear war, or they’re just going to get hit. In which case, what do you need to spend all this new money on? Just leave the old ones there, let them get hit. And by the way, have you told the communities in North Dakota and Montana, have you told them that they’re a nuclear sponge? Are they aware that one of your main justifications for this stuff is so they can get the hell blown up? It’s beyond insanity because the underlying thing driving it, see, the roots of it, is the systemic militarization that this modern American capitalism required and still requires. And then it gets its own momentum, its own logic.

To some extent, they start to believe their own bullshit. When you get into this wargaming scenario, it’s like you go to a lawyer to get a contract, right? The way a lawyer makes money is by selling you a worst-case scenario. So then you need a contract that deals with what if they do this, what if they do that. Oh, now we’re into 30-page, 50-page, now we’re at a 120-page contract.

I had this great lawyer, entertainment lawyer, George, and he would say to me, “I need you to do me a contract for one of my films.” And he said, “Okay.” And he’d give me two pages. And I said, “Two pages?” He said, “Look, do you trust these guys?” “Yeah, I’ve done business with them before.” “All right, so here, you’re gonna do this, they’re gonna do that, they’ll pay you this, two pages, done.” Or, oh, they’re gonna fuck you this way, they’re gonna do this, you need page five, you need page 20. At the end, you have a $30,000 contract in my level, of course, at the corporate level, it’s millions, so the military works the same way. They sit with Congress, who are already getting campaign contributions, and they’re saying, “Well, if we don’t do that, we’re going to do this. Oh, look, the Chinese are doing this.”

Like, here’s an example of you want crazy shit? Eric Schmidt from Google, and you can look this video up on YouTube, says that within five years, we’re going to have AI teams running big corporations and sectors of the military. And one AI will be responsible, say, for HR, and one will do logistics, and one will do weapons analysis, whatever. He says that within five years, they will be talking to each other, the AI agents, at such a speed that the human language won’t work for them. They need something else. And they’re going to invent their own language, something mathematical, and we won’t know what they’re saying to each other. And Schmidt says, “At that point, we have only one alternative.” He says, “Pull the plug.” He doesn’t tell us there is no plug. There’s no plug to pull. And they’re putting trillions and trillions of investment, and someone’s going to pull the plug. And guess what else? Who’s one of the biggest investors in military AI?

Patrick Lovell
Eric Schmidt.

Paul Jay
Eric Schmidt. The hypocrisy is just beyond belief. How does he justify it all? Because the Chinese are going to do it if we don’t. Oh, we have to do it because the Russians are going to do it. We have to do it because the Soviets are going to do it. I mean, it is the Cold War framing all over again, and it is way more dangerous. To me, it’s always been like— like, I keep asking people, why aren’t they afraid? If it blows up, they blow up too. Being dead is bad for business. Why aren’t they? And it’s, again, it’s like systemic.

Imagine these guys who were executives of tobacco companies sitting on the research that smoking causes cancer, and most of them smoked. They let their kids smoke. Why? Because you don’t advance in the corporate world in the tobacco industry if you’re not into tobacco. The thinking is, “Well, if I don’t do it, someone else will do it. I might as well do it.”

It’s the logic of Nuremberg. The Nuremberg trials said to these Nazi generals, “No, you don’t do this stuff just because someone else might.” These Nazi generals were executed. Well, these people who are doing this to us, someday maybe they need to face a Nuremberg trial. Maybe some of them do need to be threatened. I’ve never been totally against capital punishment. I can see it for some of the people running that are heading human civilization off the cliff.

Patrick Lovell
Wow. Our time is up. I have thousands of questions. I’d say I hope this goes viral, but we know the eye in the sky is throttling down things that are going to provide truth to the millions of people because they—

Paul Jay
We’re crushed on YouTube. We can’t get anywhere. We used to do 70,000-80,000 on a lot of our stories. We’re lucky now if we do 2,000.

Patrick Lovell
I’m seeing that across the board, and I’m seeing it everywhere. Especially those of us who know. Ladies and gentlemen, for the sake of humanity, just share this, okay. Discover Paul Jay at theAnalysis.news.

Paul Jay
Let’s be clear, the URL is theAnalysis.news.

Patrick Lovell
theAnalysis.news. And of course, your film is to be released in September later this year.

Paul Jay
2027.

Patrick Lovell
Oh, 2027, How to Stop a Nuclear War.

Paul Jay
And people should know, it’s being narrated by Emma Thompson.

Patrick Lovell
Brilliant. Yeah.

Paul Jay
It’s based on a lot of Dan Ellsberg’s work.

Patrick Lovell
Yeah, right. You brought up Ellsberg earlier. I wanted to just clarify that’s Daniel Ellsberg, ladies and gentlemen, of the Pentagon Papers. Obviously, he had a huge impact on all things that happened during that time period, post-Vietnam War, and everything.

My God, Paul, I am so humbled by your insight. Really, thank you for challenging me. I love it. I think this has just been a tremendous dialogue. Thank you for all your work. I guess until next time, I will keep my fingers crossed there is one.

Paul Jay
Oh, yes, sure. I am happy to blab anytime. But the thing is, these help me too because I get to work this stuff out as we’re talking.

Patrick Lovell
Good. That’s what I always lead with, with my truth bombs, because I do a similar sort of— I frame it as these are part— and you’re not going to agree with this, but this is just me speaking. When I try to lay a lot of these things out, particularly because from the vantage, because I do know corruption inside and out, because I was taught by the best. Because I can’t get tens of millions of people to understand what’s actually happening to us. I just say this is part lecture, part sermon, part self-help therapy. I got to get the information out of my own head to try to share it with people that actually care about humanity, life, and the existence of this planet, which is—

Paul Jay
Let me just— so theAnalysis.news, and if you want to just get on the email list for the film, you can go to a website which is stop-nuclear-war.org and get on the email list, and then you’ll be kept up to date on what’s happening with the film.

Patrick Lovell
Outstanding. I’ll put myself on there. Once again, thank you again ladies and gentlemen, everyone, the amazing Paul Jay. Until next time, Paul, I look forward to talking to you. I’ll put everything in the description down below, and I’ll share this with you and your team. All the best.

Paul Jay
Thank you.

Patrick Lovell
Take care.

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Sharmini Peries
I’m Sharmini Peries, coming to you from Toronto for theAnalysis.news.

Last Thursday, CIA Director John Ratcliffe traveled to Havana, Cuba, for talks with Cuban officials at the Interior Ministry; that was May 14. Then, days later, on Wednesday, May 20, the Trump administration unveiled criminal charges against former Cuban President Raúl Castro, now 94 years old, over the 1996 downing of two aircraft operated by Brothers to the Rescue, a Miami-based anti-Castro exile organization. Four men were killed in the incident; that was 30 years ago.

For decades, the story has largely been covered through the lens of the Miami exile community and U.S. national security interests. Now, Cuba’s position is rarely given equal attention in the U.S.

Havana has long maintained that the aircraft repeatedly violated Cuban airspace, despite repeated warnings from the Cuban military authorities, the aircraft were conducting surveillance operations and anti-government leaflet drops over the island during a period of heightened tensions and ongoing U.S.-backed efforts to destabilize the Cuban government.

From Cuba’s perspective, the flights represented a direct challenge to its sovereignty, territorial integrity, not to mention their airspace. The indictment against former President Raúl Castro now signals a significant escalation in Washington’s current confrontation with Havana and raises broader questions about the continued use of legal, economic, and military pressure against governments in Latin America that refuse alignment with the geopolitical interests of the United States.

Now, according to multiple reports, the same Miami-based legal team involved in Raúl Castro’s case is also handling the prosecution of former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, reinforcing concerns across the region about the expanding use of U.S. lawfare and extraordinary territorial power against adversarial states.

Notably, this escalation comes just over a decade after Raúl Castro stood beside former President Barack Obama during the historic reopening of relations between Cuba and the United States. That diplomatic opening raised hopes that decades of hostilities, sanctions, covert operations, and isolation policies might finally be put to bed, and a framework based on coexistence and mutual respect for the sovereignty and dignity of the Cuban people could be established.

In a few seconds, I’ll be joined by James Early, the former Director of Cultural Heritage Policy at the Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. For the last 50 years, James Early has been travelling to Cuba to meet with the people, academic experts, and government officials as a Cuba solidarity activist with a keen eye on the progress of Afro-Cubans. In January 2026, James met with Cuban President Díaz-Canel and Foreign Minister Fernández de Cossío.

It’s very good to have you with us, James.

James Early
Good to be back with you.

Sharmini Peries
James, let’s begin with the indictment against the former president, Raúl Castro. What is this about, and who are the Brothers to the Rescue?

James Early
Well, this is an attempt in a propagandistic way to rationalize a framework for intervention, to say that the leadership has got to step down in terms of some pressure agreement that the CIA, through Marco Rubio and President Trump, is trying to extract from Cuba. I mean, here’s a 94-95-year-old former president who is not about to submit himself to an indictment from the United States. But it does set up an additional rationale to really undermine the leadership of Cuba.

This goes back to the Eisenhower administration in ’61, which first broke relations and stopped sending oil and stopped importing sugar, which was about 60% of Cuba’s export at that time, with a document from the State Department that can be found online that basically says, “These people like their revolution, the fact that they now control their country, and they’re very infatuated with this leader, Fidel Castro, and they’re not going to be pried away from him. So that economic pressure must be put on them in order to put pressure on the government.” I like to frame it as putting pressure on the daughters and sons that they have elected to be their government.

They do have elections. They may not be the same kinds of elections that they have in Britain. Are the elections in Britain the kind of elections that we have in the United States? But democracy, in terms of the ordinary citizen, the demos, is expressed, and people can have and should have critical reflections about that. So this attempt is really to further undermine the government and to move it away from the citizenry.

It’s important to note that between 2015 and 2017, the administrations of President Barack Obama and President Raúl Castro actually brought the United States government in from the cold, from being a renegade. When you look at it in the context of the United Nations, it’s always an overwhelming vote to remove this congressional embargo, which is an economic warfare tied into restricting the government’s ability to provide welfare in terms of food, fuel, and medicine for its citizens, and therefore really mutating, cutting, and undermining the citizen’s ability to really express her or his full educational background, one of the most educated populations in the world, according to the UN. So this is the broader context of this threat.

There is documentation that can easily be found online from the U.S. State Department that there were warnings from the National Security Council in 1962, months ahead, saying to the FAA, the Federal Aviation Administration, “Stop these illegal flights out of Miami going into Cuban airspace, dropping leaflets over Cuba, because eventually if you don’t, the Cubans are likely to shoot down one of the planes.” This is documentation from the U.S. State Department, and it also shows the problems within the U.S. governance system that the National Security Council could not leverage the Air Administration to stop these illegal flights.

It’s been documented that the manifestos of these flights were illegally written. They were false, rather, not illegal. They were falsely written. They said they were flying somewhere else. But, I also have documentation with the late Saul Landau, who did the first international interview with Fidel Castro, where the two of them are— Fidel Castro is then retired— going into detail about the back and forth as Saul Landau was one of the interlocutors with members of the U.S. government and with the Cuban government in that.

So this is the context of setting up a further rationale for what I think we should expect is a likely invasive measure against Cuba. We should not— the general public should be concerned about that, as are the Cubans.

Sharmini Peries
James, a little bit more background about these flights. Can you detail in terms of who they were? Were they the U.S. military or was it—

James Early
No, these are Cuban Americans. One trained, self-identified, self-articulated as having been trained, “as a terrorist,” in his words, José Basulto, B-A-S-U-L-T-O. I think he’s now deceased. There were a number of attacks on Cuba. There was a shootdown of the plane of 73 passengers some years earlier, and the bombing in Cuban hotels.

So these people were involved in Miami, these Cuban Americans, tied into the national security setup of the United States, specifically the CIA. They were the product of an earlier attempt through the Bay of Pigs in (’61), if I recall correctly, trying to overthrow the Cuban government. So the U.S. government was well aware and never took measures to stop this or to indict any of these people who were self-admitted terrorists because they were tied to the CIA. Brothers of the Rescue, they were called.

We must also recall that after the Cuban intelligence system began to document these terrorist activities in Miami, they sent a full dossier to the United States detailing, in future years, these terrorist organizations. Well, what the United States government did was look at it and say, “My goodness. They know more about what’s going on than we know about what’s going on here. They must have somebody here.”

Out of that emerged the discovery of the Cuban Five intelligence officers, who admitted that they had been sent here to the U.S. because the U.S. would not stop these violations of international law and these terrorist attacks, and that they were here to document and to provide further evidence to the United States government to take initiative to stop these illegal activities, which the U.S. government did not. In turn, they put these people on trial, tried them, and put them in prison. The leader of it, I think, for two life terms, and he served like 15 to 16 years in prison before they were released.

Sharmini Peries
Where are the Cuban Five now?

James Early
The Cuban Five are back in Cuba. One of them heads the Committee for the Defense of the Revolution, another heads the International Friendship Association. They went back to their ordinary lives. The leader of the group, Gerardo Hernández, was an engineer. I’ve talked to people in Cuba, everyday citizens who said, “You know, one day he just didn’t come to work, and we never saw him again.” Of course, he had gone underground and came into the U.S.

There were many efforts inside the U.S., many really humanistic efforts on the part of some U.S. congresspeople at the petition of his wife, who was not admitted to the United States to see him while he was imprisoned. Saying that, you know, she was in her fertile years as a young woman and would not be able to produce a child with her husband because he had two life terms. A U.S. congressional member and his wife arranged for semen to be taken to Cuba, where she was impregnated, and they have the famous daughter Gema, who must be now 8, 9, 10-something years old, whom I’ve seen before.

There are many efforts on the part of United States citizens joining citizens around the world for basically, I would say, humanitarian purposes. Some of them are progressive, revolutionaries, or socialists, but the majority of the people are saying this is not the way to carry on international affairs through the starvation of an entire nation. That this is affecting all Cubans, no matter what they think about their own government. None of them can get access to transportation or oil. Trash is piling up all over the place with airborne diseases, because they don’t have fuel to send in trash trucks.

They ironically produced, you know, five vaccines during COVID, used all over the world, including in developed countries like Italy, Brazil, Mexico, and China, but they had difficulty getting needles because of the united sanctions on companies that produce the kinds of materials that they use. They have one of the most noted biotechnological systems in the entire world, this small country of 11 million people, less now because 2 million have left in the last about three and a half years, economically pushed out. In a world of 8 billion people, they’re able to produce this.

So, the United States is really a rogue government, both morally and in terms of the violation of international law. Many citizens recognize that and would want to protect the national sovereignty of Cuba and let Cubans resolve their own affairs.

I would refer people to President Barack Obama’s statement back around 2016. You can find it online, and it says explicitly, “We don’t support regime change. The Cuban people will determine their own internal development, as all nations do.” So this is, again, a broader context with this recent sort of propaganda attack on former President Raúl Castro, which is symbolic. It’s almost unimaginable that they would invade Cuba to kill a 94 or 95-year-old ex-president, and certainly, he is not going to submit himself for extradition.

Sharmini Peries
That’s a very important point you’re making. This is symbolic. Is it symbolic, given the threats that are underway from the Trump administration?

James Early
Well, it’s symbolic in the context of the propaganda war. There are many elements of this attack on Cuba. There is the architecture of economic strangulation, preventing them from getting fuel, which is a blockade. It is objectively a blockade, certainly from the vantage point of the Cubans, but by anyone looking at it literally, it blocks countries from delivering needed resources.

On the side of the U.S. population, it is an embargo that really informs this blockade. An embargo is a congressional-sanctioned mechanism to attack the Cuban economy with the intent of the Cuban population rebelling against their sons and daughters, again, who they have elected to be their stewards of governance. So it’s a part of the psychological warfare as well.

The United States government is trying to remove Díaz-Canel, the President of Cuba, who was the assistant to Raúl Castro for 10 years before he was nominated and approved by the National Assembly as president of the country. I think he is perhaps in his 7th year or so of what Raúl Castro orchestrated through the legislature, that no leader can serve more than two five-year terms. That’s their democratic framework, and then you cannot be elected as president of the country.

So it is symbolic, but it has a material effect on the emotions, on the anxiety with the blackouts, the pileup of trash, the airborne diseases, and the like. It further infuriates the public and further moves the public to demand more of their stewards of governance, as all citizens should, no matter what the threats externally might be. If one puts oneself in a position to be a representative of civil society at the governance level, then you have to deal with the hands that one’s dealt, and so this is a part of a kind of symbolic propagandistic attack on the emotions of the Cuban population.

Marco Rubio
The reason you are forced to survive 22 hours a day without electricity is not due to an oil “blockade” by the U.S. As you know better than anyone, you have been suffering from blackouts for years. The real reason you don’t have electricity, fuel, or food is because those who control your country have plundered billions of dollars, but nothing has been used to help the people.

Sharmini Peries
James, would really like for you to address the specificity of Marco Rubio’s role in these discussions and what he has at stake in terms of his role in the conversation that’s going on, the negotiations that are happening, and his, I guess, very aggressive position on Cuba.

James Early
Well, Marco Rubio is vying to become the president of the United States after his boss, Donald Trump, in prior elections referred to him as the “diminutive little Marco.” Talked very badly about his wife, as he did with all of the candidates. He’s an opportunist, a right outright opportunist who is willing to, on the one hand, say that the Cubans are his people. He was born here in the United States. He was not born in Cuba. His parents left, as I recall, actually before the revolution. Even if they did not leave before the revolution, he is carrying out the vendetta of people who want to go back and take over Cuba.

In effect, they’re saying that, “We are the ones who should lead Cuba, not the Cubans in Cuba.” Even if the Communist Party of Cuba were to disappear, and the government of Cuba, which is not the same as the Communist Party, were to disappear, they’re not saying the Cubans in Cuba should determine their stewardship. They’re saying that they are the ones who should go back.

Of course, they were funded by the CIA when they came into the United States of America. They all thought they would be back in two or three months, so they left all of their industries, and the Cuban government was able to take over the modes of production and really begin to dramatically work with citizens to change society.

Well, Marco Rubio, I think, is the point person framing the overall strategy, probably in relationship to the Heritage Foundation and others. It’s not Donald Trump, who’s— he doesn’t think strategically. He’s impetuous. You never know what he will do. But Marco Rubio is really representing a right-wing base of Cuban Americans in South Florida, Miami in particular. But South Florida is also the home of the Latin American and Caribbean right-wing and the drug mafia, and all of that. It’s almost a jurisdiction unto itself under the borderline of the U.S. and the flag of the U.S., but very much culturally a part of the Caribbean and Latin America, and many of the right-wing, including Bolsonaro in Brazil, which is a part of an international right-wing authoritarian organization. Orbán was just voted out, but he’s a part of the right-wing mainstream movements in Germany and France.

This authoritarianism is organized internationally, and so Rubio, in many ways, has matured to become the front person for that. He certainly is around Cuba as he talks about his parents and his heritage, but he is willing and is actively economically strangling Cubans. This is the inhumanity, this is the immorality. But he’s also vying to be president of the United States, and he’s vying to become a part of the global right-wing.

Recently, in Germany, he called out for the recolonization of the Global South. He said that the civilizing mission of Europe was interrupted by these anti-colonial liberation movements and godless communism, and that what has to be resurrected is the centrality of “We, the Europeans. We, the Christians.” He’s moving with the right-wing fundamentalists, where the State Department has really become more theocratic in its messaging. Even mainstream pundits are recognizing this shift to the right and the emergence of Marco Rubio as a politician at the highest levels of statecraft, and positioning himself on the global stage.

So he is the one who is orchestrating this against Venezuela. Trump, you never know what Trump will do because he is impetuous and he is a megalomaniac, a narcissist who wakes up and wants to bomb somebody. But Rubio is a more strategic-oriented person.

One of the things that I think we have to watch with regard to Rubio is that now that he has Trump attacking Cuba, Trump is unpredictable, so he may not be on the same page. He and Rubio may not be on the same page. My guess is Rubio may not be happy with some of the statements of Donald Trump vis-à-vis Cuba.

On the one hand, he’s going to send a battleship 100 yards away from Cuba, and on the other hand, he says, “We want to talk, and we want to help Cuba.” They’ve turned truth on its head, so it is really difficult to get a full measure, but I think it is clear enough with Rubio that he is an emerging factor for the presidency of the United States, up against Vance. And he will— he’s really burnishing his bona fides now in the international arena in a way that Vance will not be able to claim that, or perhaps any other right-wing candidate, if indeed there is an election for the next president of the United States, because it’s not altogether clear. Trump has talked about “remaining as a dictator,” his terms, not mine.

Sharmini Peries
James, Ada Ferrer, who is the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian who wrote Cuba: An American History, recently published a letter to the President of Cuba, Díaz-Canel, in the New York Times, articulating that she’s flatly against a U.S. invasion of Cuba, but that Cubans are ready for changes, the opening up of Cuba, and particularly the young people are eager for these changes. What are your thoughts on that letter?

James Early
Well, interestingly enough, I would say her position correlates with the position of the president of Cuba, who has said there are objective reasons people are frustrated, that they’re protesting, and that they’re demanding change. That is to be expected. What is unacceptable from the vantage point of the Cuban government is to use that to overthrow the governance and economic system of the nation.

Ferrer’s argument is really an objective one. When people can’t get access to basic necessities, they should not sit silent. People who have put themselves forth to be stewards of government must face the cards that they’re dealt. It is not enough just to say it’s the U.S. embargo. So even Díaz-Canel says that.

I was one of three people in January in a delegation of 20 from the U.S. who met with him and the Deputy Foreign Minister Cossío. I’ve had the opportunity to meet with President Canel over the last 10 years, on a number of occasions, from the time that he was vice president, when Danny Glover, the citizen artist in the United States, and I met with him for almost three hours 10 years ago to talk about issues of race and racial discrimination throughout the hemisphere, in which when he arrived in his presidency, he then sets up a presidential commission, “against racism and discrimination.” Not because Danny Glover and I talked to him, because we were reflecting the expressions and the self-organization of Afro-Cuban and other citizens in Cuba on racial discrimination, which was both a legacy of disenfranchisement and outright racism prior to the revolution, but which is reproduced in the revolution by its own reports in households about people’s physical features and with remittances. The people who left the country were “significantly or largely white.” And so, without an intended sense of superiority, when they send resources home, they get color-coded as just objectively so.

Ferrer’s point is something, again, I think really coincides with something that the president of the country has said, that yes, people are frustrated and they are demonstrating that and they’re clamoring for change.

What I think the Cubans have not done as good a job as they might, and people in the solidarity arena like myself have done a poor job of, looking at what has been the democratic developments within the Cuban Revolution over the last 67 years. So we have a revolution that comes into play that is immediately threatened by the world’s greatest economic and military power. So you have a really stringent approach on the part of the government to concentrate decision-making more directly within governance.

Over the course of the— although they set up the Federation of Cuban Women, the Young Communists, the Young People’s Expression, they really were very poor in dealing with the issue of race. They had this sort of post-racial perspective that we are all just Cubans and we are all the same. But then they began to recognize that there was a legacy question about race, of who inherited what. And then there was an ongoing reproduction, a contemporary reproduction. They have taken democratic initiatives by recognizing the self-organization of Afro-Cubans outside of parastatals of government, who began to protest and to demand.

The Family Code over the last number of years, in which LGBTQ rights, one of the most dramatic developments on the entire planet, in which the president went around the country asking people to support that, because the Catholic Church, for a number of reasons, understanding in the context of Catholicism, were against these LGBTQ rights. Literally thousands of meetings over three or four years of report after report of citizens reading, criticizing, and making recommendations on the policy projections. And then out of that comes a synthesis.

Now, a country of 11 million people at that level of scale, you can do that. It’s almost unimaginable in a country of 300-and-some-odd million people like the United States that you could have that kind of intimate democratic exchange, if you will. But I don’t think a good job has been done in really educating the world about the internal dynamics, the debates that go on in Cuba, the debates about Eurocentrism. People said, “Oh, that was about race.” I said, “No, that was explicitly about why did the government think that they could set down a European model in a mixed-race society in which the majority of people are worshiping these African religions, where Catholicism was never really a strong factor as it was in Mexico, or it still is, or Brazil, or Argentina, some of these places.”

This is again a context of saying to the listening audience, we should take whatever individual view we want to take ideologically, politically, about Cuban socialism, but we should be honest and earnest and see how they debate and find compromise internally, because they actually do that. And like every nation, it has its own contradictions in the context of its virtues and its achievements.

What is being called for, even in the United States Congress today, by a number of Congresspeople, is to recognize and support Cuban sovereignty and its right to be self-determined. Congressman Jonathan Jackson, out of Chicago, the son of Jesse Jackson, and Congresswoman Jayapal were in Cuba three or four weeks ago. People should go online and read their statements about the horrendous situation they saw in hospitals, on the street, when talking to Cuban citizens, not just to the Cuban government.

And their call with many others, including a number of Republicans who have historically wanted to trade with Cuba. Cuba would rather trade with the United States out of simple arithmetic. It’s 90 miles away from the United States, and it’s probably a few hundred miles away from the Mississippi River, where they can import rice, chicken wings, and so forth and so on, rather than trying to deal with Vietnam or Brazil, which is an added cost. The Cubans have always wanted to have that kind of economic relationship, but to determine it through their own citizenry and their own stewards of governance, you know, how they would handle their economy and their society and not let others impose.

Let me just transition on this point. Because little Cuba stood up against the giant of the United States and did it their way, they’re being punished, as Haiti is still being punished for defeating Napoleon and the French, and the way that it’s just been economically raped over the years by the Western countries, particularly with France and the United States, and to some degree Canada involved in that, and the failure of Brazil, through a UN mandate, sent troops into Cuba to actually handle that in an effective way of dealing with democracy on the ground.

These are the complexities of governments and their compromise under threat from the United States.

Sharmini Peries
Let’s talk about the material effects of the sanctions that have been in place, really for a very long time. Tell us about the history of the sanctions and the effects it’s having on the ordinary people.

James Early
Well, starting with President Eisenhower, the U.S. sanctioned Cuba and stopped sending oil, stopped buying its major export product, which was sugar. Sixty percent of that was coming to the U.S. market. So already it is reducing the ability of governance to provide for the well-being of its diverse population across the nation.

Then the Kennedy administration took additional sanctions and moved then towards what we now know to be the embargo. Over years and years, this was updated, including right up to the Biden administration, which, only at the very last minute, like two weeks or so before the Biden administration was through, did it remove Cuba from the terrorist list.

Now, this is the Democratic Party centrist Biden administration, Vice President under Barack Obama, who departed radically, dramatically away from the 2015 to 2017 normalization of relations established by the administrations of President Barack Obama and the presidential administration of Raúl Castro. Again, people should go online and look at how all of the cabinet posts: Interior, Agriculture, all kinds of cabinets with the United States; it’s outlined what kind of relationship they would have with Cuba to reach mutual interest and to continue in respectful civic ways about their differences.

As the Cubans have said always, “We will talk to you about anything, with no preconditions, and it must be a respectful dialogue.” The United States did not follow up on many of those agreements that they had made with Cuba, including 20,000 people a year being able to migrate out of Cuba towards the United States, as the United States has these kinds of migratory agreements with nations all across the world. So the attempt has all along been to undermine the Cuban government by putting pressure on its citizens.

It is very important— I was just looking at it again this morning— that Barack Obama, in his own speech, signed this document. He says explicitly, “We do not support regime change. That is a matter for the Cuban people to decide their governance and their project, and that they wanted to assist the economic reforms of the Cuban government, which would be in the interest of the United States,” as explicitly said, “but also in the interest of the economic stability and viability within Cuba.”

Sharmini Peries
James, there are critics of President Barack Obama. He made several advancements and openings, but they also argue that he didn’t do enough to stabilize that relationship.

James Early
I would totally agree with that. I mean, I think one, we want to judge our stewards of government by their policies, not by their skin color, not by being the first or whatever other sort of sociological dimensions that we tend to use here in the United States. Oh, you’re a woman, or you’re Black, or you’re gay, and therefore this somehow is to translate into policy. No, those things don’t translate into policy. They certainly contextualize and assist policy.

Barack Obama, in my view, did not do enough, and he has disappeared from the scene on the Cuba question. This is arguably his highest international affairs accord with President Raúl Castro on the normalization of relations. And by way of evaluation of how other nations around the world, the great majority of the nations of the world have repeatedly annually at the UN called for the dismantling of this embargo to enter into the accords post-World War II that have been accumulated since 1947, and the ways in which governments should handle mutual interest and differences, deep ideological, political, and economic differences.

Accords have been set up within the UN in which the United States has been a rogue government. The United States and Israel consistently vote against this, but as they are violating all of the post-World War II accords, as well as dismantling, as they have openly said, the dismantling of the administrative state in the United States of America, read the dismantling of liberal democracy. So this is the context in which, again, the rogue development of not just Donald Trump as an individual, but of the Heritage Foundation, a third of the voting population of ‘Make America Great Again,’ the MAGA citizenry, and other entities that for many decades have been studying how to restrict democracy here in the United States and how to revive the Monroe Doctrine.

Donald Trump just said a few days ago, this is, “Our hemisphere, and anybody in it that does not agree with our approach to the hemisphere, will be considered an enemy.” And so, objectively, we have acts of war as we saw in Venezuela. Even some centrist Democrats, while they did not like President Maduro, were against this kind of international violation of international law. So this is a situation that we are facing. Again, the demand has got to be on our governance system to change its ways with Cuba.

Sharmini Peries
James, is there a progressive caucus within the United States, both in Congress and the Senate, in terms of a more positive approach to Cuba? And is there any way to leverage that in this current moment?

James Early
There is a caucus called the Progressive Caucus, which is quite amorphous. It goes in many ways, and so it is not as coherent and certainly not as consistent as one would like it. There are individuals who have stepped forward like Jayapal, who I think is still chairing the Congressional Caucus, or its chair from the last year, Congressman Jonathan Jackson, but there is no evidence of a consistent caucus, a consistent discussion.

Sharmini Peries
Now, Cuba has had an annual resolution at the UN General Assembly for 30 years, calling on the international community to support it in calling for an end to the financial embargo, commercial, and economic activity in Cuba. This has been overwhelmingly supported by the international community, but the UN General Assembly lacks the binding authority to enforce this, and the U.S. continues to ignore it. What are your thoughts on that?

James Early
Well, it’s a simple matter that the United States is an imperial power. Even some of the mainstream pundits and some of the elected congressional officials will now use that term. It’s an imperial power that might makes right. We’re seeing the highest, most profound expression of the dismissal of laws that have been accumulated both within the nation and again, in the post-World War II accords, notwithstanding many limitations and problems within the United Nations. It’s still in its articulation as the highest achievement of humanity at the nation-state level of how to live in a globalized world with some stability, with some predictability. So, what we’re seeing is the violation of all of that, and we’re in a very unpredictable moment, and it’s an imperial moment.

We find that the architecture of democracy in the United States is paralyzed. I was just reading a statement by Congressman Gregory Meeks, who is a minority Foreign Affairs chair, who gratuitously puts out that Raúl Castro should be tried for the murder of Americans, and then the following statement are very, I would say, progressive policies of dismantling the embargo, removing the fuel blockade, of building a more direct relationship with Cuba in its attempt to change its own internal economic stability.

So this is the why. The United States government, in its arrogance and its dismissal of international law, and while it’s sharply and deeply expressed in the sort of megalomania of a Donald Trump, runs broader than this individual. It’s in the very structure of U.S. governance, as we see with the case of Palestine, in which only recently have we gotten a break within the Senate where people to some degree, while they will not acknowledge the genocide, they stand up in limiting U.S. complicity in that, which has been a bipartisan affair of sending material aid for what most of the world now sees clearly as a genocide of killing children, women, and starving them. The same is now going on in Cuba.

So, you know, Cuba is one of the leading biotechnology countries in the world. Ironically, this small country of, again, less than 11 million people in a world of (8) billion people emerges through a will of governance, one of the highest educated populations in the world. According to the United Nations, the Cubans don’t have to really spout this themselves, whose children score off the charts in math, science, great literary figures, musical figures, one of the four major ballets of the world, and so forth and so on.

Why is the United States doing this? It’s out of an imperial arrogance. It is a signal to— not just a signal, it’s a message to the rest of the world, “Do not defy the United States of America.” And of course, now with globalization, the rise of China, China being the major trade partner throughout Latin America, the United States is trying to restrict the relationship of the countries in Latin America, the Americas, and Canada. And with threats even to Canada, of colonization of Canada’s “the 51st (State),” a Greenland. And while I laugh at that, we really can’t laugh at this administration because it is an unpredictable administration. One must prepare for the worst, as we saw with the violation of national sovereignty in Venezuela.

Sharmini Peries
James, let’s also talk about how other Latin American nations are responding to the current pressure on Cuba and potential threats of invasion. Now, Claudia Sheinbaum in Mexico and Lula da Silva, a Brazilian President, have all come out against any aggression towards Cuba, calling for diplomatic conversations and resolution. The Canadian company, Sherritt International, has done some very good work in Cuba under these conditions, but has actually withdrawn and paused its activity in Cuba.

Now, there are movements in Latin America, plus certain countries with strong leadership and economic power that could actually assist, yet they are restrained. Why is that?

James Early
That’s a really important question. I think Sheinbaum has really been a shining star in many ways. While she has provided aid as some other countries, her articulation of the context of that, the right of a sovereign nation to develop relations with other sovereign nations, I think she has been more consistent in her framework and in her articulation to both her public and to the general public and to governments around the country, around the hemisphere.

In the case of Brazil, which has a very strong economic capitalist class in a country that’s self-identified as 53% negro y raza mixta, so the race question is really the contextual horizontal Democratic question, not a kind of minority affairs question. Lula, President Lula, whom I’ve spent time with, I think, is very restricted vis-à-vis the opposition forces, particularly the economic forces in his nation. So he has a different kind of balance that he has to try to achieve in comparison to Sheinbaum, who’s got an overwhelming mandate in Mexico, or in contrast to Canada.

Sherritt, the Canadian company that has worked with Cuba for many decades on nickel and cobalt, which are the two basic minerals. Cuba does not— Cuba has some oil, but it’s a heavy oil. They’ve made a lot of progress in the last few months on some kind of heating process to refine that oil that they’ve not been able to do before. But all of these countries are ultimately compromised under the imperial threat of the United States government, which first carries out economic warfare against them in terms of sanctions, which penalizes the American population in terms of higher prices, which fuels the pockets of the U.S. oil companies.

The U.S. is the biggest oil producer in the world. People think that comes out of the Middle East with OPEC, not so incidentally, of which Venezuela was one of the founding members of OPEC years ago. So it is the imperial might and the threat of the United States that we have seen people do just the unimaginable, where Cuba has provided a surplus of medical personnel, particularly doctors, that go all around the world in a voluntary service in which they pay their tax to the government to be able to support free education, to be able to support free healthcare, who are now being called slaves, by Rubio at the State Department and others, and putting a lot of pressure on these underdeveloped and developing countries, these mid-level countries, to expel medical personnel, which, unlike their doctors, concentrated in the large metropolitan areas in these countries throughout the world, including in South Africa.

The Cuban doctors go into the smallest, most challenging spaces within these nations. I’ve visited them in Venezuela. I’ve seen them in South Africa and in Brazil. Jamaica has broken their deal, and citizens are up in arms about this because they’re not receiving a basic human rights of healthcare from their governments, but the relationship with Cuba was able to provide that. So it is the military might, it is the economic might of the U.S. that compromises internal democracy, even in some of the larger economies of our hemisphere, particularly Brazil, Mexico, and then throughout the Caribbean.

Sharmini Peries
James, there has been quite a bit of civil society activity in the United States resisting U.S. policy towards Cuba, more aligned with what you described earlier in terms of what Barack Obama wanted to do in Cuba. And yet we don’t hear those voices anymore under the Trump administration. Why is that? And what activities are taking place to resist this kind of potential invasion, the blockade, the various sanctions that are in place on Cuba?

James Early
Well, over the last 67 years, there have literally been thousands of people-to-people relations of university students, musical groups, plastic arts groups, humanitarian aid groups, Code Pink, Pastors for Peace, carrying tons and tons of supplies to Cuba, violating U.S. laws to do so. In some instances, Code Pink continues under the legal framework every other month or so to carry tons of rice into various locations in Cuba. There are people who carry heart devices and things of that sort. So there’s a lot of people-to-people activity, and that is to be applauded. It’s also coming from all around the world.

The limitations of that are that a government cannot build its well-being policy for the complexities of its nation just on voluntary associations, and not knowing when things will come. Governments have to set forth calendars, and this is where the blockade comes in, and this not being able to do regular business, to not having access to the financial architecture of the world, because the United States then penalizes even developed nations, Germany, France, and Canada, for working with Cuba. Cuba has almost no access to global banks because they’re threatened by the United States government. So these activities are going on, and they’re to be applauded.

However, for the listening audience, whether it’s an audience in the United States or wherever on the globe, the electoral battlefront, organized, mobilized citizens saying to their stewards of governance, “Here are the policies that we demand of you,” that is where we have to put increased pressure, because this is then what allows for the opening of a stable diplomatic bilateral relationship between two countries, whereas voluntary movements, humanitarian movements, and street-organized protests, all of which are very important, they don’t have the consistent engagement in the policy arena. It’s just the nature of the democratic architecture.

We must speak to our elected officials and demand that they represent our interests in being full participants in the family of nations. Again, that is not saying that one has to support Cuban socialism. I might support Cuban socialism, but someone else has a right to have a different perspective. But what we should not have a right to have a difference over is the recognition of, again, of these accumulated accords over many decades where countries say, “This is how we handle mutual interests. This is how we handle differences among us in peaceful and civil ways,” in which the United States is in violation, both from a moral point of view, but most importantly, from a legal international point of view.

The United States government is violating all of those policies. And again, Barack Obama, where is he? You know, he— this is— we need him to speak up on this policy agreement that he was at the center of with President Raúl Castro, and his voice is nowhere to be heard in this process. He’s about to open up his library on Juneteenth in Chicago, so perhaps he’s preoccupied with that.

Sharmini Peries
James, this has been a very insightful and deep conversation, and I want to come back to you as things are unfolding in Cuba. I thank you so much for joining us today and giving us this incredible historical as well as the current situation with Cuba. Thank you so much.

James Early
Thank you.

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Paul Jay

Hi, I’m Paul Jay, and welcome to theAnalysis.news. In a minute, I’ll be joined by Gerald Horne, and we’ll start a discussion about the consequences of the American war against Iran.

A few things are now clear. First, the American people are mostly against this war. This is not a repeat of the Iraq War. In 2003, while there were mass protests against the invasion, the American establishment was largely unified. The elite consensus held, the right was solidly behind the mission, and a significant portion of the population went along.

That’s not the situation today. The right is fractured. The Democratic Party, including its corporate and usually pro-war leadership, is opposed, and polling suggests the majority of the American people want no part of it.

Even much of the mainstream media has acknowledged there was no imminent threat of a nuclear bomb in Iran or any kind of attack on the U.S. In fact, there’s no evidence that Iran had any plan for a nuclear weapon at all, and at most, maybe they were developing a breakout capability, but only as leverage. We’ve even heard mainstream pundits use the words war crimes about an American president.

The Israeli genocide in Gaza cracked open a consensus that has held for decades. For the first time, significant numbers of Americans, including young people, and communities that have historically been reliable supporters of Israeli policy, began to question unconditional U.S. support for Israel. Many have condemned it outright as genocide.

The 4-day war against Iran has become months-long, and the world might be heading into recession and a realignment of forces. Many countries across Europe are militarizing their economies. Germany is turning itself into an arms manufacturer. The UAE pulled out of OPEC. The Russian war of aggression against Ukraine seems to be at a stalemate as Russia reaps the benefits of higher oil prices, and China is pulling ahead of the U.S. in tech, economic growth, and allies. The U.S. is isolated as never before.

Have Donald Trump and the Christian nationalist cabal around him, who planned a Mussolini-style administration, overplayed their hand? Has it produced a genuine rupture in American political life? Tens of thousands of Iranians, Lebanese, and mostly Palestinians have been killed by this Israeli-American war. It’s a level of American savagery we haven’t seen since the 2003 war against Iraq.

Now joining us is Gerald Horne. He holds the John J. and Rebecca Moores Chair in History and African American Studies at the University of Houston. He’s the author of dozens of books, most recently The Capital of Slavery: Washington, D.C. 1800-1865. Gerald, welcome back.

Gerald Horne

Thank you for inviting me.

Paul Jay

I’ve raised all kinds of questions, so just start where you like.

Gerald Horne

Well, first of all, just in terms of updating the news, the foreign minister of Iran was just in Moscow. According to certain observers, this may suggest that Iran is developing a kind of JCPOA lite, that is, the Joint Comprehensive Program of Action inaugurated by the Obama administration, denounced by Mr. Trump as the worst deal ever during Trump 1.0. But given the fact that this bombing by the United States and Israel has not accomplished this purpose of regime change, it seems that if Mr. Trump actually wants traction and movement with regard to the nuclear file, he’ll have to return to JCPOA lite. Therefore, you may see the removal of what Mr. Trump calls nuclear dust, euphemistically, I’m sure, to Moscow, which of course is under strict international authorities, the International Atomic Energy Agency, for example.

Similarly, with regard to reaching a compromise, apparently the Iranians are willing to alter the present status quo concerning the Straits of Hormuz, from which they have fundamentally set up a tollgate and have rather rigorously established who can enter and who can exit. They will release or somehow reduce that regime if the United States somehow releases or reduces its so-called blockade. Apparently, Mr. Trump is not in favor of that, just as he’s not necessarily in favor of the Moscow arrangement with regard to what he calls nuclear dust.

I think we also need to take seriously the remarks of Chancellor Merz in Berlin who is oftentimes not necessarily a paragon of diplomacy, but he probably outdid himself just the other day when he suggested that Iran is humiliating the United States of America, when he suggested that there is no strategy with regard to how Washington has gotten into this crisis and apparently has no exit scheme with regard to how to flee from this crisis. This reflects a general resentment, if not opposition, in Europe to this escapade in Iran.

We know that King Charles is now visiting Washington, apparently trying to mend fences between London and Washington in light of Mr. Trump’s repeated denunciation of Sir Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, because of his reluctance to commit to the misadventure in Iran. This mirrors a similar sort of opposition in Spain, where Prime Minister Sánchez has forbidden Washington to use Spanish bases to bomb Iran and has forbidden the use of Spanish airspace to conduct missions from there to Iran. The cherry on the cake, perhaps, is the fact that just a few days ago in Barcelona, there was a kind of anti-Trump summit, if you’d like, that was convened by Prime Minister Sánchez and President Lula of Brazil, but also included Mia Mottley of Barbados, President Petro of Colombia, President Sheinbaum of Mexico, and President Ramaphosa of South Africa.

Now, if that were not enough, simultaneously, in Milan, in North Italy, there was a gathering of the European right. It may come as a surprise to many that many in the European right are not necessarily pro-Washington. This holds true for perhaps the lodestar of the European right, speaking of the so-called Alternative for Germany Movement, which in many ways is more hostile to the U.S. presence on German soil than, say, the Christian Democrats or the Social Democrats, for example.

So it’s appropriate in this context to also mention the trifecta, because at the same time you had these meetings in Barcelona and Milano, you had a similar meeting in Türkiye, convened by President Erdoğan, which brought together many centrist and center-right regimes, particularly regimes with heavy Muslim majorities. Even though there was not an explicit denunciation of Mr. Trump, it was clear that that was the rationale for this gathering coming into being, because Türkiye has reason to believe that they should take Israeli authority seriously when they have suggested that after somehow they dispense with Iran and execute regime change, they will turn their attention to Türkiye, believe it or not, even though this country is 10 times the size of Israel, has a formidable military, is the eastern flank of NATO, and as noted, has rather positive relations with Washington.

So, when commentators suggest that this may be a Suez moment for Washington, I don’t think that they’re referring necessarily to what happened after 1956, when once again Israel, this time joined by Britain and France, attacked Nasser’s Egypt over control of the Suez Canal, not to mention regime change in Cairo, but were forced into a hasty retreat, not only because of protests from Moscow, but also from President Eisenhower. This marked the beginning of the end for the British Empire.

Now, you perhaps can draw a straight line from 1956 to 1957, when Ghana in West Africa gained independence, escaping the clutches of London, or from 1956 to 1962, when Algeria, which was not considered a colony, but a department of France, also was able to declare independence. I don’t think that 2026 necessarily marks the beginning of the end for the U.S. Empire; however, from what I’ve just said in the last few minutes, you should reasonably conclude that it does mark a shift in the global correlation of forces. A kind of not only shifting of the pieces on the chessboard, but also, to a certain extent, turning over the chessboard.

I haven’t had time, for example, to talk about the impact in Africa, and the fact that as a result of this Iran crisis, you see that Israel has moved to establish relations with the breakaway Somalia province of Somaliland, which has outraged the larger Somalia, which is heavily dependent once again on Türkiye, which is responsible for picking up the garbage, airport security, educating Somali students in Ankara and Istanbul, not to mention offshore drilling for oil and a spaceport. Israel feels that it can further seek to weaken, if not attack, Türkiye from the soil of East Africa.

In that same vein, Israel feels that its longtime antagonists across the Red Sea in Yemen, speaking of those who are referred to as the Houthis on this side of the Atlantic and Ansar Allah in Yemen itself, which fought the United States to a standstill in the first few months of the Trump administration and shut down the Israeli port of Al Eilat after October 2023 and the war on Gaza. Israel feels that from its perch in Somaliland, it can further weaken and attack Ansar Allah.

Likewise, and this is just breaking news to a certain extent, the United States is seeking to improve relations with Eritrea, a neighbor of Somalia with which it has had very negative and frosty relations ever since its independence from Ethiopia decades ago. But because of the Yemen issue in particular, Washington wants to improve relations with Eritrea.

We haven’t even touched upon all the economic manifestations. The price of a gallon of gasoline in California is going past $7 as we speak. It may reach $10, believe it or not. That has knock-on effects with regard to the price of jet fuel, raising airline prices, the price of groceries in the grocery stores, since groceries in this country are largely transported by trucks, which require fuel, for example. When the United States gets a cold, you can readily surmise that a place like Africa gets pneumonia, and the reports we have been receiving suggest as much. So, once again, this may not mark the beginning of the end for the U.S. Empire, speaking of this rather inglorious and cautious attack on Iran, but certainly it will mark a weakening of Washington, particularly vis-à-vis its ongoing Second Cold War with the People’s Republic of China, where Mr. Trump will be visiting rather shortly.

Paul Jay

So you raised a lot of interesting stuff, but let me ask this. The picture you’re describing is a fractured, incoherent policy of the Trump administration. But it doesn’t, as far as I can see, reflect a fundamental fracture or weakening of the American economy. Like, the underlying structure— it’s not like Germany, a deep depression of the ‘30s. The way out is a great militarization, and there’s nothing you can do with a totally militarized economy except invade people and plunder, but we’re not looking at that.

Prior to the Trump administration, there were lots of problems. But as a fundamental, you know, they still had the reserve currency. Wall Street was still the financial giant, so on and so on. This cabal, this kind of Mussolini-esque cabal that has seized the White House, was very profitable in terms of tax cuts for the elites and in terms of doling out all kinds of contracts to Silicon Valley and the crypto gang. It was a great boondoggle administration for quite a while, but has it reached a point now where the elites have to bail on this thing? Which means, do they have to get rid of this guy? Because it really seems that while structure and systems assert themselves, sometimes crazy, not mad men theory, but madmen, sometimes they get in the way of the systemic needs.

Gerald Horne

Well, I agree with the underlying premise of what you’re saying, and I would bolster it by suggesting that even though there is a fracture in MAGA, recall the dispute between former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who has presidential ambitions all of his own, as I understand it. Not to mention other forces of the podcast right, including Candace Owens and Alex Jones, for example. Mr. Carlson says he’s tormented by the fact that he helped to encourage people to go to the polls to vote for Mr. Trump.

Despite that fracture, if you look at the polls, Mr. Trump still has significant support within his political party, for example, that, that may not prevent a wipeout of the Republicans in the midterm elections. Although I would point your audience to the current issue of The Economist, the British conservative weekly, which lists scores of ways that Mr. Trump might try to steal this election, and we should not be shocked by that, considering his rather over-the-top reaction to his loss of the 2020 election, for example.

So it’s too soon to say that Mr. Trump is on the way out, for example, although it is true to say that there is a split that many in the elite, particularly the elite who suffered from his tariffs, although they’re supposed to be getting a refund, would like to see his exit. But many in the base are not necessarily on that same level of disagreement. I should also mention that to cite Mr. Trump’s favorite hockey player, Wayne Gretzky, who suggested—

Paul Jay

We, by the way, us Canadians, you know, I have dual citizenship. Wearing my Canadian hat, we have disowned him, disavowed him. Call him an American hockey player.

Gerald Horne

Well, okay, fair enough, but the metaphor is, as you know, that he says, “You should not skate to where the puck is, but skate to where the puck is going.” I’ve just articulated where the puck is, that is to say, mass support in the Republican Party, for example, a certain kind of discontent amongst elites. But who is to say what the scheme of things will be within six, seven, eight, or nine months, for example, particularly as this economic crisis asserts itself?

Now, The New York Times had this article, I believe it was just this morning, on the front page, suggesting that, as you have noted, the United States has not necessarily suffered economically to the same extent that other countries have as a result of this February 28th, 2026 escapade. Certainly, you are correct to point out how the German economy has suffered, and that may undergird these rather intemperate remarks by Chancellor Merz.

But we also need to pay attention to the discontent in France, which historically has been rather hawkish with regard to establishing a certain kind of strategic autonomy for the European Union, despite the presence of pro-Washington regimes in Europe, including the recently installed government in Budapest, not to mention the Baltic States, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. We should not rule out the possibility that Mr. Macron’s hawkishness may find a more willing audience. That is to say, more willing to confront Washington.

And speaking of Canada, I’m wondering if I can turn the tables. Have you heard the story about Canada possibly joining the European Union? And if that—

Paul Jay

A lot of Canadians are in favor of it. They did some polling on it, and it’s a fairly popular idea. I think there’s some serious conversations going on, not about joining it, although frankly, it wouldn’t be such a bad idea, but having a higher level of economic association. Sort of what the UK may have now post-Brexit, but a much closer relationship with Europe. It’s hard to tell how serious Carney is about this. There’s a lot of talk about diversification of the Canadian economy. We’ll see.

The American capital owns and controls really the majority of the Canadian economy. So it’s not like he has such a free hand. We’ll see. He talks a good game, but we don’t know yet how real all that is.

Gerald Horne

Well, I raised that as well because I’m seeking to link that to the aforementioned point about France. That is to say, if Canada does have a closer relationship with the European Union that’s significantly influenced by French hawkishness, what will be the knock-on effects in Quebec, for example? This closer association with France and the European Union? Will it introduce further fissures into the Canadian body politic, or alternatively, will it strengthen Canada vis-à-vis the United States?

Paul Jay

Well, I would— it’s a very popular thing, maybe not in Alberta, but almost all the rest of the country supports the idea of a diversified economy and so on. The problem is what really needs to be done in Canada, if we’re going to go there, is that we have an enormous amount of resource wealth, and instead of using the Norwegian model, where you have essentially publicly owned or a large-scale public ownership of the resource, so that far more money goes into the public purse, we have a very entirely privatized model. The amount of royalties that are paid to the provinces or the federal government is nothing compared to what, say, Norway does. That would be a real way to develop some independence, but Carney, of course, doesn’t talk about that.

But let me get back to the situation in the U.S. I thought it was very interesting. Jamie Dimon, about a week and a half, two weeks ago, sort of said. I’m not quoting him. I’m paraphrasing. I hope I get it right, but what I took from it is, “Yes, this is a mess. Yes, maybe he shouldn’t have started this Iran war, but now he’s got to finish it.”

I think the American elites are stuck in this. They’ve now given Iran something they didn’t have before, control over the Straits of Hormuz, which has turned into a stranglehold on the global economy. Leverage they never had. People have said this in the main punditry, you know, “No nuclear bomb would’ve given them this much leverage.” So now they want to finish the job, but what the hell does finish the job mean?

Because, as it’s obvious now, it’s not so easy to overthrow a class because you’re not overthrowing a government. It’s not like you’re going in and plucking out a Maduro here, and the reason they did that is that they were able to make a deal. Rodrigo said they were able to get someone who said, “Okay, you don’t have to throw the whole Venezuelan ruling class overboard. We’ll make a deal with you.” Well, in Iran, they took out the leadership, and then they got another leadership. So it’s an entire class of thousands and thousands of people.

Not only that, you can’t underestimate, especially in the countryside, with still significant popular support. Not only that, but the more they attack Iran with bombs, the more support the government gets. So it doesn’t get them where they wanted to go.

So Jamie Dimon, what is he saying? Finish the job means what? I only see one way they can finish the job, and the Iranians don’t want to cooperate so far, is actually to offer so much to Iran that you bring them back into the West. But that would just completely demolish the whole American narrative about Iran, and it doesn’t seem like their theocracy or the Revolutionary Guard, that’s not in their DNA to cooperate. I don’t know. What do you think? What is the way out of this for the American elites?

Gerald Horne

Well, if you listen to the neoconservatives who’ve been accused of capturing the White House, John Bolton had an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal just the other day. John Bolton, of course, a former national security advisor under Mr. Trump. Known for his unalloyed hawkishness. He says the only way out is regime change. Now, accomplishing that is more than a notion, but to suggest that it was not just his opinion. In the Washington Post just the other day, Marc Thiessen, a former Bush crony, was fundamentally saying the same thing.

Now, how they plan to accomplish that perhaps is asking too much. To outline it in an op-ed, but even if they were to write a book, I’m not sure how you could accomplish regime change in the Islamic Republic, particularly since a number of informed commentators have suggested that, inadvertently, Mr. Trump may have helped to create an Islamic Republic superpower. If you drill down on that particular notion, you have to go across the Strait of Hormuz and look at what’s happening to the Gulf monarchies. I don’t find it coincidental or accidental that Qatar, for example, has taken a much more dovish line towards Iran than some of its neighbors.

You can see that reflected on Al Jazeera, for example, where even when there were missiles being shot into Doha, where Al Jazeera is located, the commentators were still not necessarily harsh or hostile towards Iran. However, next door in the United Arab Emirates, Dubai and Abu Dhabi in particular, which, as you know, signed on to the so-called Abraham Accords, which involved a kind of de facto recognition of Israel, and the UAE is a kind of Israeli front. Not only have they withdrawn from OPEC, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, as you just suggested, but they’ve also tried to snuggle closer to Washington, asking for a currency swap, which you could see understandably as a kind of bailout. The fact that it’ll be considered in Washington by the Treasury Department should tell us quite a bit.

We also have to understand, in terms of the aforementioned point concerning whether or not Iran is on the route to becoming a kind of superpower, there are those who have suggested that the only way out for these Gulf monarchies is to become protectorates of Iran. Given the pummeling and pulverizing they just endured since February 28th, they’re going to have to come to some sort of agreement with Iran. Even the UAE will have to come to a kind of agreement with Iran. I would say the UAE, particularly, because it not only has contradictory relations with Iran. It also has contradictory relations with its giant neighbor, speaking of Saudi Arabia. So if you were—

Paul Jay

Well, there is another way, and the more we talk, the more this seems like this will be the way they go when you listen to them. It is another Iraq. In other words, bomb the shit out of the place and send in ground troops, overthrow the government, and install people you like, and it turns into a complete mess. They blame it all on Trump. You know, he wears it, and then Vance comes in as, you know, the next.

I mean, it’s either that or the Americans are going to have the most embarrassing surrender, really. And by the sounds of Jamie Dimon, if he represents the majority of finance, and certainly he’s the gorilla on Wall Street, then they’re ready to do this or willing to take all the chaos that comes from it. A lot of money gets made in these kinds of wars. My God, what happens to the price of oil? And all the arms that are being expended have to be replaced. But other than an Iraq scenario, what have they got?

Gerald Horne

Well, to your point, you should pay attention, as I’m sure you have, to the stories flowing from Vance’s world. He, it seems to me, was a major source of the recent story in The New York Times by Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman suggesting that on the fateful days before February 28th, 2026, Mr. Netanyahu was a de facto resident of the Situation Room. Coming in through video link were his comrades from Israel itself, and JD Vance supposedly expressed discontent about this possible invasion.

Interestingly enough, The Atlantic just had another story which suggests that JD Vance feels that the Secretary of War, so-called Mr. Hegseth, is misleading Mr. Trump with regard to what has transpired, and to that end, NBC News carried a startling story about the billions of dollars in damage inflicted on the U.S. military bases. And of course, Jonathan Swan once again did a story just the other day talking about how the United States, putting it simplistically, might be running out of ammunition. That is to say, running out of Tomahawk missiles, running out of missile interceptors, which does not bode well with regard to confronting the big enchilada, which is the People’s Republic of China.

Paul Jay

Very dangerous, very dangerous. I mean, you can also see, you know, what led to the Iraq War was 9/11, which, according to Senator Bob Graham, was in fact something orchestrated by the Bush-Cheney administration with the Saudis. That’s not me saying it. Senator Bob Graham, who was co-chair of the Joint Congressional Investigation into 9/11, said it. It’s a moment where one can see something like that, and/or they just bloody well, you know, say, “Oh, the nuclear bomb, the nuclear bomb, we have to go,” and they invade, and Trump pays the political price. Vance becomes the “I never liked this war, but now I’ve got to win it.” It’s very dangerous.

Gerald Horne

Well, to that end, recall that there are three major aircraft carriers off the coast of Iran as we speak. Thousands of U.S. sailors and Army personnel. I assume they’re not there just to gather rays from the sun. I assume that they have a larger mission. And certainly, Mr. Trump sees this as a sword hanging over the necks of the leaders of the Islamic Republic. But the Islamic Republic is very confident that if there is an invasion, they’ll be able to repel it. After all, they have a million-strong military.

It’s doubtful if the United States will be able to amass a 3-to-1 ratio, which they may need in order to successfully overthrow that regime. I’m not even sure if that would basically mean that the entire U.S. military would have to focus on Iran, which seems rather ridiculous and absurd. But to the further point, I should say that we should not rule out the possibility of a military invasion of what has been called regime change, as absurd and ridiculous it may seem at the moment.

Paul Jay

Yeah, I’m not even sure what to say next. All right, thanks, Gerald. We’ll keep doing this every couple of weeks. Thanks for joining us.

Gerald Horne

Thank you for inviting me.

Paul Jay

Thank you for joining us on theAnalysis.news. I guess if there was ever a time when we needed a large-scale, massive anti-war movement, it’s now.

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Barry Stevens

Hi, welcome to theAnalysis. I’m Barry Stevens. In a few moments, I’m going to be joined by author Michael Ellsberg, and we’re going to be talking about the work of his father, Daniel Ellsberg, who is best known as the whistleblower who released the Pentagon Papers. I’ll see you in a moment.

Michael Ellsberg is a well-known author, but also the co-editor of a new book, Truth and Consequence: Reflections on Catastrophe, Civil Resistance, and Hope. It’s a collection of the writings of Michael’s father, Daniel Ellsberg. Now, Dan was the original modern U.S. whistleblower. He was a Senior White House and Pentagon military analyst until, in 1971, he smuggled out the Pentagon Papers, which exposed the lies told by many U.S. administrations about the Vietnam War and was consequential in the resignation of President Richard Nixon.

You may be familiar with this through movies like All the President’s Men or Steven Spielberg’s The Post. But after beating an espionage charge, Dan became an activist for the rest of his life and wrote several books, including The Doomsday Machine. He was a nuclear war planner, and it’s about nuclear weapons. So welcome, Michael.

Michael Ellsberg

Thanks so much for having me. My father was a great appreciator of your work, Paul Jay, and theAnalysis and, of course, all his work with Paul. So it’s an honor to be here.

Barry Stevens

Yeah, I should probably disclose that I’m the co-writer of a documentary coming out, which is based on Dan’s book, The Doomsday Machine, largely, and it’s called How to Stop a Nuclear War. Paul Jay, the editor of this channel, is the director.

Yeah, well, I was really, as I was saying just before we recorded, that I was really impressed by the personal stories in the book about your dad, who I had the honor of meeting once. He was an amazing guy. I think what perhaps is really interesting to us right now is the penetrating essays he wrote, particularly there’s one— well, there are several, but on violence on ethics, on terrorism. Now, how do you see the relevance of the work here to our world today?

Michael Ellsberg

Yeah, well, the main message of the book, I would say— I mean, there’s, there’s writing spanning 50 years here on diverse topics. But I actually chose one passage to put right in the introduction where he just makes a very clear moral statement that deliberately targeting civilians in war is terrorism and terrorism is wrong, no matter who does it, whether it’s a state actor or a resistance movement. Deliberately targeting civilians is evil, as he would put it.

Unfortunately, you don’t have to look very far across the globe or in our own military to see what he would define as terrorism being played out every day, unfortunately. I would add that he would also include in that reckless disregard for civilian collateral damage. Obviously, all war has some collateral damage. But when you can see that one side just literally does not care at all about the civilians on the other side, he would classify that as terrorism as well.

Barry Stevens

He said, I’m quoting here, “We need to recognize, acknowledge, and change our own involvement through our government and its allies in mass murder. And we must do this with the same urgency with which we move to protect ourselves from further mass murder being inflicted on us.” He wrote that right after 9/11, which was a long time ago.

Michael Ellsberg

Yeah.

Barry Stevens

But it still has this relevance today, as you say.

Michael Ellsberg

Yeah, absolutely. That essay that I was alluding to was written about a month after 9/11, and of course, he was completely shaken by that and horrified, and also horrified by the response that we engaged in, and engaged in a great deal of protest. In fact, the one time that I ever got arrested for anything, I got arrested for nonviolent disobedience by his side in the run-up to the Iraq War. I believe that was March of— what was that— 2003. We stepped across the line in front of the UN in New York. I guess it was the U.S. delegation to the UN in New York. We were with a bunch of actually religious leaders. I believe there were a bunch of Catholic priests and such, and we all were in the paddy wagon with a bunch of priests.

Barry Stevens

Yeah, it’s interesting because there were a lot of people that I think Dan was working with. I forgot the name of the woman who was from India who influenced him a great deal.

Michael Ellsberg

Right. Yeah. So he was greatly influenced by many people, but probably the two most important who both passed in the last several years, then young anti-war activists Randy Kehler and Janaki Tschannerl, is the woman that you’re referring to.

Barry Stevens

Right.

Michael Ellsberg

I believe they knew each other. They were in the peace movement, and they were both Gandhians. In particular, Janaki was from India and had a very direct lineage, a kind of spiritual political lineage to the Gandhian nonviolence. I would say that was my father’s main orientation. He was not a pacifist, but he’s also not any type of left revolutionary either. He was very much in the tradition of Gandhian nonviolent civil disobedience. Martin Luther King and Gandhi, both of whom were quite influenced by Henry David Thoreau.

Barry Stevens

And Tolstoy.

Michael Ellsberg

Yeah.

Barry Stevens

That’s true, but as you say, he wasn’t a pacifist, and he was also very critical of, obviously, terrorism. He would have been, I’m sure, critical of Hamas’s attack on October 7, 2023.

Michael Ellsberg

Yes. Yeah. Absolutely. He lost friends over that. I mean, I grew up in Berkeley. You can meet a lot of Berkeley Bay Area leftists who are even pro-Hamas terrorism. My father would never condone that or support that. He would condemn it in the strongest terms, but also condemn the other side, condemn our side, and condemn our support for any form of terrorism, which, as I said, he defined as deliberate war on non-combatants.

Barry Stevens

Yes, and it’s a little saddening to think, of course, that his activism around the Vietnam War— he’d actually, when he was deep inside the government with a strong Cold War mentality, and he was a Marine. He was a United States Marine. He went to Vietnam, even though he wasn’t at that point a serving Marine; he went into combat. But he came back convinced that the war was a disaster, which is what led to him releasing the Pentagon Papers. But what I was going to say is that it’s a little sad to think that there was that period of his life. Then we were just talking about 2001 and the Iraq War, and then we’re in it again now.

Michael Ellsberg

Yeah.

Barry Stevens

Perhaps it’s fortunate he didn’t live to see that one.

Michael Ellsberg

My mom and I agree that he lived a long, very rich, and full life. We think he probably would not have had a lot more happiness had he lived past 2023. He fortunately missed October 7 and the Israel-Hamas war. He obviously missed the Iran war. He was very despondent over the Russian-Ukraine war, specifically around the implications for nuclear.

Like, for him, that was the big issue: do these issues, do these wars increase the chance of nuclear war? And obviously, Russia-Ukraine has had that effect. All the wars in the Middle East now do. He was also very worried about the potential in Taiwan. He unfortunately went out quite worried about the prospect of nuclear war. I think he would have been all the more worried over the following several years.

Barry Stevens

Yeah, it’s true that in that actual essay you were quoting earlier, he said, and I’ve got it here, “I define terrorism as the deliberate killing of noncombatants,” as you said, “that includes the bombing of populated areas and all nuclear threats.” Now, he didn’t say nuclear war, but I do know that he came to believe that— I think the metaphor he said was, “If you walk into a bank with a gun, and threaten people and take money, you may not fire the gun, but you’re still using it.” And in that sense, we use nuclear weapons all the time.

Michael Ellsberg

Exactly.

Barry Stevens

Putin used nuclear weapons to threaten the West. And just recently, I guess it is April 21 right now, but just about a week ago, was it, that the president of the United States essentially threatened to wipe out Persian civilization, and it would never recover. So that was extraordinary, and those threats have existed for a long time.

Michael Ellsberg

Even on Trump’s scale, that was beyond the pale. And my father would say, and I would completely agree with him, that that was a clear-cut terrorist threat. If any other nation made any threat like that to any other nation, we would call that a terrorist threat. I would say that there is no definition of terrorism that could possibly mean anything for which that wasn’t a prime example. We’re not talking about dozens of people on a bus or an airplane, as horrible as that is. We’re talking literally about one of the oldest civilizations, continuing civilizations on the planet, with close to 100 million people.

Fortunately, some people in the media— even the mainstream media did call him out on that, but I don’t think nearly enough. I think that the whole nation should have just been horrified that this is what our nation has come to, making clear-cut, mass-scale terrorist threats. Even for me, even for us who’ve had 10 years of Trump blustering around in different ways, I think that one was shocking.

Barry Stevens

Yeah, but this particular administration has started a war, which of course violates the Charter of the United Nations. Not the first time that Western countries have done that. But also, now you have a president and the Secretary of Defense who have openly said they are uninterested in following international law, the Geneva Convention, or any of the laws of armed conflict. There was a quote that I found in, I think it was in a different essay. Yes, it must have been.

After Trump was elected, quote, “Trump’s destruction of facts, evidence, and truth does not prevent us from knowing the reasons for our policies. These were always lied about. The difference now is that the purveyors of denials, assertions, and cover stories no longer bother to appear plausible or moral.” I find that they were always lied about. That’s pretty radical. I kind of like the take because so many people on the liberal side right now seem to regard what Trump does as bad and Democratic leaders previously as good. But I don’t think your father would think that.

Michael Ellsberg

No, no, not at all. The difference is just that Trump is more brazen about it. And there’s not a fig leaf of any type of, you know, no pretense of following international law. In fact, there’s a kind of gleeful flaunting of it. We don’t need that.

Barry Stevens

Yes.

Michael Ellsberg

That is sad, and it’s dangerous because the point of principles is that if you follow a principle, you can expect and demand that other people follow it as well. If you openly flaunt principles, then you shouldn’t be surprised when other people openly flaunt them. Now you’re just in the law of the jungle. We are a pretty big animal in the jungle, but it’s still a jungle. The idea that we can just exert our will ad infinitum with no pushback is not going to come to pass, I believe.

Barry Stevens

For all the United States failures, weaknesses, or flaws, your country did put together— was very important in putting together some of those rules, let’s say that. Your father, I think, very much in his earlier life was very much on board with the United States project, saw it as a moral force. Now, he came to be very critical of it, but there is that feeling, as you say, the fig leaf is gone. But the fig leaf meant something, you know, this building of the United Nations. The United States was the principal architect of the United Nations as a national force. Anyway, yes, I’m sure he would be very distressed.

Michael Ellsberg

Yeah, no, he viewed himself very much as a patriot. He entered the RAND Corporation, which is a quasi-governmental think tank in LA, wanting to help achieve Cold War aims, while reducing the risk of blowing the whole world up. That was his mission. He very much believed in the ideals of defeating communism. He just didn’t want the world to blow up in the process. There was a process by which he became very disillusioned with the Cold War and with what he came to see as imperialism.

But he always viewed himself as a patriot, and in fact, by far the most distressing, anguishing thing of his life, which repeatedly occurred— well, other than the childhood things that he writes about from his childhood, but of his adult life, was being called a traitor. This was incredibly anguishing to him, and he writes a lot in the book about how he believed that he was acting out of his highest patriotism, that democracy was being flaunted, and the Constitution was being flaunted. People were being lied into a war. Their children were being sent to die and kill, and all through lies that were subverting the Constitution. So he viewed himself very much, despite being incredibly critical of U.S. foreign policy in particular, the secrecy system, and the executive overreach, he viewed himself, very much to the end, as an American patriot.

Barry Stevens

That’s really interesting, and in a period when only the right-wing seems to claim the U.S. flag, and the same thing in my country, in Canada, as though they own it. But yeah, patriotism is not simply owned by people of any particular political stripe. And it’s interesting too, because I think just a few days ago your president said that the Democratic Party was traitors. Didn’t he say that? The entire Democratic Party?

Michael Ellsberg

Yeah, it’s gotten so absurd here, what gets called treason at this point. My father was called a traitor regularly in the media, and there was, back then at least, more of a public listening to the idea that someone who would be a national security whistleblower was definitely a traitor. I think the consensus came to disagree with that opinion regarding my father. But definitely not in regards to, for example, Edward Snowden or Chelsea Manning, who my father greatly admired and had an ongoing virtual friendship with Edward Snowden, until the end.

Now, interestingly, support for Snowden does seem to cut fairly— I mean, there are definitely people in the Republican Party or the more kind of—

Barry Stevens

Libertarian.

Michael Ellsberg

—side of the Republican Party, which is unfortunately the smaller side right now, that was in favor of Snowden. So it’s not a pure left-right issue on that. But yeah, a lot of people on both sides of that regard him as a traitor, unfortunately.

Barry Stevens

Well, it’s interesting that the people who were reviled in the past— some of the people who were reviled in the past become great heroes later. Nelson Mandela comes to mind.

Michael Ellsberg

Yeah.

Barry Stevens

Or Gandhi himself. Well, Dan, of course, was a nuclear war planner, a very senior one. He wrote about nuclear war in his book, The Doomsday Machine. And also, I think it’s in the book that you’ve edited; the story of finding the secret war plans of, I think, 1961. Now, in the 1950s and ‘60s, the plan was that the moment there was even any kind of confrontation with the Soviet Union, no matter how minor, it was to attack with everything. The nuclear weapons had hundreds of targets in the U.S.S.R. and China.

The secret that Dan was shown was that the estimate of deaths was 600 million people, and he called that 100 Holocausts. He said, and I think this is from your book. “It was and remains, I believed and still believe, the most evil human project in history, even compared to massacres that have actually been carried out.” Now, of course, we know, and Dan knew later, that the actual number would be far, far greater than that. I just say this to emphasize that, as you said, it became the focus of his life— the realization that nuclear weapons are still with us, still threaten us, and are still being used in that sense, and the risk is omnicide.

Michael Ellsberg

Yeah, I would say that anecdote, that story, is the key turning point in his adult life, even more so than the decision to release the Pentagon Papers 10 years later, roughly. He was a high-level nuclear war planner in the kind of defense bureaucracy. He was working for RAND. He was studying command and control, basically, how does the decision to initiate nuclear war get made? How is it delegated? How many fingers are actually on the button? And he asked a fairly simple question, which is, if these war plans to essentially annihilate every major and medium city in the Sino-Soviet bloc, if there’s any significant even land warfare between the powers, how many civilians would be killed?

And his assumption was that they simply didn’t know. They didn’t care. They didn’t make the estimate. He was shocked to find out, actually, that they did know and that they had made the estimate. Within a day, he got back a neat graph, a tidy little graph that just showed time and civilian deaths. It went up from, I think, 300 million immediately to 600 million within a couple of months. He was just utterly shocked that a human being, and on his side, nonetheless, maybe someone he went to have beers with after work, had sat down and calculated this and said, “Well, that’s okay. Our nation is going to inflict,” as he put it, “100 Holocausts worth of civilian lives to defend ourselves.” And this was, as you pointed out, before nuclear winter was known about.

We now know that nuclear war at that level would essentially kill everyone within a year or two because of nuclear winter and end most complex life on Earth. But even before we knew that, again, as my father would write repeatedly, that was a terrorist plan. Like, there is no definition of terrorism that would exclude deliberately targeting 600 million people. As he put it, it’s hard even for the word evil— we call serial killers evil, and they are, but to put that in the same category as deliberately massacring 600 million people, it’s like language breaks down at that point. And this was on both sides, including ours, that had plans along these lines.

Barry Stevens

Yeah, well, it’s interesting, of course, that he actually went on at that point to write a new war plan. I mean, he was one of the people who crafted the flexible response plans, which still meant the death of millions. The subtitle of The Doomsday Machine is Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner. I was really struck that in an interview where we sat in, he said, “If he were charged with war crimes, he would plead guilty, both for his work on Vietnam and for planning nuclear war.” I would never condemn your father to prison, but I was very struck by the honor in that admission of guilt. You don’t hear those admissions from people who’ve done wrong.

Michael Ellsberg

Yeah, he truly felt guilty in the deepest moral sense for the period where he participated in the nuclear war planning, even though his mentality at the time was kind of a lesser evil. Like, “I believe I can reduce that number.” I don’t know what he was trying to get it down to, but let’s say he was trying to get it down to 100 million instead of 600 million. Well, that sounds good on one side. You reduce 500 million dead, maybe that’s a morally positive thing. Even so, he came to view his participation at any level versus the other option of immediately exposing this evil, which he wished he had done back at the time, as the worst moral failing that one could imagine, and for himself as well. He really felt that one.

He wrote a lot about Albert Speer, who was one of the Nazis who came to condemn himself quite strongly for his participation. He compared himself a lot to that, that if you’re participating in a program that you know is evil on a mass scale, and even if you’re not directly the one ordering it, or even if it would keep going on if you didn’t stop, you’re participating in evil in a morally culpable way. He held himself to that standard.

Barry Stevens

Yeah, there was a quote of Albert Speer’s in your book, and I wrote it down. “I was like a man following a trail of bloodstained footprints through the snow without realizing someone has been injured.” It’s very good.

Michael Ellsberg

Yeah.

Barry Stevens

How did your dad fight evil? What was his way, or what did he think would be the way to fight evil?

Michael Ellsberg

I would say that he felt that insiders have a disproportionate capacity to affect change by not only withdrawing participation, which on its own he never really valued that much when he heard of officials resigning and saying— Even if they made a public statement and said, “I can’t be a part of this.” I mean, it’s better than nothing, but he never really thought that was all that valuable. The thing that he valued is, as he always put it, he really tried not to say, “Well, do what I did.” The way he put it was, “Do what I wish I had done earlier,” which is that he could have released these documents. Well, he could have released the nuclear documents as early as the 1960s. I don’t think that was likely. It didn’t even cross his mind, but I think he was mentally in a position where he might have considered releasing the Pentagon Papers, or not the papers themselves, because they weren’t written, but the types of documents and estimates that the Pentagon Papers are based on. I think he could have released those, as he says, as early as 1964. Actually, his first day at the Pentagon was as an assistant to the assistant of McNamara. So he was kind of a high-level aide.

Barry Stevens

And McNamara was the Secretary of Defense [inaudible 00:29:41] under Lyndon Johnson.

Michael Ellsberg

Yeah. My father’s boss was John McNaughton, who was McNamara’s special aide. His first day happened to be the day of the Tonkin Gulf incident. So within literally 24 hours of working in the Pentagon, he knew that— well, I think maybe it took a day or two, but pretty soon, within, especially I think after the second purported attack, it was widely known that this was false and that there hadn’t been a second attack. He knew that the populace was being lied into war within days of working in the Pentagon. So he could have exposed the lies that he was participating in immediately. And he faults himself for doing that.

So his message always was, “Do what I wish I had done five years earlier.” If you know that you’re in a position, a particular government agency, but also a corporation, I think it’s very relevant for cutting-edge AI labs as well. If there are internal estimates saying that what you’re participating in is much more dangerous than what your leaders are telling the public, you have a duty to the public to let them know, even if that’s at risk of your career or even potentially jail time.

Barry Stevens

Right, and we can, I guess, pass on that call because he was explicitly calling for people to be whistleblowers. And he also was very— and you suggested this in what you just said— aware that there is a big financial drive, that the corporations which make money off building weapons and fighting wars, they are certainly doing very well right now. I was just looking at the stock prices of companies like Northrop and Lockheed over the last year. But they can also affect policy. So that also applies to whistleblowers both within government and within the corporate world.

Michael Ellsberg

Yeah, he spent— you can see his mind working through it in this book because the bulk of the book consists of selections from about 100 boxes of handwritten notes. Pretty much his favorite activity, or certainly his most obsessive, was sitting for hours and hours at a stretch reading, writing marginalia, and then writing in these yellow legal pads. Those legal pads and the marginalia, actually the books, are now at UMass Amherst at their library’s special collections. His handwriting was very hard to read. I actually couldn’t read it. He would have to read birthday cards to me aloud. I couldn’t read his cards. But his longtime assistant and my friend, Jan Thomas, whom I’ve known pretty much my whole life since the early ‘80s—

Barry Stevens

And she’s the co-editor of the book?

Michael Ellsberg

Yes, so she co-edited the book, and we had a bit of a division of labor in the book. One of her main roles in the book was that she actually, fortunately, could read his handwriting quite well. So she went through those notes, picked out the most interesting ones, and they’re now presented year by year in the book.

You can really see him working through from 1971 to 2021— 50 years exactly of notes, how did this system arise? Why do we have a system where, in order purportedly to defend ourselves, we are going to initiate a chain of events that would predictably lead to the end of ourselves and all complex life on Earth? That seems very irrational.

His ultimate analysis was that it did stem from military-industrial complex incentives that in the way that those interact with politics and electoral politics. You have companies that get very, very rich building these systems. They have incentives to frame the issues in ways that always make it seem like an existential necessity to build more of these and have them on hair-trigger alert. Notoriously, these big defense companies are very good at getting job production in all the states, so that you have senators in favor of jobs. So a lot of this just comes down to profit motive, then filtered through electoral politics, campaign finance, and then sort of bureaucratic, interdepartmental budgetary competition between the different forces of the armed service. I think that was his main theory, at least on the American side. Of course, the Soviet side had a different set of incentives.

Barry Stevens

I remember he would say if there was one thing you could change about the doomsday machine of nuclear weapons, it would be taking the ICBMs, which are the land-based missiles, to take them offline so they aren’t in the situation where you have to use them or lose them, as they say. Fire them when the radars tell you. The radars are now, of course, being integrated with artificial intelligence.

Michael Ellsberg

Yeah.

Barry Stevens

Which, as we all know, never makes mistakes.

Michael Ellsberg

Right.

Barry Stevens

And then, because of that, because they’re on this hair-trigger, as you rightly call it, the president of the United States has 10 or 12 minutes to make the decision whether to annihilate the world. And that decision is in the hands of one man. It’s the only nuclear power where it is in the hands of one man, except perhaps North Korea, and that is the United States president. All of that together is something that, in a sense, just to walk around sane, you have to not think about it a lot.

Michael Ellsberg

Yeah, it’s terrifying, and it’s totally irrational, even from a just cold, pure self-defense rationale. He said that he felt that now with submarine-armed nukes, the basis for land-based ICBMs has completely disappeared, and the existence of these missiles on hair-trigger alert is the most dangerous thing on planet Earth right now. There’s just no basis for it.

Any argument you can make about deterrence— and I think there are rational arguments around deterrence. I think my father ultimately did not agree with the idea of even keeping small amounts of nukes around. But if you’re going to make a deterrence argument, those arguments can be made with submarines. If you know that submarines can inflict massive damage, that is going to be a deterrent. Keeping these missiles, as you pointed out, which are use it or lose it, creates an incentive to launch on warning. There have been multiple movies, including one recently. I’m blanking on the name, but it was on Netflix within the last year or two that dramatized this.

Barry Stevens

House of Dynamite.

Michael Ellsberg

Yeah, House of Dynamite. Exactly. So it dramatizes this. So you’re dealing with— this is my father’s area of expertise, even before the— his work at RAND was decision-making under uncertainty. So it’s not only uncertainty, but it’s extreme stress. How do we interpret this signal? There have been multiple cases throughout history, even after the Cold War, where there were false alarms. There was a situation where a flock of geese, I think once, was interpreted as a missile. All kinds of false alarms. So you have human decision-making. It might be the middle of the night. There were cases where maybe the leader was drunk. That was certainly, I think, the case with Khrushchev, Nixon, and perhaps others. You have a great ape who’s tired and drunk in the middle of the night, with conflicting evidence deciding whether to press a button to blow up the world or not. That’s just not a safe situation by any stretch. I would say his number one priority was to get these ICBMs off of hair-trigger, and then second would be to just get rid of them altogether.

One other note on that—

Barry Stevens

Sorry, please go ahead.

Michael Ellsberg

The last thing I’ll say on that is my father very much believed that Dr. Strangelove was essentially a documentary as comedic as it was, and it really is a great comic masterpiece of a film, but it also essentially pointed to a very realistic scenario, which is that you get some kind of low-level nutjob who just decides to launch for whatever reason.

Barry Stevens

And that’s where he got the title, of course, of that book, The Doomsday Machine, which is what the Soviets had built, which turned out to be actually true. Even though when I saw the movie, I thought, “Well, that part’s stupid.” But anyway, this has been terrific. I just want to point out that you are actually talking from the basement of your father’s house in Berkeley.

Michael Ellsberg

Yeah, the downstairs of the family home where I grew up. My parents moved here when I was one. All my childhood memories are of this home and quite a bit in this office as well. Maybe that’s why I became a writer, because I was poking around this bookshelf since I was a kid.

Barry Stevens

Well, thank you very much. I really enjoyed the book, particularly because I think of what you said, that it’s jottings and it’s a development. It was like reading a diary in some respects, and, as I say, the personal accounts. If you’re interested in Dan Ellsberg, I would recommend it.

I just remember there was one quote that I wanted to mention, and there’s just one line that he wrote somewhere in your book: “I want us to be more like who we think we are.”

Michael Ellsberg

Yeah, it’s a great quote.

Barry Stevens

I like it. I like it very much.

Michael Ellsberg

Because he would always make this point that when you say words like humane, you think of kind, caring, and compassionate. When you say inhuman, you think of violent, aggressive, brutish, and horrendous. But unfortunately, as he pointed out, we have a very dual aspect as a species. Of course, we have a very idealistic, caring, and compassionate side. But we also have a side that will completely join in on the mob, either directly, physically, or ideologically, when we feel threatened, and there’s an opportunity to address that threat with extreme violence towards the other side’s civilians. He very much hoped that we would embody the positive meaning of humane and become more self-critical and transcend or grow beyond this other side of this extreme propensity to group violence.

Barry Stevens

Well, there’s always hope.

Michael Ellsberg

Yes.

Barry Stevens

So thank you. It’s been a great pleasure. Once again, and maybe you could hold up the book.

Michael Ellsberg

Oh yeah.

Barry Stevens

Co-edited by Michael Ellsberg and Jan Thomas is Truth and Consequence: Reflections on Catastrophe, Civil Resistance, and Hope, writings by the great Daniel Ellsberg, and thank you very much.

Michael Ellsberg

Thank you so much for having me.

Barry Stevens

You can find this and many other interviews and videos on theAnalysis.news, where there is a donate button, should you feel inclined. And also, we are on YouTube and podcast streamers. So if you like this, you know the drill: like and subscribe. See you next time.

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Barry Stevens
Hello, welcome to theAnalysis. I’m Barry Stevens. In a few seconds, I’m going to be joined by Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, who is going to talk about the U.S. and Israel’s war on Iran and Lebanon. Please take a look at our website, theAnalysis.news, where you can subscribe to the show as well as on YouTube, and various podcast services like Apple or Spotify. I’ll see you in a second.

I’d like to welcome a favorite and familiar guest of theAnalysis, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, a frequent critic of U.S. foreign policy, formerly Colin Powell’s Chief of Staff when Powell was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon, as well as when he was Secretary of State. So welcome, Larry.

Col Lawrence Wilkerson
Good to be with you.

Barry Stevens
To say the situation in the Middle East is changing rapidly would be an understatement. To recap quickly, over Easter weekend, President Trump upped his ultimatum to the Iranians to, quote, “Open the fucking strait” by last night or quote, “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” Last night, he postponed Armageddon again. A ceasefire was announced. The U.S. claimed victory, but Israel doesn’t agree to the ceasefire and is currently applying a Gaza-like policy in Southern Lebanon. Iran says they’ve closed the Strait of Hormuz again, and the U.S. says they haven’t, but by the time you’re watching this, lots more will have happened.

So we’re going to pull back a little bit. Now, we’ll talk about the broader picture of the ongoing war. But first, Larry, U.S. elites have been accusing a U.S. President at war of war crimes. Even Republicans and far-right commentators like Alex Jones. To my mind, this is unprecedented. Am I right?

Col Lawrence Wilkerson
I think so, but let me back up just a little bit and tell you that I just finished an hour-long podcast where videos were played about every 15 minutes in the podcast. Videos of Karoline Leavitt, videos of Donald Trump, videos of Peter Hegseth, and in that hour podcast, we changed— we being the empire, the United States— we changed our policy about eight times. We contradicted our policy. We stepped back on our policy. Karoline Leavitt said the president didn’t say that. Five minutes earlier, we’d seen a video with the president saying that just to say how mercurial, how absolutely unusual, and that’s a kind adjective, this administration is.

To your point about war crimes, absolutely, but let’s think for a moment. We really didn’t have the framework of international law. Had the League of Nations had a little bit before that, but we really— the League of Nations was repudiated almost by the war. After World War II, we really started crafting what you would call a legal definition of adherence to, somewhat spottily, but arguably led by the United States, with Dwight Eisenhower in the forefront, international law.

A buildup from the Nuremberg Tribunal, from the Geneva Conventions that resulted from all the way up to Helsinki, going back to the French Declaration on Human Rights. I mean, we built up a body of international law, and why did we build it up? We built it up because people like Eisenhower, people like Admiral Nimitz in the Pacific, people who waged that 2-continent, 3-continent, pick your continent number, really, conflict, and I’m not just talking about Act II, World War II, I’m talking about World War I, Act I.

People who went through the interregnum of the Great Depression and so forth, for example, swore that this would never happen again. Never happen again. A hundred million casualties in World War II. Never happen again.

That body of law, that corpus, made its way forward with the United States being one of the principal architects and pushers of that law.

Now we’ve utterly destroyed it. We have utterly destroyed it. We started with my president during the 9/11 era. We moved on through other presidents who reinforced that destruction, including Barack Obama, who likes to claim he didn’t. Joe Biden, big time, and then we got Donald Trump, who put the coup d’état to it, if you will, or the coup de grâce, or whatever you want to call it. The end culmination. We are no longer a nation of law, domestically or internationally. We’re no longer a nation that adheres to, however imperfectly, a body of laws that governs maritime operations, international law at sea, if you will. War crimes, all this.

The UN has become feckless under Guterres. Absolutely feckless. You could say it’s the UN Security Council. I agree with that, but Guterres is feckless. Kofi Annan, for example, would have never let this happen, never let it happen without major comment, without possibly resignation. I mean, he came out and declared our war in 2003 on Iraq as illegal. He said from the UN perch, it is illegal. Didn’t do any good, of course, but he said it, and that means something, just as it means something when Pope Leo contradicts or criticizes Donald Trump. I wish he’d do it more often. But all to say that we had a really good deal going in terms of both our own interest, which were paramountly served by this body of laws, and in terms of the global interest, which is part of our interest, too, because of the economic success we want in the globe.

We’ve destroyed that, utterly destroyed it. It exists no more. A future president cannot bring it back. We have killed it. We have murdered it in the eyes of the world; we are the number one thing to fear on the globe. I’m not so sure that Dick Cheney, having made that statement himself, and Donald Trump, having fulfilled it to a degree Dick Cheney would never recognize, we didn’t do that on purpose, and you have to parse that purpose quite a bit to see why we might have done that. But we’ve destroyed it, and we are now the pariah of the world, led possibly by that little pipsqueak called Israel in the eastern end of the Mediterranean.

We are just like that. We are the destroyers of peace. We’re the destroyers of law. We’re the destroyers of humanity. We’re the destroyers of international humanitarian law. You name it, we’ve destroyed it. It’s gone.

Barry Stevens
Well, so, I mean, the big difference is perhaps that in the past, the law was honored in the breach as much as in the observance, in that there were situations like the My Lai massacre and many other situations long before that. What’s perhaps different now is that it’s openly declared as being irrelevant.

The Secretary of Defense and Trump have been saying they’ll ignore international law openly. Hegseth’s phrase was “Stupid rules of engagement, give no quarter,” which means don’t take prisoners, “Take out their families,” and so forth. But what effect does this have on the military itself, the U.S. Military, who are supposed to obey the laws of armed conflict?

Col Lawrence Wilkerson
Well, I think to a degree, you’re mixing up the apples and the oranges with the bigger basket.

With my president, George W. Bush, and 9/11, we decided not only to rip the fabric of that international law apart in front of people’s faces, most notably when the President of the United States authorized the torture of other human beings from his pedestal. That’s quite a lot different from people being tortured in the Philippines, Vietnam, or whatever. The President of the United States made official U.S. policy of torturing other human beings. We began our departure from all that body of law, and to leave it knowing that it’s imperfect. Nothing is ever perfect.

As Mao Zedong said, quite eloquently, really, “International law comes out of the barrel of a gun.” Well, it does, but the barrel was ours. And the barrel was more or less used in many cases for decent humanitarian purposes. At the same time, it was making money for us, you can say, or it was doing this or that. It might not be so laudable, but nonetheless, we stuck to a script, and that script basically led towards improvement and betterment. We were different in ’72 than we were in ’45. We were different later on. We were very different after 2001, and now it’s gone. It’s completely gone.

Barry Stevens
So how would you characterize the… like, how is the Trump administration worse or different? Or is it just a continuation from the George W. Bush administration in terms of the law?

Col Lawrence Wilkerson
Yeah, it’s a continuation because of its disregard for international law. After all, if we’d had a Secretary General who was worth the warm blood, he would have declared, and eventually did declare, that the War in Iraq in 2003 was unlawful. It was a violation of international law, which it most assuredly was. So it started with Bush in torture, but it had its roots actually in Bill Clinton and in Bill Clinton’s disregard for a lot of the things that I just described, and in subsequent presences, including Obama’s disregard for it, too, after George W. Bush.

So all of those presidents, beginning with Bill Clinton, really built on this deviation and diversion, and Donald Trump has just brought it to full completion. He’s brought it to that in such an awful way, in such a horrible way, that I think it’s fair to say 60%, if not more, of the world now despises us, hates us even. That’s not too strong a way to express it, and we’re going to pay for that dearly, because you can’t make 60% of the world or more hate your guts and survive in the way that we have survived in the past.

Now you can survive. You can survive the way we’ve dealt with Venezuela, the way we’ve dealt with people on the high seas that we say are trafficking drugs, the way we’ve dealt now with Iran, the way we’ve dealt with Lebanon and Syria, Libya, Afghanistan, and the list is almost interminable. You can survive, but you’re not going to have a happy life, and you’re damn sure not going to be the leader of the global community, and you’re damn sure not going to be occasionally called before the bar of justice, even if that bar is too low to take you on. I would submit this; it will not always be that way. It will not always be that way

We had an old expression in the military: be kind to your friends and even your enemies, because you may meet them on the way down. Well, we’re on our way down, and when we get to the bottom of the pit, we’re going to need some of these people. We’re going to long for some of these relationships that we’ve killed, destroyed, and murdered.

Barry Stevens
Well, the United States, you know, the President and the Secretary of Defense, seem to have the attitude that power is everything, just like Mao, and that they can pretty well do what they want. Yet there’s this kind of back and forth because then President Trump does want help from allies and is annoyed when he doesn’t get it. So are they kind of realizing at this point that they can’t do this alone?

Col Lawrence Wilkerson
I think so, but there’s a difference between Mao and the Cultural Revolution, and maybe 40 million Chinese did, and what we’re doing, the Chinese did it to the Chinese. The Chinese have not been fundamentally, with very few exceptions, going abroad to fight monsters. They don’t do wars abroad. A little excursion with Vietnam got them a little bit of their own vitriol handed back to them by the Vietnamese, who were hardened in war by that time. But they usually don’t go abroad as we do.

John Quincy Adams said, “Don’t go abroad to fight monsters, you’ll become one.” Well, Confucianism teaches the Chinese that too, and so they don’t do it that much. If you’re killing your own people, that’s one thing. That’s bad, but it’s one thing. To be killing people all over the world is quite another, though, especially in terms of international relations, or what I like to call it, the relations of nations. You don’t have good relations with nations if you’re killing people all amongst them, and that’s what we’ve been doing. That’s what Trump has brought to an apogee.

I mean, how many presidents in the world in the modern age have said what Trump said about Iran, have declared from the podium of the President of the United States that you’re going to conduct a genocide, indeed, that you’ve been conducting a genocide with Israel now for a couple or three years? This is a brand new world, and it’s an ugly, wow, evil world, and Trump is at the head of it.

Barry Stevens
Yes, absolutely, but politically, going back to my earlier question, it does seem to be unusual, the response of elites or Republicans to his statements over Easter weekend, especially. But maybe as an accumulation of so many things that this war… There hasn’t been a rally around the flag effect very much of their support, but the majority have been against it. Even in the early days of the Iraq war, there was a majority in favor of it. And now, with his clear threats of genocide, there are people on his side who are objecting. I’ve never seen that before. What do you think that portends for the future of this presidency and this movement?

Col Lawrence Wilkerson
I think your point is well made, and I think it’s a very narrow one, though, in the sense of why people are turning against him, even some people within the MAGA movement. And that narrow point is not so much self-interest as ignorance, and “Wow, was I ignorant, and now I’m waking up.” Or “Wow, was I stupid, and now I’m getting smart.” There’s no such phenomenon going on.

What’s happening is the normal attrition around a president who more and more looks as if he’s lost his wits, is actually probably a megalomaniacal idiot who’s acting out his TV program, if you will, from the presidency of the United States. That realization is hitting people, and it is hitting them, and it’s hurting them. It’s hurting them at the gas pump, and it’s hurting them in every way possible economically, because regardless of the lies coming out of Karoline Leavitt’s mouth, Trump’s mouth, or anyone else in the administration, it’s becoming harder and harder to live in this country.

I filled up with gas here in Virginia this morning. It cost me $45 to fill my car up, and I only put about a half a tank in it. That’s what gets it to Americans. It’s not the ethics. It’s not the genuine depravity of what he’s doing. It’s not the genocide that he declared from the podium of the President of the United States. It’s the fact that they’re hurting and they’re going to hurt more and they expect to hurt more. They don’t realize what the pain might really look like if Iran continues, and I suspect they probably will.

Chances are, they will more than stop with what they’re doing with regard to jeopardizing the global economy. Because we’re looking at, right now, right in the face, two quarters of legally declared recession, and we’re probably going to be looking at— if Iran is to continue, and I suspect that’s the most likely road— we’re probably going to be looking at global depression because this is truly a disturbing event in the economic life of the world.

It’s not just the Strait of Hormuz; it’s the Bab el-Mandeb in the Red Sea. Much more important sea and strait, really, than the Persian Gulf. Not in terms necessarily of petroleum like the Persian Gulf, but in terms of 60% of the world’s commerce.

Barry Stevens
Suez Canal and, yeah—

Col Lawrence Wilkerson
Medical supplies, you know. You’re talking about going around the Horn, which experts tell me, and I’ve been looking at this for about 40 years, but recent updates are maybe one and a half to two and a half times the cost for shippers to go around the Horn, to not use the Suez, to use other routes. That’s being taken care of by the Chinese, but we’re trying to take care of… They’re taking care of that right now.

These railroads the Chinese are building are an age-old, 5000-year technique for empires to better other empires. They’re building all these railroads that mean about a 16 to 24-hour transit across land into the heart of Europe, into the Caucasus, into Iran. Put that one in your noggin for a minute because that’s one reason we’re waging this war against Iran, and these railroads are going to negate maritime commerce in large part because it’s so expensive. These land routes are going to be cheaper, and they’re going to just fuel China, Russia, and Central Asia economies in general at a rate that’s fantastic because they’re not going to have to pay the maritime cost of shipping their goods. They’re going to go by a cheap railroad.

One of those railroads runs along the southern perimeter of Iran, the Bandar-e Emam, up north along the Persian Gulf. We’re bombing the bejesus out of that railroad right now, and don’t you think that’s just a target? That target is selected by us because we don’t want China to have that railroad.

Barry Stevens
So in a way, the desire for conquering Iran, if you like, is to pull it away from the Chinese orbit and closer to the U.S., but-

Col Lawrence Wilkerson
Does Trump know that? The question is, does Trump know that?

Barry Stevens
I don’t know if he knows that.

Col Lawrence Wilkerson
I don’t think he does.

Barry Stevens
Probably not, but it’s an odd choice because the national security strategy, which was issued about four months ago or something, explicitly said we weren’t going to get involved in the Middle East again.

Col Lawrence Wilkerson
But it also said we were going to take China on, and that’s part of it because China’s arguably most important railroad is not the one that runs north, central north, south, central south, it’s the one that runs along the coast of Iran. That’s the most important railroad because it-

Barry Stevens
Israel is specifically attacking that railroad, I believe.

Col Lawrence Wilkerson
Yeah, they have. I think they’re doing that on our behalf because they don’t really have a dog in that fight. In fact, Netanyahu has been negotiating with the Central Asian states because he sees this. He’s not stupid like Trump. He understands that the world is shifting and the power is flowing to the East. He’s trying to make relationships with the Southeast Asian countries, with the Central Asian countries, with other countries that are going to be impacted by these new maritime or non-maritime economic routes, and put Israel in the catbird seat, if you will, for the eastern Mediterranean, based on his recognizing this early and shifting his allegiances.

It’s just that he’s got caught in the trap of Gaza, the trap of the West Bank, the trap of East Jerusalem, the trap of Syria, and ultimately now one that’s closing on him, the trap of Lebanon. He’s in a mess right now, even worse and deeper in terms of existential nature than Trump is in, because he’s done this, he’s seen all this coming. He’s trying to negotiate new relationships with China, with India, and others, but he’s mired now in his own mess, of his own creation, in his own territory. He has, in the old military terms, “Shat in his own pot.”

Barry Stevens
In the last 24 hours since the ceasefire, there’s clearly been a ramping up of the attacks in South Lebanon. And last I looked at it, there were 300 people who had been killed.

Col Lawrence Wilkerson
Mostly civilians, too. Not as bad-

Barry Stevens
A million. Oh, no, no [crosstalk 00:24:28]. And the ancient city of Tyre is being assaulted. So all of that’s happening. Presumably, he’s trying to do that, to get it done before Trump leans on him to support the ceasefire.

Col Lawrence Wilkerson
If you think this is a genuine attempt, this could be, as Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said very eloquently, “You torpedoed diplomacy in its midst. Not once but twice.” Speaking to Trump and us. “Not once but twice.” This could be a thrice. We could be looking at Netanyahu complaining and bitching because he’s ostensibly being the man out and the complainer, while he knows perfectly well what Trump is going to do, and that’s violate the negotiations in medias res again and continue his attack on Iran. I mean, I wouldn’t put that past Trump afoot.

Barry Stevens
Well, I believe there have been attacks actually since the ceasefire. Certainly, Iran has also attacked in the Gulf.

Col Lawrence Wilkerson
Well, no ceasefire…. You know, people think ceasefire-

Barry Stevens
At present, there is no ceasefire. You know, but that’s 24 hours-

Col Lawrence Wilkerson
You can’t implement a ceasefire like that that fast, especially not in Iran. You’ve got people all around Iran. I mean, look, we lost our C-130Js and our Black Hawks and some troops’ lives in Iran about 96 hours ago because we thought we could get in there and be undetected. You can’t get into that country and be undetected. They’re everywhere, and they’ve got a rifle in every closet. So they started shooting at our soldiers and our airmen before they even got down on the ground.

So you’re looking at a problem with a ceasefire now in a country you bomb mercilessly. How do you implement a ceasefire? You’ve got to send a runner out to Bandar Abbas or a runner to Shiraz, or wherever, in order to get them to, “Hey, stop.” So it would take a week for Iran to bring a ceasefire into effect. I don’t think we’re serious about our end of it. I know Netanyahu is not serious about his end of it.

Barry Stevens
Clearly.

Col Lawrence Wilkerson
So this is all a Kabuki game right now.

Barry Stevens
A Kabuki game, yeah. I guess the phrase, “The theater of war,” has never been more true. I suppose also we’re seeing the downside of a decapitation policy, which has always been discussed. Whenever people have talked about decapitation in the Soviet Union during the Cold War, it says, “Well, who do you negotiate the peace with if you’ve killed the leaders?” But, let me just-

Col Lawrence Wilkerson
You’ve got other problems with that, too. I mean, look at Hassan Nasrallah. He was genuinely interested in the political aspects of his opposition to Israel, genuinely interested in it, even to the point where he had almost made himself a part of, if not a substantial part of, the Lebanese government. He was not so interested in continuing what we call terrorism. I don’t call Hezbollah a terrorist group. I call them guerrilla fighters against the occupying power that is illegally occupying. It’s called Israel. But they killed him.

Now they’re having to deal with nothing but people who are militarily oriented and want to kill them, and they’re getting killed. They’re getting killed at a rate they were killed at in 2006, and in effect, Israel is losing. And when Israel loses, it goes to killing civilians, it goes to bombing hotels, bombing hospitals, and so forth, but it’s losing. I’ve seen videos. It’s losing.

Barry Stevens
It doesn’t look like a loss from over here, but I think it’s been Israel’s policy not to have anyone to negotiate with. That has been kind of the policy.

Col Lawrence Wilkerson
How do you look at a column of Merkavas on the ground in an administrative road march? Drones start flying over them, knock out the rear tank, knock out the lead tank, and watch the vaunted IDF armored corps unass its tanks and run up a hill trying to get away and say they’re winning?

Barry Stevens
Well, I’ll defer to your predictions and your analysis about that militarily, but let’s talk about the wider hopes for peace. You were saying earlier that, you know, the United States, Americans are paying a great deal for their gasoline. That’s the cost, and then possibly a recession, that’s a high cost. But the rulers in Iran are fighting for the survival of their regime. They’re fighting for their physical survival.

Now, doesn’t that give Iran a certain advantage moving forward? I think of Napoleon’s maxim, “In war, the moral to the physical is as three to one.” It seems that despite the enormous firepower of the United States, it can walk away. Iran can’t walk away. They’ve got nowhere to go, so how do you see this playing out with that—

Col Lawrence Wilkerson
Well, you’re absolutely right.

Barry Stevens
—that correlation of forces?

Col Lawrence Wilkerson
I think Haaretz had a headline about a week ago that was very accurate. It simply said, “Iran to win must not lose. The United States and Israel, to win, must have a spectacular victory.” Iran is not going to lose, and we’re not going to achieve a spectacular victory. So, I mean… And that’s the truth. I don’t think you get out of this without recognizing that.

Oddly, strangely, I think Donald Trump might have got a scent of that of late, and I’m told he might have got the scent of it because he was briefed pretty thoroughly on how The New York Times and others finally doing their job, at least in this narrow respect, reported on how he was convinced by Bibi to attack Iran in the first place.

Barry Stevens
Yeah, I read that article this morning.

Col Lawrence Wilkerson
Yeah, and he realizes how stupid he was, and he’s trying to figure out how to get out of that. He’s angry with Bibi right now, I think, if it’s not just a facade. So at least in that respect, we’re looking at a different president right now. How long that’ll last, though, is anybody’s guess. As I said, it might be all subterfuge. Netanyahu may be acting like the angry partner because they are getting ready to do it again, and even with more ferocity, and both of them together. So I don’t know. It could be a ruse, as Araghchi said, “Torpedoed diplomacy two times already. Right in the middle of it, you attacked us not once, but twice. How can we trust you?” I agree with Araghchi. How can you trust us?

Barry Stevens
Yeah, in that New York Times article where they go inside the Situation Room and talk about Bibi’s pressuring Trump and his buying Netanyahu’s predictions, General Caine, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, seemed professional, but very different from Mark Milley in the previous administration of Trump, who was very frank and perhaps a little political in advising him not to do things. General Caine is not doing that, and I’m wondering how you see the current military leadership and their relationship to the United States and to the president?

Col Lawrence Wilkerson
I walked into Colin Powell’s office one time when he was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and in some frustration, I looked at him— we were the only ones in there— and I said, “Never make an Air Force officer the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs.” He looked at me, and he said, “I agree with you, but what’s the reason you’re saying it right now?” I told him it was something petty, but I meant it, and he meant it when he agreed.

No ground experience whatsoever. So you get a technician who’s Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The worse you’ll get in Caine’s case, a technician who’s been elevated there from three-star status, never served as a four-star, is an Air Force officer, basically a technician. Not really what we would call a soldier, and owing to everything he is and might be in the future, think 7-8 figure salary from Lockheed Martin to Donald Trump. A lot different from Milley. A lot different from Milley.

Barry Stevens
Yeah. A lot different from Milley, and there is-

Col Lawrence Wilkerson
I’m not so much denigrating Caine as I am describing the circumstance. I mean, how can you be a really good advisor in all respects of that term if you don’t have the credentials to be it and you’re more or less owned by the person who made you?

Barry Stevens
It is striking that the United States, ever since the Second World War, has been tremendously seduced by air power, by the Air Force, and in fact, they are remarkably good at it. I mean the precision of the strikes, the devastation of the strikes on Iran, but in a sense— I don’t know if you’d agree with this— it doesn’t really matter because you’re not really occupying the ground. You’re not really changing the government as you did with Germany and Japan, because you can’t do everything from the air.

Col Lawrence Wilkerson
And you’re making the people resolute, angry, and ready to get back at you.

Barry Stevens
Yeah.

Col Lawrence Wilkerson
We’re talking about 92 million, 93 million people, most of whom are probably of that mind now that they’ve been bombed relentlessly. I don’t know if you saw the testimony of the European commander. I couldn’t believe he did it. Maybe he did it on request from the administration because they wanted to put a little more music in their decision-making or whatever. But he testified before Congress that no nation has ever been moved by bombs, no nation, and he went back through the history of air power.

I always bring up LBJ’s comment. It was 1964, I think it was when George Ball was telling LBJ, one of the few people on his staff, telling him the truth. “You’re not going to win this war. I don’t care how many people you send to Vietnam. You’re not going to win this war.” And then someone intervened. I forgot who it was. It might have been Walt Rostow, someone like that, who intervened and said, “Well, you know, this bombing campaign is going to bomb the North Vietnamese back to the Stone Age.” Woo. Where have we heard that before?

LBJ said, looking at the person who said it, whoever it was, “Old Ho, ain’t going to be moved by no bombs.” Right, Mr. President, in your Texas slang, you summed up air power. “Old Ho, ain’t going to be moved by no bombs.” Of course, he was talking about Ho Chi Minh, and he wasn’t. And as this general said, “No country in the history of air power has ever been brought to its knees by aerial bombing.” I don’t even think Japan was.

Barry Stevens
It’s funny you should use that phrase because Karoline Leavitt actually just said it. What did she say exactly? Oh, darn. I have it here somewhere. Oh, “They’ve been raised to their knees,” which is an interesting mix-up of phrases.

Col Lawrence Wilkerson
Right.

Barry Stevens
“Raised to their knees.” But how do you see them getting out of it? How do you see this nightmare? And it is a nightmare because people are suffering enormously all over the world, but particularly the ones who are under those bombs. How do you see it? How do you see the West getting out or the United States getting out of it, Israel getting out of it, or anything ending?

Col Lawrence Wilkerson
Well, I thought when I first heard this about 4:00 am in the morning, and I read the actual points that were being discussed, that Trump had finally seen the light and was operating on something many of us have recommended he operate on, and that is declare victory and leave. Just, you know, “I’ve won,” and leave. Eisenhower Media Network and others, we weren’t really saying leave just the Iran war. We were saying leave Southwest Asia. Don’t leave any residual U.S. military power on the ground in Southwest Asia.

If that fractures your relationships with the Arab countries, so be it. If it fractures your relationship… Why even talk about the Gulf Cooperation Council? It’s already dead. Just like NATO, it’s dead. We’re going to have to resurrect something else, but get out. We were out for years and years, from World War II to the point where Jimmy Carter declared the strategic necessity of the Persian Gulf. We were out.

We did something called offshore balancing. We use Marine amphibious ready groups, we use carrier battle groups, and other things like that in the North Arabian Sea and in the Mediterranean. If we wanted to use military power anywhere, we did it from that platform. We said, and I was there, I was present when two different Chairmen said this: “Never put substantial U.S. forces on the ground in Southwest Asia. Never.” It was a maxim, almost like, never fight a lamb war in China, and we violated that.

We started violating that once we had created a situation after 2003, where Saddam Hussein was gone, and we had to become the balancer of the Persians. So we had to put massive forces on the ground in the region. Every military officer worth his salt that I ever served or worked for said that was verboten. Never put U.S. forces on the ground in Southwest Asia. The situation is too tenuous. The Saudis are too tenuous. The Kuwaitis, the Qataris, all those people are too tenuous. They will leave you in a heartbeat, or you will have to leave them in a heartbeat.

After all, they’re massively autocratic. They cut people’s heads off with swords. They cut up bodies in Istanbul and ship them away. Khashoggi. We didn’t want to be there, and all of a sudden, we changed. And when we changed, we put ourselves in a death trap, so get out.

Barry Stevens
It’s very hard to see what you say will happen.

Col Lawrence Wilkerson
Well, it is.

Barry Stevens
In the foreseeable future. It’s extremely hard to imagine that withdrawal.

Col Lawrence Wilkerson
Except for the fact that they’re going to throw us out. Saudi Arabia is already. The moment Trump made his politic remarks in southern Florida, MBS started negotiations for an entirely different future for Saudi Arabia. Their sovereign wealth fund was geared to the Abraham Accords, and it was geared to building, and this is very important for people to understand, geared to building pipelines through northern Saudi Arabia, up into Israel, and over to Ceyhan and other points north— Ceyhan, being in Turkey, of course— with Israel being an intermediate spot, Haifa, where its oil facilities are and therefore being eternally possessed of plenty of oil.

Now he’s shifted his entire concept to building across Syria and up. Israel will be completely out of the picture. We will have to take over supplying Israel with petroleum products. We’re the only people in the world that will supply them, probably. Even that two-faced son of a gun in Ankara, Erdoğan, won’t allow them to have any. So we’re looking at an entirely different future in that region. If Iran is compelled to execute its second tier of targets in the region, which includes most of the economic infrastructure of note in the region, it’s not hit that yet. If it hits that with the devastating accuracy and intelligence that it hit the first round of targets, then we’re going into global depression.

Barry Stevens
But Karolyn Leavitt said today that we are… It’s interesting. She didn’t say destroyed. She said, “Destroying Iran’s defense industrial base, crushing the regime’s ability to manufacture weapons, stockpile ballistic missiles, and long-range drones, being set back for years.” The picture that they are portraying is that Iran is pretty well done in terms of an offensive capability. What do you think of that?

Col Lawrence Wilkerson
I think it’s absolutely poppycock. I have it on very good authority that about 50% of their missile stocks are intact, that they have plenty to go on for a very long time. They’re pummeling Israel right now to prove that. I also have it on fairly substantial authority that they have enough enriched uranium. They have an underground chamber. I was involved in this with the A.Q. Khan network when the North Koreans were working with Iran on how to do this underground.

They have a chamber underground that is considerably deep. Even a B-2 sent by Donald Trump wouldn’t even impact it. And what they’re doing in there is they’re matching that enriched uranium with a warhead, and they’re matching the warhead with a Khorramshahr missile.

And what’s going to happen if it really gets existential for Iran, which I don’t think it is going to, because they’re holding their own right now quite well, they’ll have a nuclear weapon, and then we’re going to be confronted with two nuclear-weapon powers in the region. One of whom, if shot with a single nuclear weapon, let alone two, will be utterly destroyed because it’s no bigger than a postage stamp, really. Israel.

Barry Stevens
Well, we’re talking about 60%.

Col Lawrence Wilkerson
The other one could absorb 50 nuclear weapons without all that much impact, especially weapons like those Israel has, which are low magnitude of explosive power. So you’re looking at a whole new game if Iran decides to build a nuclear weapon.

Barry Stevens
My understanding is that the 60% level of uranium enrichment is not going to produce much of a bomb.

Col Lawrence Wilkerson
90.

Barry Stevens
Well, if they have 90-

Col Lawrence Wilkerson
They have 90. They have plenty of 90 right now.

Barry Stevens
Do you think so?

Col Lawrence Wilkerson
I know so. When Jim Kelly and the team from the United States went to North Korea in October of 2002 and met Yi Geun and Kang Seok Ju, the two then nuclear negotiators for the leadership in Pyongyang, Jim Kelly was carrying in his briefcase a massive economic proposal that Powell had managed to get through Dick Cheney and the president. The president was very willing. Dick Cheney was only slightly opposed. He was going to present that economic proposal to the North Koreans to nurse them, you know, was the carrot to get them to give up the stick of the atomic weapon, because we knew they were working on it furiously.

And Kang Seok Ju looked at Jim Kelly, and in Hangul translated and shocked Jim to the bottom of his feet, and said, “In essence, we already have the bomb. We have six to 12.” We had missed that entirely. We knew they had conducted two tests. We knew we missed the first one. The second one, we only got because the seismic center in Geneva was able to isolate the spot so precisely that we were able to get our assets in the air and keep them up 24/7 and detect the second test.

All to say Iran doesn’t need to test, and Iran has the same thing the North Koreans were working on, and now it has the enriched uranium. Were I Iran and were I the National Security Advisor to President Pezeshkian or to the IRGC or whomever, I would have told them, “Build a bomb and then you’ll have deterrence.”

Look at what happened to Libya. Libya abandoned its atomic bomb program, and it was attacked, and Gaddafi was killed. Look at North Korea. They have a bomb. We haven’t messed with them. We haven’t said jack about North Korea for months and months and months, and we won’t because they have a bomb. So you need to get a bomb. They are now understanding that to the point, and the Ayatollah is gone. So the religious restriction in some sense has been lifted because the IRGC is not dominated by Islam. It’s dominated by national interests and by money. They’ll build a bomb, and then we’re off to the races between Bibi and Tehran. I suspect they already have-

Barry Stevens
A bomb isn’t much use as a deterrent unless the other side knows you have it.

Col Lawrence Wilkerson
It is because with two of them, you can wipe the other side out.

Barry Stevens
Yeah, but it still isn’t a deterrent unless you know.

Col Lawrence Wilkerson
Well, there are ways to let someone know. There are ways.

Barry Stevens
Well, that’s interesting. All right, well, look, clearly, the last question about this, I think, obviously, is the military-industrial complex in the United States going to benefit from this?

Col Lawrence Wilkerson
It is benefiting.

Barry Stevens
It’s benefiting mightily, and we do hear about how the ammunition stores of the United States are being depleted, especially the expensive stuff like the Patriot anti-ballistic missile systems, and so forth. They’re very diminished. Is this the, you know, the problem that they say it is, or is this that the United States can simply regroup, rearm, and keep going?

Col Lawrence Wilkerson
It is a problem for Israel. Larry Johnson, Ray McGovern, and a couple of us saw the charts the other day. The charts are set up like for David’s Sling, the other weapons in the Iron Dome over to THAAD, Patriot to Patriot III, and what you see is— and this is four days ago— so you’re already out of David’s Sling, for example. Four days, five days, six days, seven days, nine days, and 12 days. That’s the critical air defense munitions that Israel needs. We provide THAAD, for example. We just robbed THAAD from the South Koreans. I understand we’re robbing it from other allies right now, too, in order to supplement Israel.

But in those critical air defense weapons, yes, you’re right. The other weapons that are common for this kind of warfare, you probably have quite a few left. I don’t mean with regard to a stockpile that you’d need for war with China, for example, but I do mean this war that Israel is waging and that we’re now waging. We’ve got lots of those bombs left. We’ve got lots of missiles left.

So it’s not a fact that we’re going to run out anytime soon. Now, eventually, it would have an impact, but you’ve got the defense industrial base out there. They met with Trump in South Florida. He gave them some general guidance. They salivated and went off, you know, “Yes, sir, we can do that.” And he’s got a one-and-a-half trillion dollar asking for a 200 billion more defense budget going on right now.

So I mean, yes, we could collapse with $40 trillion worth of debt, a trillion dollars every year in interest payments. We’re going to collapse. It’s inevitable. The question is when? And that would be a real impact on it, but right now, the munitions are there, and people are making lots of money.

Barry Stevens
And indeed in the Second World War, of course, when there was presumably a good reason to go to war, the United States simply took over General Motors and made trucks, tanks, and bombers, and the entire industrial base was switched over. You could do that if you wanted.

Col Lawrence Wilkerson
Hard to do today. Really hard to do.

Barry Stevens
Yes.

Col Lawrence Wilkerson
Because China has been very careful and strategic about cornering a lot of the things we need for that kind of build-out, and other countries have been smart too. So there are lots of things in this new world we’re dealing with now, drone world, missile world, that we are not self-sufficient in. I think that’s bothering the administration too in terms of what they’re doing with Iran, because that is apt to be made much worse if we keep this war going on, and the global supply chain is impacted majorly.

Barry Stevens
Do you see China as coming out in some way with advantages in this war?

Col Lawrence Wilkerson
Absolutely. The one thing I see that they’re taking a blow on is the Southern Railroad, like I was saying, because we’re bombing the hell out of it. So is Israel. We just started about two or three days ago, making the railroads a major target. Somebody got to Trump. I think what we’re looking at, though, is we’re looking at a very circumspect strategic analysis by the Central Party School and the Politburo in China that says, “We’re winning. Let’s not disturb the victory. Let’s stick with our friends and allies to a point, but let’s not disturb our victory. A war with the United States would disturb our victory. We’d win, but it would disturb our victory. Maybe set it back 10 or 15, maybe 20 years. We don’t want a war, so let’s be very careful. We’re winning.”

And this latest edict from Xi Jinping indicates that in spades because what he says in this edict, which our press has been utterly oblivious to, what he says in a continuation of comments, if you will, on capitalism with Chinese characteristics, beginning with Deng Xiaoping and about 1984, what he says in this one is, “We have everything we want, and we’re at the top of the game. Technology, military, defense industrial base, maritime assets, shipbuilding, all the things that make up national power, except one, financial. Now, we are going to move into that world, and we’re going to take down the Bretton Woods system. We’re going to substitute the renminbi for the dollar, and we’re going to be the financial titan in the world.” And I believe he’s serious.

Barry Stevens
There was a… I think it’s a quoting from Sun Tzu. Isn’t it the Art of War? “Don’t interrupt the enemy when he’s making a mistake.”

Col Lawrence Wilkerson
Bingo.

Barry Stevens
Yeah.

Col Lawrence Wilkerson
And especially don’t interrupt him when he’s making mistake after mistake after mistake.

Barry Stevens
And finally, just to return to your earliest point in this interview, the reputation of the United States, well, from a point of view of Pete Hegseth or Donald Trump, that doesn’t matter because you’ve got power. But in the long term, that soft power does matter.

Col Lawrence Wilkerson
It does.

Barry Stevens
You can recover a lot of things economically, militarily, but the image of the United States— whether it was ever true, I don’t know— but as a good guy, as a principled country, it seems to have taken a huge hit.

Col Lawrence Wilkerson
Yeah. Having traveled all over the world, having worked with the Germans, with the Japanese, the Koreans, and other allies around the world, the Australians, the Kiwis, they respected us, and they respected our respect for international law, however flawed it might have been. They don’t anymore. Our allies don’t even like us anymore. If you poll Koreans under 40, South Koreans under 40, 80% of them will say the greatest threat to their future is the United States of America. If you poll Pakistanis, you’ll get a higher average than that. I suspect if you poll almost any U.S. ally right now, even our European allies, you probably would get at least a 50%. Yeah.

Barry Stevens
Certainly. In my country?

Col Lawrence Wilkerson
Yes.

Barry Stevens
I think you would in Canada. Yes.

Col Lawrence Wilkerson
Yeah. Oh, well, in Canada, I would have said 60 or 70%. I have a friend who was just in Calgary and reinforced it for me. So it is a different ball game we’re playing now, and we’re not playing with a full deck. That’s really bad because our deck is reduced in cards and China’s is full. So all they have to do is sit back and wait, really, and let it happen.

Now, I’m not saying that would necessarily be a negative development, but if we go out the way we’re going out right now, it might be a negative development. What we should be doing is working together to create a condominium of powers that can handle two huge threats. The climate crisis, which none of us can solve alone, and the treatyless world of nuclear weapons. The only way we’re going to handle those two really horrible challenges is together, and this means we ain’t going to be together.

Barry Stevens
That’s right. I couldn’t agree more about that last point. Well, at least the high price of gasoline may spur some further investment in renewables. That’s a small bonus, but listen, thank you, Larry. This has been great as usual, and I hope we can return to that course of a condominium and working together. I don’t see much hope that we will, but I hope we will, and I hope perhaps you’ll be back here on theAnalysis to talk about it again in a few weeks.

Col Lawrence Wilkerson
Surely. Take care and thank you.

Barry Stevens
Thank you, sir. Bye-bye.

Col Lawrence Wilkerson
Bye-bye.

Barry Stevens
Thank you for watching theAnalysis today. Remember, you can go to theAnalysis.news, and there is a donate button if you would like to support this kind of content. Of course, you can subscribe here on theAnalysis.news or on YouTube and various podcast streaming sites. Thank you, and see you next time.

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Talia Baroncelli

Hi, I’m Talia Baroncelli, and you’re watching theAnalysis.news. Assal Rad, a historian as well as the author of a recent book State of Resistance, will be joining me today to speak about national identity formations in Iran.

Assal Rad

But then, in a lot of cases, as I said, I didn’t say I was doing an interview. I would just go to a store, and I wanted to buy a CD. If there was a dance party and you wanted to give somebody a CD of all the best songs right now, what is that? Chat up the person who’s going to sell you what is, by the way, not an official CD. It’s like an underground CD because it’s officially allowed to be sold.

Talia Baroncelli

If you enjoy this content and would like to contribute to the show, please go to our website, theAnalysis.news, and make a donation by hitting the button at the top right corner of the screen. You can also get on our mailing list; that way, you’re notified whenever a new episode drops. You can also like and subscribe to all of the videos on our YouTube channel at theAnalysis-news. See you in a bit with Assal.

Joining me now to speak about Iranian national identity is Assal Rad. She’s a historian and author of the new book State of Resistance. Thanks so much for coming back onto the show, Assal.

Assal Rad

Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Talia Baroncelli

Well, your book is a really fascinating excursion into Iranian national identity, and it juxtaposes different identity formations, such as top-down formations led by the former Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, and the Islamic Republic. It sets that up against different bottom-up formations and ways in which Iranians contest these limited notions of identity. Before we get into the details, I wanted to ask you why you wrote this book in the first place.

Assal Rad

Well, it was a very personal project, if I’m being honest. As an Iranian American, as someone who was born and raised in the United States but to parents of Iranian immigrants, my own navigating that hyphenated identity made me really interested in the notion of belonging and identity. When you grow up, especially within that generation where there’s a lot of anti-Iran sentiment in the United States that creates a sense of alienation, you want to always have this idea of belonging.

I travelled to Iran as an adult, thinking in my mind, oh, I’m going to go to this place where I’m going to get that sense of belonging for sure because this is really where my core identity comes from. I travelled there and realized that that’s not the case. It’s not that it wasn’t wonderful for many reasons, visiting your family, being with people who understand certain aspects of your culture that might not be understood in the state that you live in. My idea of Iranianness was so distinct from theirs. It was so far removed. What I had expected when I visited there because I had grown up in this bubble of not only my own Iranian household but the community that we had built here; that’s really what I expected. It was a very different situation. So I became very interested in understanding that more and understanding Iran more. It also made me realize that if I, as someone of Iranian heritage in the United States, didn’t really understand the complexity of the population, the culture, and the politics of that country, how can I expect an American of non-Iranian heritage to understand? I became really fascinated with trying to understand those things.

As someone who decided to study history, there is that ubiquitous phrase, “History is written by the victors.” You understand the importance and the power of narrative, how important the story is, and people believing that story. The story and whether or not people believe it is more important than the reality on the ground. People in religious studies and historians of religion do this all the time. They’re like, “Oh, such and such story that’s in this religious text is disproven by this information.” It doesn’t matter oftentimes to the believers. So all of that I found really fascinating. I wanted to, as much as possible, try and understand how those narratives played into contemporary Iran.

I tried to trace that back to how having a national narrative and condition of nationalism was tied to the idea of the modern nation-state. In order to have a modern nation-state, you had to have the trappings of a modern nation-state in terms of modern infrastructure, an organized military, a bureaucratic state, all of those types of things. The story was so important, too, that people understood how they belonged to this, as [Political Scientist and Histortian] Benedict Anderson has put it, “imagined community.” That was such an integral part of that project. You could see that unfolding under both the Pahlavi dynasty and then continuing under the Islamic Republic.

Talia Baroncelli

These historians, like Benedict Anderson and [Historian] Eric Hobsbawm, play a really important role in how you make sense of identity making and identity formation. I think the Haitian anthropologist [Michel-Rolph] Trouillot also plays a big theoretical role in terms of looking at how certain narratives are silenced over time and which contested narratives actually have supremacy or are more recognized as being valid or authentic over other ones. I think in your book, by reading it, it seemed like you weren’t trying to argue that not one identity is actually more authentic than the other. If you have all these different identities, which one do you then choose? Or is it all relative?

Assal Rad

I think there’s definitely the idea of it being relative. Yeah, I would never want to. I think anybody who tries to choose a definitive or authentic identity is doing a disservice to understanding the whole point. The point of it is, in scholarship, at least, there’s this idea that the nation-state is a construct, race is a construct, and gender is a construct. Sometimes to the nonacademic, that’s a meaningless statement. It’s like, what do you mean that there are social constructs? What it means is basically that they can change their dynamic—someone who’s wielding power at the top. A state can try and wield that narrative, and people can do the same thing. There’s a negotiation that goes back and forth. Nobody has the power to control that narrative because it’s so dynamic and fluid, and it can change over time.

But then what happens is if you take that argument to an extreme, the idea that it’s a construct, you sometimes see in scholarship the idea that then it’s inauthentic, that it’s not real, it’s fake, or it’s made up. I think that also does a disservice because the reality of it is once you as an individual psychologically attach yourself to an identity, it’s very real. It’s a very real experience, and it has very real consequences. You can say that borders are made up, and they are. If you look at a picture of the Earth, there are no borders on it. We’ve created those borders. But the experience of existing in those borders is very real. The inability to move across those borders is very real.

I wanted to be on that fence of understanding both sides of the argument, that it’s constructed in the case of, say, Iran, where I’m looking at national identity. Those national identities are constructed both from above and from below, but it’s still a certain set of characteristics and symbols that they can choose from. An Iranian identity is not… it’s going to take different symbols that are part of its very long and rich historical and cultural history. That was really what I wanted to get at. Yes, it is imagined, and yes, it is constructed, but it’s still very real, and it has very real consequences for those who are experiencing it.

Talia Baroncelli

Yeah, and you were looking at the former Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, and how he would use certain cultural or historic symbols from Iran’s pre-Islamic age, so to speak. He kept referring to the 3,000-year history of Iran and how it was this Aryan civilization—trying to sanitize Iranian history from Islam, basically. Whereas I guess after the revolution, there was resistance to that. An opposite identity formation was taking place but in the same manner.

Assal Rad

Yeah, so one thing to be clear about with the Shah is that the cultural pillar that he tried to use in terms of the national narrative was tied to monarchy. Remember that when he’s asked, “What ties the nation together?” He literally responds with himself, the monarchy, the monarch, the king is like the father of the nation. So in seeing that identity for himself, he tied the identity of the nation-state to this history of the monarchy; that predates Islam. He was also very much a Muslim himself. Especially with the recent protests, the anti-compulsory hijab protests that we saw in Iran, although those protests obviously went beyond the concept of the hijab. The idea that there is this compulsory hijab in Iran, a lot of people brought up the fact that, “Oh, the former Shah outlawed the veil.” The reality of it is that it was his father. Reza Shah outlawed the chador in the 1930s when he tried to enforce this idea of westernization. But his son, who would become the last Shah, didn’t enforce those restrictions on whether or not women could wear the veil. You could say, culturally, those groups may have felt more alienated because westernization and westerners were set higher in terms of something to aspire to. He wasn’t anti-Islam; that’s not the point of it. It’s more that that’s the cultural factor that he tried to bring into his national narrative.

I bring up two other elements to these three elements that make up his nationalism. It’s the concept of revolution, ironically, and the concept of independence. You see those same threads go into the revolution itself by 1979. Revolutionaries are using the idea that Iran is not an independent state, not a fully independent state. Going back to the coup of 1953, going back to the idea that they see some of these tendencies, the appetite towards westernization that the Shah had as being alien to a lot of the indigenous cultures within Iran. Obviously, they are revolutionaries. But he’s using this discourse in a historical context where you have a lot of anti-colonial national independence movements around the world. So you see that rhetoric everywhere around, and he’s trying to tap into that.

You see that in the White Revolution of the 1960s. He has an entire book called The White Revolution. So he’s using revolutionary discourse, he’s using the discourse of independence, and he’s infusing cultural symbols that predate Islam and go back to the Iranian monarchy– as far back as the Achaemenid monarchy, that of Cyrus the Great– and really directly tying his own dynasty to that era.

Iranian revolutionaries then use Islam as a counterpoint in a certain way. It’s someone like [Iranian Revolutionary and Sociologist] Ali Shariati, whose discourse becomes very popular, especially in the 1970s, when he is saying we need to go back to our indigenous roots. Now, who is he getting influenced by? It’s a figure like [Psychiatrist and Political Philosopher, Frantz] Fanon. This is quintessential anti-colonial resistance. But whereas Fanon is saying we have to leave history behind and forge new identities, Shariati is saying, “No, we have to reclaim our indigenous identities and take pride in those identities rather than trying to emulate the West.” And that’s a sentiment that you see in other thinkers at the time. Someone like [Author and Anthropologist, Jalal] Al-e Ahmad, who writes the classic Westoxification—the idea that this obsession with the West, wanting to emulate the West, is almost like a malady that exists within Iran and within maybe the greater region arguably. So that’s the historical context in which the Shah is creating this narrative.

Talia Baroncelli

I mean, you do see the Shah’s obsession with the West, and that’s probably what was one of the factors in leading to his downfall and leading to the Iranian Revolution; his constant reference to the West being more modern and that Iran is, because of its history, also a modern civilization, they just needed to emulate the West to drag themselves out of the impoverishment that had been brought on them by imperialists. Not that Iran was ever colonized, but its resources were colonized. I think in the ’70s, he had more of an anti-imperialist rhetoric when speaking about the oil crisis, for example.

Assal Rad

Right. I mean, he did. There are interviews with the British. Up until 1953, Iranians tended to have a very positive view of the United States. Their negative view, vis-à-vis colonial powers or foreign powers trying to exert control over Iran, is really against Imperial Russia and the British Empire. In the ‘Great Game,’ these are the powers that are trying to influence and really control resources and even land in Iran. It was after 1953 that Iranians started to have a negative view of Americans because that’s when Americans started to impose their will as well. He has these interviews in the 1970s where he is very much talking about a confrontation with the attempt of British control over Iranian resources.

Talia Baroncelli

Well, you mentioned Ali Shariati, and he was an Islamic Iranian thinker. I’m wondering how you think he would have influenced modern Iranian identity because he did say that Islam was the greatest victim of colonialism. I wonder if that idea of being a victim plays into the Islamic Republic’s idea of itself as being the underdog, as having to stand up for revolutionary struggles around the world, stand up for Palestine, whether they actually do so or not is, of course, a different story. I’m not trying to equate Shariati with the Islamic Republic or with [Former Supreme Leader of Iran, Ruhollah] Khomeini, but do you think some of his views imbued the identity of the state which came after the revolution?

Assal Rad

Well, what I think the state does, the Islamic Republic does, is it really appropriates that language from revolutionaries. Shariati is someone who’s influencing that discourse very much so. You point to something that’s really important, and it’s actually [Professor and Author] Hamid Dabashi and his book on Shi’ism where he writes about this. He says, and I thought this was so fascinating, it’s basically this idea that Imam Husayn in the Battle of Karbala in the seventh century when he’s martyred with his 72 companions, he is victorious in his defeat. It’s the fact that he’s fighting against tyranny and dies fighting for justice that makes him this heroic figure.

What happens with the Islamic Republic, especially, is when you become the person in power, when you become the power, you’re now the flip side of that. You become the symbol of injustice. You very much see that with the Islamic Republic. The reason it appropriates that language is that it tries to maintain this image that it is a continuously revolutionary state. As such, it is supporting resistance movements worldwide. You mentioned the Palestinian cause is one cause.

You see Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, talking about figures like Malcolm X or mentions of things like BLM. Why? Because they’re trying to take this facade. They’re like the modern-day Imam Husayn. They are fighting injustice, all while trying to divert from the fact that they are carrying out their own injustices and that they’re actually the ones in power.

That language is very much, I think, taken up by the Islamic Republic. There’s this attempt to pretend like they’re the guardians of Imam Husayn. Why tap into that imagery? Arguably, one of the reasons is because it’s so powerful. It’s really powerful imagery. Shiite motifs and symbols lend themselves very easily to resistance, whether it’s through stories that were told to galvanize Iranian troops after Iran was invaded in 1980 by Saddam Hussein or whether it was the revolutionary cause itself because that’s the story of the martyrdom of Karbala. This isn’t unique to Shiites. This story, these lores are ubiquitous in other cultures. It’s the David and Goliath story. It’s the Battle of Thermopylae and 300 Spartans against, in this case, thousands of Persians.

You see this story because the images are so powerful. They really tap into that. Revolutionaries tap into that imagery, and then later, the Islamic Republic appropriates that and tries to use it as one of the ways to get that rally around the flag effect in order to fight back against the Iraqi invasion of Iran in 1980. Of course, that’s also infused with a lot of nationalist rhetoric. It’s not just these symbols, it’s not just Shiism, but it’s Iranian Shiism. You’re not just defending the religion; you’re defending the land. That’s very much the sentiment that so many of the people who fought in that war had. It was a very, very nationalist cause because it was defined by these two nation-states that were fighting each other. So even though Iraq had a large Shia population and Iran, although it did not have a large [population], but still had, especially in the Southwest where Iraq initially invaded, an ethnic Arab population. Neither fought for the other side. Iraqi Shiites didn’t fight for Iran, and Arab Iranians didn’t fight for Iraq because they were very much defined within these national borders. It’s fascinating.

Shariati, of course, dies in ’77, so it’s before the revolution even happens. You would imagine that all of the revolutionaries who died before or soon after the revolution would take issue with the way that the Islamic Republic has manifested because of its actual actions, not its rhetoric, but its actual actions fly in the face of (A) why Iranians had a revolution. They had a revolution to dismantle tyranny, not to replace it with another one. Also that it was based on this idea of justice, and so many injustices are carried out in its name right now.

Talia Baroncelli

Well, Iran is an incredibly diverse place. Farsi isn’t the only language that is spoken there. I think many different languages are spoken. The Shah did embark on this nation-building project in which he made Farsi the official language of the country. You could argue that that erased a lot of the cultural diversity.

Would you say that the Islamic Republic is equating Iranianness with Islamicism? Essentially another way of trying to potentially erase some of the cultural and religious diversity? I’m also asking this question, given that my mom’s side of the family is Baháʼí, so they’re a religious minority from Iran. They had to escape Iran and go to Canada during the revolution, unfortunately. I’m asking this question from that position of knowing that there was and there continues to be large-scale persecution against certain minorities in Iran.

Assal Rad

Absolutely. You bring up one of the most important examples of that silencing. That’s one of the things that Trouillot is talking about. Inherently, when you elevate one narrative, you’re silencing others. Both states, both the monarchy and the Islamic Republic, participate in that erasure. It was actually the father, Reza Shah, who established Farsi as the official language. It’s not unique. That’s part of a nation-state project. In order to bring people under this umbrella of the nation when you have so much ethnic language and religious diversity, there has to be something that formalizes that. It’s formalized through, for instance, secondary education.

The United States is a country that has lots of different ethnicities, languages, and minorities, but we tend to have a formalized system where everybody is educated at least– now we see a lot more dual language programs, but still, English is the dominant language in which everybody is educated in.

Something that’s interesting about that on the language front, by the way, just to understand how new this actually was. For instance, for me, my maternal grandparents are Azeri Turks. My maternal grandparents, this is not so many generations ago; this is two generations before me, spoke Persian with an accent. They spoke it with an Azeri accent. It was their second language. Their first language was Turkish. For my mother, Persian became her first language, and she spoke Turkish with an accent, so it reversed.

In terms of the minorities you’re speaking of, yeah, the Islamic Republic tries to present itself as a country that is tolerant or has religious freedom. If you are Christian, there’s a large Armenian population in Iran. If you are Sunni, if you are Jewish, Iran is home to the second largest Jewish population in the Middle East. These are all supposed to be protected religions.

Well, let’s start with them. First of all, they’re treated differently. Anytime you have a country that identifies itself as a particular religion, I mean, it’s the Islamic Republic. You’re automatically second class if you’re anything else because you’re not part of the identifying feature of the state. Baháʼís specifically are persecuted. This isn’t just you don’t get the same treatment. This is that you are basically not recognized. It is difficult to get an education. It’s difficult to own property, which is to the point that you just made why many Baháʼís have left Iran. Iran is the home of Baháʼísm. It’s a religion that emerged in Iran in the 19th century. That group, unfortunately, has been persecuted from the very beginning, from the 19th century, in part because they’re seen as heretics because, obviously, anything that comes before Islam is different. But when you have the seal of the Prophet, anything that comes after Islam is considered heresy because Islam is the last religion, and Muhammad is the last Prophet. Anything that comes afterwards is considered, in theory, heresy. That’s one of the reasons why Baháʼís are targeted the way that they are.

Also, of course, when you have a new religion emerge, and you have Shia clergy in Iran, that even in the 19th century have already become an autonomous body, who already wield a certain amount of power– maybe not political power at the time, but they have their large landowners, they have mosques, they have religious taxes that they collect, and they have a significant following– anything that might compete with that also creates challenges to the power of the clergy. These are the reasons why Baháʼís are persecuted, unfortunately, from the very beginning, and it continues in a much harsher fashion under the Islamic Republic.

Talia Baroncelli

There’s a part of your book where you’re talking about different symbols and military symbols. You’re speaking about the Iran-Iraq War and the Basij. The Basij being a paramilitary group which formed during the Iran-Iraq War. Then you were also speaking about the museum in Tehran, the war museum. There’s a photo of different religious symbols and how they are representative of the different Iranians who engaged in this struggle. Again, emphasizing their Iranianness, even though they came from different religions and how they were all fighting together to face Saddam, represented as Yazid in a way. But of course, Baháʼís were not included in that, so that was significant. I guess there was a time when it maybe wasn’t as bad as today, and I think that might have been under President Khatami in the early 2000s when I think he was even talking about extending certain social rights to Baháʼís at the time, whether that was implemented, I’m not sure.

Assal Rad

I’m actually not sure about that. I’m not specifically privy to Khatami wanting to expand rights for Baháʼís. But I will say I find it believable. I don’t know personally, and so I don’t want to speak to it in that sense. It would fit with the general change that occurs with at least the rhetoric of someone like a figure like Khatami. He gets a lot of criticism for his failure to fundamentally change the system or to change the system, really, in any significant way. But I think that also misses the fact that he was very different than previous leaders in the country, and his vision of the country was quite different. Things did change under him in terms of at least newspapers opening, artistic expression, and a lowering of repression. There’s been this ebb and flow in Iran since the 1979 revolution, depending on who is the president and which political faction has more power. It’s always a repressive state. It’s always an authoritarian state. I’m not saying that any of those things change, but the atmosphere on the ground does change to a certain extent.

What we’ve seen in the last five years or so is this consistent trend toward more repression. That’s why I’m saying this fits in, I think, with that logic. You’ve seen that with the Baháʼí community as well, that increased repression and the further persecution of the Baháʼí community. We’ve seen it in terms of arrests and punishments of human rights activists.

You had someone like Nasrin Sotoudeh, who I believe had been arrested under the Ahmadinejad presidency and was released in 2013. Then again, I think it was in 2008, if I’m not mistaken, somewhere in the last five-year span, that she was rearrested again. So in the last five years, you see crackdowns on labor movements, crackdowns on protests, a crackdown on any voice of dissent, and then further repression, I think, of groups like the Baháʼís as well, unfortunately. I think that all fits into that trend. It’s just gotten worse under the Raisi administration, who took over in 2021. One of the things that they tried to implement more strictly was the hijab. The hijab law has always existed, and women have always been stopped in order to have it enforced. The morality police, I should say, so-called morality police predate the Raisi administration. However, it is under this stricter enforcement that we see a young woman, “Jina” Mahsa Amini, killed by the so-called morality police. That’s the spark of the most recent iteration of protests that we’ve seen in Iran. So that further repression is not forcing Iranians to stay quiet. They continue to come to the streets. They continue to protest. They continue to show different forms of resistance, whether it’s to the state as a whole or particular policies within the state.

Talia Baroncelli

Well, we will come back to the current iteration of Iranian identity or iterations. I did want to ask you about the method you used in writing this book. You’re a historian, so typically, historians will spend countless hours sitting in archives pouring through different documents. You actually went to Iran multiple times and interviewed people. So your work almost comes across as being a bridge between a historical endeavour as well as being very sociological and looking at culture. Maybe you can talk about your first experience going to Iran and when that was. I don’t know if it was actually under President Khatami or if it was already in the Ahmadinejad period. Explain how you decided to interview certain people. How did you pick those people?

Assal Rad

One of the things is that when I was doing my graduate research, I had an anthropologist on my committee, very intentionally, because I wanted to do fieldwork. To your point, yeah, I wanted it to be a history text, but I also wanted to have very contemporary elements to it. That’s where I think the interdisciplinary approach comes across, and that’s why I wanted to do interviews and use really contemporary work.

My archive is not the same dusty archive that we think of. I’m listening to contemporary music, films, and television. Specifically, in terms of interviews, there are a couple of things that went into it. The most important part was accessibility—the ability to access people. One of the things I tried to avoid when possible was the formal interview process because I came to notice that once you’re discussing these topics, especially identity and things like that, in a very formal setting, the tone and the responses become much more politicized. Whereas in a lot of cases, I’m like, I’m not asking for your political identity. I’m just asking, how do you identify? What does being Iranian mean to you?

In some cases, they were very formal. I went in with the idea of I want to interview people, for instance, families of people who were either involved, who were soldiers in the Iran-Iraq War, or families of people who were martyred in the war. Those were much more formal because I didn’t have that access myself. Then in other cases, I really started with a small network. I think it’s called the snowball method. I tried to expand from that network, and it started with people that I knew. Then from there, I tried to get as many different perspectives as I could, but that’s why in the book, I also give a basic description of the person I’m talking to. A lot of the reasons why I don’t use their names is because of the nature of the research, the fact that it’s very contemporary, and it could be very contentious. In an authoritarian state like Iran, that’s the other layer of it. Accessibility in terms of people you can get to and in terms of people who are willing to talk to you. There becomes an unwillingness for a lot of people to speak because you’re in an environment that might feel like it’s dangerous. Assuring that anonymity is very important.

But then also, in a lot of cases, as I said, I didn’t say I was doing an interview. I would just go to a store. I wanted to buy a CD. If there was a dance party, and you wanted to give somebody a CD of all the best songs right now, what is that? Chat up the person who’s going to sell you, by the way, not an official CD. It’s like an underground CD because it’s not officially allowed to be sold. Chatting with someone who’s a taxi driver. Finding other situations where you could interact with people and talk as much as you can, but get a much more organic conversation that way. So the central limitation, though, is accessibility because I wanted it to be as under the radar as possible, both for myself and for anybody who would be willing to speak to me.

Talia Baroncelli

Well, one of my favorite parts of the book is where you’re talking about popular culture and pop music. There’s this one section where you’re speaking about Black Cats and Andy [Andranik Madadian]. These are very famous Iranian pop singers or pop bands from the ’90s and early-2000s. There’s this one part that just really struck me because you’re speaking about Andy’s song, Dokhtare Irooni, the Iranian girl, and you’re explaining how the lyrics paint this picture of Iranian women in general, the figure of the Iranian girl and how that ties and plays into certain stereotypes or notions of national identity.

In the next breath, you then bring up the Frankfurt School theorist Theodor Adorno and his manuscript on popular music from 1941, in which he talks about how pop music really standardizes the idea of individual identity and national identity. So I just thought that it was so brilliant how you took this pop culture example and then analyzed it through the cultural lens or theory of the Frankfurt School. My question would be, looking at these really popular artists, Andy and Black Cats, when you were in Iran, did young Iranians think of these artists as being Iranian, or were they considered to be artists who were then traitors or from the diaspora because they had left Iran and gone to the U.S.?

Assal Rad

First of all, thank you. That’s a great anecdote from somebody who read the book. I never got the sense that they were seen in a negative light in that sense, like a traitor or anything like that. They were also distinct. There’s a period in which, soon after the revolution, music is outlawed at the beginning, and then it’s very limited. There’s very limited space for any music, both production and consumption. Of course, it’s still limited to this day. For instance, women cannot be vocalists. Women can still not be vocalists.

I talk about a band, Arian Band, that emerged in the late ’90s or early 2000s that used women and men, but the women vocalists were just background vocalists. They couldn’t sing lead. But that was a big deal at the time because it was like, “Oh, look. Women are sort of back in the scene.” This is a country before the revolution that had, maybe you can’t necessarily say, the most popular artists, but at least some of its most popular artists were women. You have a singer like Googoosh or Hayedeh, pop staples of pre-revolutionary Iran. They still tend to be popular figures because they’re these famed female vocalists of that era.

In the ’80s and ’90s, especially, when you don’t really have a burgeoning musical scene in Iran, they relied a lot on these diaspora artists. They were very popular in the consumption of that music. I don’t remember the theorist right now, or I don’t remember the author that wrote this, but I want to clarify, this is another author who wrote about this. The author is cited in the book at least, who basically talks about how the consumption of this music in and of itself was a form of, I don’t know if she calls it resistance, or it’s more like it’s a way of pushing the limitations that they have because you’re listening to this pop music that’s not even allowed to be consumed in the country. This has evolved over time. As I said, when you have a period like Khatami in the late 90s and early 2000s, you see the beginnings of the Iranian musical scene inside of Iran really start to flourish. You get all sorts of genres, which were much less popular. The diaspora had its own pop music genre.

Whereas inside Iran, when the music scene starts to evolve, you have rock and heavy metal. In the early 2000s, you have a lot of rap music that becomes very popular. Of course, you still have the pop ballads and melodies and things like that as well. Later, you see a lot of infusion of traditional vocalists, people like [Mohammad-Reza] Shajarian, who then his son, Homayoun Shajarian, uses those traditional styles but then meshes them with more contemporary styles. You get this very diverse music scene in Iran. When that happens, I think they start to shift away from the diaspora musicians a little bit more.

What I saw when I was there in the field work and when you would ask if it was a DJ or if it was somebody who was selling music and it was for parties that they were having at the time, just things that you consume in passing. This is not a political statement at all. It’s just what do you listen to when you’re at a party? Then you’d see these songs like, Dokhtare Irooni would be playing, or they would have a song if it was at the time popular by Black Cats or something like that. So the diaspora music was still, and I assume today, that would be the case. I haven’t been. My field research ended in 2015, so it’s now been several years, so I don’t want to speak to that.

If you look at a site like Radio Javaan, which is basically an iTunes-type site. No, it’s Spotify. Maybe that’s a better equivalent. It’s like a musical streaming site for Iranian and Persian music. They have artists inside Iran as well as diaspora artists. They have a lot of views, listens, and all of that from both sides of the spectrum. I think inside of the country, they more heavily listen to artists inside of Iran because the musical taste in the country has evolved probably more distinctly than that within the diaspora, which would make sense. The cultural center is the country itself, so it has a lot more diversity within it.

Talia Baroncelli

You spoke to so many young people when you were there. I wonder what they think of their own history. Now I’m generalizing, but young people are Generation Z as a group. How would they see the revolution? Do they think of their history in terms of this historical rupture of pre, post-revolution, ‘ghabl as enghelaab, bad as eghelaab?’

Assal Rad

The people that I interviewed, I didn’t make it to Gen Z because most of Gen Z were born after the 2000s. When I was there, they were far too young to be part of the group. I would be fascinated to actually go back to Iran if it was possible to do that field research. It’s not unique to Iran, but this new generation, Gen Z, is changing things everywhere. That’s just the nature of generational change and transition. I think previous generations, the post-revolutionary generation, which is a lot of the subjects that I spoke with. I spoke with the post-revolution generation, who are probably now in their 30s and early 40s, and folks who were there before the revolution– a slightly older generation, people in their 50s and 60s.

Gen Z, as opposed, I think, to the previous generation in Iran, which was more open or more, I think, strategically thought more in terms of reform, less in terms of revolution, like having another revolution. If they had grievances and discontent with the system, they thought more of the idea of reform, which is why we saw so much engagement with the political system for so many years after the revolution. This generation, and we can’t paint everybody with one brush and draw this conclusion or generalize, but there’s at least a significant portion, and we saw this in the protests in 2022 into 2023, that believes that reform is not possible. As such, they have gone a step further in the way that they protest and the way that they air their grievances. So I’d be very interested in really looking at that group distinctly.

What you mentioned, though, the ‘ghabl as enghelaab, bad as enghelaab,’ before and after the revolution, that’s very much of the people that I interviewed, that’s very much a language that they would talk about. There were two periods that they would always talk about if you wanted to have this conversation, and it would be talked about in very unique ways.

One was periodization, before and after the revolution, and also the war. The war was such a huge thing. I knew people who were born in 1986. This is the tail end, the last two years of the war. You would think they have no recollection of the war. You were a toddler when the war ended, and they were very much like, “No, I remember this.” The war was also very much, I think, a part of that generation’s experience. It affected, especially those who were children during it, it affected their childhoods, and they have these childhood memories from it. It literally changed the landscape. So many of the murals, if you go anywhere in Iran, this is not just Tehran, this is anywhere in Iran if you go, you will see street signs and streets named after martyrs of the war. Murals everywhere, either about the revolution or especially the war. That’s changed as well over time. The amount that you can really allow, the more history is removed from it. The further away we get from that history, the less it resonates with people. But you still see something like that museum in the middle of Tehran. It’s like a giant piece of land that’s been dedicated to the war, to the revolution and the war. I’ll tell you, as somebody who visited it, there wasn’t a lot of people there. How popular was it? This was in 2015. I would not describe it as the Louvre, where you go and you have a lot of people.

The state can still try to use those stories, but how Iranians themselves consume war stories is also very different. You can see that in the cinema of it.

Talia Baroncelli

Yeah, I think the state probably exaggerates the importance of some of those symbols. It’s like they play a role in this cultural sense-making, as you call it. But they’re not the only symbols that matter, and pop culture does matter.

My other question would be, your book really looks at identity as a construct. Of course, you mentioned that people who identify in certain ways or live these identities have a very visceral, a very real experience of it. So I wonder what your prescription would be. Identity, it seems to me, can have disadvantages and advantages in terms of how you strategize in a political struggle. Would you say that national identity in the current context of the protests could maybe serve as a political ideal of liberation, or would other forms of identity, maybe across class lines or other shared universal experiences, would that be more important?

Assal Rad

It’s a great question. It’s hard for me to answer because on the front of nationalism, let’s say this about nationalism, using nationalist rhetoric can be liberating or extremely dangerous depending on who is wielding it and how they’re doing it. That’s very important to say. Yes, in terms of resistance movements. For example, in the state of India in the 1940s, when they were trying to liberate it from British colonialism, Indian nationalism became a force for resistance. When partition happens, it can become something that’s not as good. It can create that Indian nationalism, which can then create violence against other groups. It depends on the situation. It’s really dependent on how it’s used.

It’s funny because when you talk about nationalism, I think it’s like any other ideology. This happens a lot with religion. I think when you talk about religion, you’ll often get… I’m not talking about academia, I’m saying across the board, when people talk about religion, there’s a sentiment that religion is a wildly dangerous thing. Look at how many people have been killed in the name of religion. The counter-argument to that is that people have been killed in the name of everything. Nationalism is not religion, but in the name of certain nationalisms, we’ve carried out genocide and many atrocities. These are tools in our repertoire that can be used for liberation but can then also be used for oppression. When you use it as a way to silence minority voices, in the case of Iran, if you use it as a way to silence Baha’is, that’s a danger of nationalism.

In some circles, the nationalism you see about Iranian identity can elevate the idea of Iranianness as being tied to Arianism and whiteness. That carries some dangers within it. When it becomes exclusionary of other groups, whatever those groups are, whether they’re religious minorities, racial minorities, or ethnic minorities.

In a revolutionary movement or in a social movement, especially one that uses discourse like liberation or democracy, inclusiveness, human rights, all this very powerful and ubiquitous discourse– everybody uses this discourse now. That’s what everybody is claiming to be. But if you’re going to use it, then you have to actually execute that in reality. For instance, class struggle, I think it is very important for that. It’s one umbrella in which people can really be united across. That also carries its own dangers. As soon as you say class struggle, and then you bring in words like socialism, and then it goes communism. What I’m saying, what I’m trying to get at, essentially, is any of these identifiers, any of these ideological tools, any one of them can be used in a way that’s potentially good, but also potentially bad. It’s really the people who are wielding that identity and how inclusive they want to be.

What I’ll say about these protests that we saw in Iran, inside of the country, inside of Iran, is some of the images that I saw that were heartening, at least, where I thought, well, this is hopeful. It was images of women with their backs turned, and you would see very different variations of how they were dressed. That was actually very intentional and very symbolic. A woman in chador, a woman in hijab, a woman in nothing, dressed how she wants to, a T-shirt and pants, holding hands. That solidarity, to me, is much more positive because it’s creating that larger umbrella. That’s not about nationalism necessarily; it’s just about choice. It’s about freedom. That’s what they’re really trying to talk about. These aren’t protests that are anti-Islam. They’re not anti-hijab. They’re anti-compulsory hijab. They’re anti-repression. They’re anti-authoritarianism. I think that positive messaging resonates more because it’s more inclusive. If you want to be inclusive, I definitely think you have to take class into consideration.

If you want a successful movement, you probably want to involve the workers of a country because they’re the backbone of that country, whatever country it might be. Iranian workers have been organized politically since before the revolution and after the revolution. In recent months, it’s a continuity. When we saw some attempts at labor strikes, these aren’t unique. This didn’t happen starting in September 2022. This has been happening for years. Remember that five-year period where I said you’ve seen more repression? You see more repression of the labor movement as well.

I don’t know if that answers the question fully because I feel like I’m evading the question just a little bit because it’s hard to articulate whether something is good or bad. It’s really the way that it’s used. I would urge that the more inclusive we can be, the more I think that reflects the ethos of the discourse that we hear people use.

Talia Baroncelli

Even though the movement can be described as a feminist movement, it’s very inclusive because they’re not talking about women’s rights in terms of it being a zero-sum game. It’s not women’s rights at the expense of the right of men or anyone else. It’s women’s rights so that everyone else can have more freedom as well.

Assal Rad

Absolutely.

Talia Baroncelli

It’s anti-repression. It’s repression of all groups and not just specifically Iranians or minorities such as Kurds.

Assal Rad

I also want to say since you brought up women’s rights, these are conversations that transcend Iran’s borders. This isn’t just happening in Iran. That’s the solidarity that you can see. When it becomes nationalist, that’s one of the limitations of it. When it’s about your borders, then it limits the discourse to your borders. But when you look at it as women’s rights, there’s no border that it doesn’t transcend. Women’s rights is an issue everywhere in the world. Women’s rights is an issue right now in the United States. It’s a very important issue actually right now in the United States. Despite all of the freedoms that we have, this is a huge issue in the United States because we’re seeing those freedoms being stripped away. We’re seeing a regression of those things.

Workers’ rights transcend borders. When you can look at these movements, these social movements, and see parallels in other places in the world and build that solidarity, I think those also become, in a very different way, more inclusive and, I think, more effective.

Talia Baroncelli

Well, I do have one last question if you have time, if you have a few more minutes. It’s just a very, maybe, I don’t know if this will elicit a short or a long answer, but what would you change or add to your book in light of the current protests? Your book does such a good job of giving the historical context to understand the protests, but I wonder if there’s anything that you would maybe add now.

Assal Rad

Oh, yeah. I think I touched on this earlier. There’s a whole generation that it’s now missing. That generation emerged on the political scene in a very potent way, starting with the protests of September 2022. It’s not to say that they were never on the scene, but not in this fashion.

The saddest thing, the saddest evidence of that, is in the people who were killed. When you look at the age of the people who were killed, those are the people protesting. Something else you saw is you saw a lot more women killed because they were the ones out there again. If I wanted to add a chapter, and I would love to, it would be to look at this generation as another watershed moment. Not these protests necessarily, but what these protests represent about a generational shift. That’s where I think the fieldwork in Iran would be invaluable because then you could actually be on the ground to see what the distinction is between this generation and previous generations.

Talia Baroncelli

Well, Assal, it was really great to speak to you. I hope everyone reads your book because even though you write it in a somewhat academic context, it’s not an incredibly dense, unreadable academic book. It is very easy to understand, and it’s incredibly interesting. You also bring in these amazing historians, and you weave that in. I really loved reading it. I hope that everyone reads it. I don’t have a physical copy of it to show here but I really hope that everyone reads it.

Assal Rad

Thank you.

Talia Baroncelli

Thank you for watching theAnalysis. If you’re able to donate to the show and contribute, you can go to theAnalysis.news. Hit the donate button at the top right corner of the screen and also get on the mailing list so that you’re notified every time a new show drops. Also, please go to our YouTube channel, theAnalysis-news, and hit like and subscribe. Hopefully, we’ll have Assal on again soon to speak about Iran.

Assal Rad

I would love to. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me and for the very generous review of the book.

Talia Baroncelli

You’re welcome. You really deserve it.

Assal Rad

Thank you.

Talia Baroncelli

Take care.

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Barry Stevens

Hi, welcome to theAnalysis. I’m Barry Stevens. I’d like to welcome Miloud Chennoufi, professor of International Relations at the Royal Military College of Canada.

On February 28th, the United States and Israel launched a massive aerial attack on Iran. Iran has responded with attacks on the Gulf states and on Israel, and Israel has invaded Lebanon. Thousands of people have died, and so that’s not just a statistic. Early in the war, the United States attacked a school in southern Iran, killing 170 or so civilians, most of them children.

Two days ago, Joe Kent, director of the National Counterterrorism Center of the United States, resigned. Now, Kent was an Iraq veteran and a far-right Trump supporter. In his letter, he said that “Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby. It was based on a misinformation campaign that was a lie, and is the same tactic the Israelis used to draw us into the disastrous Iraq war.”

In addition to that, Oman’s foreign minister, Badr Al Busaidi, who was the mediator of the talks in Geneva between Iran and the United States, said that they were very close to a deal at the time the war started. Recently, I think today, he said that the United States has “lost control of its own foreign policy.” So, Miloud Chennoufi, has the U.S. been drawn into Israel’s war?

Miloud Chennoufi

Well, coming from somebody like Joe Kent, who had the responsibilities that he had in a very important intelligence organization in the American establishment, should not be taken lightly. Now you’re right to point out that this gentleman is a far-right person, and it’s true that in the far-right or in any extreme ideology, lying is always justified. So we always have to take what comes from extremist groups, extremist individuals, or individuals who believe in extreme ideologies with caution.

Now, how we do that is by comparing what is said with what decent people have said on the same topic. You’re right to point out to the Omani foreign minister, who is by no means an extreme person and by no means somebody who believes in extreme ideology. Add to that many other voices who clearly said that this war is not the United States war, and the reason is very simple.

Israel has been pushing for a war against Iran right after the regime change in Iraq. So it is a lifelong endeavor by the Israeli prime minister to try to convince American presidents to go to war against Iran. He tried with George Bush Jr, he tried with Obama, he tried with Biden, and he tried with President Trump during his first term, and he did not succeed.

The reason why he did not succeed is simply that the United States has enough intelligence to understand that going to war with Iran will be much more difficult than the very difficult regime change that took place in Iraq, and certainly much more difficult than regime change in Libya. This was repeated by Joe Kent. Again, they knew that in Iran, even if it’s much less powerful than the United States and clearly much less powerful than the combined power of Israel and the United States, it’s nevertheless a different country compared to Iraq, Libya, or even Syria.

Why? Because it is not a one-man show reality. In Iran, you have an institutional apparatus. Now, whether we like or dislike the regime, the way the Iranians conduct their own business is a different discussion. But one has to recognize the fact that there is an institutional architecture, and in any country where you have a complex institutional architecture, it gives the country much more strength than a country like Saddam Hussein in Iraq, where everything was based on one man. So you topple the top, and everything else will crumble and collapse.

Now the question is, why did Israel want this war so badly? There is an answer to that, and it’s part of a strategy that the right and the far-right in Israel have been following since the 1990s.

Very quickly, I can explain this point by saying that during the peace process between the Palestinians and the Israelis in the 1990s, led on the Palestinian side by Chairman Arafat and on the Israeli side by Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, two men who were not, well, peaceniks. Both had blood on their hands, but they were pragmatic enough to understand that it was in both their interests to find a negotiated solution.

So the right and the far-right in Israel, who ended up basically assassinating Rabin, had an alternative to this. This alternative consisted of, number one, pursuing the colonization of Palestinian land, and confronting any Palestinian resistance with extreme violence. This is the first dimension of the strategy.

The second dimension was to normalize relations with any Arab country that agrees to basically throw the Palestinians under the bus. And number three, to confront any other state or non-state actor in the region with extreme violence and with the help of the United States, go down the road of regime change. So it is in this third dimension of the strategy of destroying the peace process with the Palestinians that a regime change war with Iran is included in Israeli calculations.

Barry Stevens

Yeah, and it’s interesting that the role of the Palestinian’s is little commented on in the current CNN coverage of the war. It’s something that I’ve noticed, and yet it is somehow at the heart of so many of the difficulties in the region.

Miloud Chennoufi

Well, any decent observer of the situation in the Middle East knows about the centrality of the Palestinian question. Everything leads back to this issue. Some of the American leaders understood this and tried to find some kind of a negotiated solution because they knew that once this problem is resolved in one way or another, but in a peaceful way that guarantees at least a minimum of rights for the Palestinians, many other things will become much easier to handle in the region.

Two presidents at least tried. Jimmy Carter, who thought that brokering the peace between Israel and Egypt would serve as a first step towards solving the Palestinian issue. When you read the Camp David Accords, there are dispositions about getting to the Palestinian issue later. Of course, it never happened.

The second president who tried and was mainly the only American president who really pressured the Israeli government was George Bush Senior. Now, George Bush Senior is a seasoned statesman who was an ambassador, who ran the CIA, and who was vice president before being elected president. He knew the Palestinian issue inside out, and he had a close understanding of the geopolitical dynamics in the Middle East. He saw it in the interest of the United States to do something on this issue, especially because he went to war in this region to liberate Kuwait after the Iraqi invasion. So he knew that the United States would never ever have the legitimacy it seeks in this region if this particular issue is not solved.

He was the one who started the peace process with the Madrid Summit, and then he was not re-elected. Bill Clinton actually inherited this from him, and he did not do a great job for a long time, unfortunately. He tried by the end to broker something at Camp David once again, but he was not ready to pressure the Israelis the right way in order to get a real solution about the most wicked aspects of the negotiations.

Barry Stevens

In the current war, I think a lot of people are very sympathetic to the demonstrators in Iran who were going up against their theocratic regime, who were vicious in their response and killed a great many people. So I suppose the public and the West, at any rate, are thinking, well, perhaps this will overthrow that regime and something like a democracy could be established. Do you think that’s possible or realistic?

Miloud Chennoufi

Well, I think that it’s not possible and there are reasons for that. The first one, the human experience has shown that democratization happens when you have a critical mass in a society, well-organized, that carries the democracy project. So it is always an indigenous endeavor. The second element, except for some exceptions like Germany and Japan, all successful democratizations happened in Latin America, in Europe, like Spain and Greece, or in Asia, with the clear examples of South Korea and Taiwan, in a moment of stability and prosperity. So you need stability and prosperity, and you need a critical mass carrying the democracy project.

So it makes it very difficult to believe that, in the destruction caused by foreign powers, what will happen next is the emergence of democracy. It didn’t happen in Iraq. It didn’t happen in Syria. It didn’t happen in Libya. There’s absolutely no reason why it is going to succeed in Iran, but there is more. We make the naive mistake to think that the American and Israeli objective is democracy. I doubt it is the case, and I’m going to tell you why.

Theoretically, in a democracy, there is the liberty, the freedom to express public will, and ideally, the government will try to act in a way that meets the expectations of the population. Now, anyone who knows about the Middle East also knows that the majority of the public opinion is sympathetic to the Palestinian cause. So, a genuine democracy anywhere in the Middle East means the exact opposite of the objective that Israel and the United States seek in this region, and that is to crush the expression of any sympathy to the Palestinians. So the objective is not democracy.

So if it’s not democracy, what is it? It is simply weak states, failed states with a very fragile institutional apparatus similar to what we have in Iraq or even in Syria or in Libya, where the states are so weak that they will self exclude from the geopolitical equation in the region and leave it only to the United States, Israel and their allies in the region, like for example, the Gulf states. So this is why there are many reasons why we should not believe that democracy is going to happen.

Now that said, I do understand the desire among the populations in the region, in Iran and elsewhere, the desire among the diaspora for a change. The problem is that when you are dealing with such complex problems, your heartfelt reflexes are not enough. We need an ice-cold analysis of the situation to see if what we would like to see happen has any chance to happen. You see?

Barry Stevens

Yeah, and perhaps it’s worth reminding ourselves- certainly you don’t need reminding- but there’s a long history throughout my lifetime of the United States and the West’s relationship with Persia. To pick one beginning point, the overthrow of the elected government of Iran in 1953 by British and American intelligence, engineering a coup for the sake of the oil, it would seem. And that led to the restoration of the Shah, and then that led to the Revolution in 1979, which established the theocratic government.

Also, the fact that the United States backed Saddam Hussein, of all people, to attack Iran in 1980, I think, and a war that led to maybe half a million dead and subsequently... I sort of skipped over the hostage crisis, which was such a huge story in the United States. And then, of course, the 2003 war in Iraq and the 2011 overthrow of Gaddafi in Libya. I mention all this because it often seems in the news coverage there’s kind of this depthless present, this sort of complete amnesia about all this. Perhaps it’s worth simply reminding ourselves of that.

Miloud Chennoufi

Well, thank you very much for the reminder, because I should have mentioned this in my previous answer. The Americans and the Brits intervened in Iran, you’re absolutely right, in the early 1950s to overthrow a democratically elected government. Iran was going through a very interesting experience of democratization in one of the first and most promising in the Muslim world because it was not based on a violent revolution. This takes me back to what I was saying about democratization. It’s achieved through reform, step by step, and instability.

Even under Mossadegh, there was a monarchy, and it was moving towards a constitutional monarchy. This is the best way to democratize. By the way, Great Britain democratized this way, and this is one of the best examples of gradual democratization.

The United States allies in the region, mainly the Gulf states, no one can say that these are democracies. No one can say that. You know that Saudi Arabia beheaded more people in one year than ISIS did when ISIS was at the peak of its power, so no one can say that. No one can say that these are democracies. Nevertheless, they’re very close to the United States.

Israel is a country that is very close to the United States. As we all know, it has two heavy fires on the International Justice Institutions. One at the International Criminal Tribunal and the second one at the International Court of Justice, one for war crimes and the other for genocide. So it is very difficult to imagine that these states, in their collective effort of opposing Iran, have at their heart the human rights of Iranians or a future democracy for the Iranians. It’s simply not logical. It doesn’t make sense.

Barry Stevens

That reminds me of the United Nations Charter, which is supposedly the pinnacle of international law. I actually wrote it down, because I just went back to read it again in the significant article. “All members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.” That’s, in a sense, the foundation of international law from 1945 on. Obviously, it’s not perfect, and there have been many violations of it, but it seems to me that we’ve reached a kind of new level of ignoring this.

Miloud Chennoufi

Clearly, this war is illegal. Why? Simply because in the United Nations Charter, which is a cornerstone of international law, the only legitimate use of force of a state or group of states against another state or group of states is when it is authorized by the Security Council. The Security Council is the agency that gives legitimacy for the use of force.

Now, there is another possibility where the use of force is seen as legitimate under international law, and that’s self-defense against an imminent threat. So, everybody agrees... not everybody, of course, but you know, there is a large consensus that there was absolutely no imminent threat to the United States from Iran. Let’s not forget that the war-

Barry Stevens

That was the first thing that Joe Kent said in his letter, yes.

Miloud Chennoufi

Yes, indeed, and many people are saying that it’s not true. I’ve said it before, and my line of reasoning here is that the war started in the midst of diplomatic negotiations. What we know so far about these negotiations is, number one, the Iranians were negotiating in good faith, and number two, they made very serious concessions on enriched uranium, but also offered many economic advantages to the United States in the case of a deal.

Now, why did they do that? Simply because the Iranians are rational, like any other state. They are rational in the sense that they know that even if they can retaliate, and they have been retaliating in a forceful manner, they know that a war will basically destroy a lot of things in Iran, human life, infrastructure, and [inaudible 00:32:05]. So they did not want this to happen. Since they accepted the principle of negotiating a deal, going back to Obama’s time, the idea was that we want to be powerful, we want to be assertive, we want to keep our freedom, as I defined it earlier.

So there are two routes. The first route is the revolutionary one, where we oppose everybody, and we assert ourselves with power. The second route is the Chinese route, the Singaporean route, and the South Korean route, where you become powerful through strengthening your economy and integrating into the world economy.

You know that Iran is a very big country with a very well-educated population and many resources. They have everything to become an emergent power economically. This goes through a deal with the United States that will eventually lead to the lifting of the sanctions, because the sanctions are the only thing preventing the Iranians, aside from the war, from becoming an emergent power. So this was their calculation, and the Americans left the negotiations and joined the Israelis and launched a war. So clearly, there was absolutely no imminent threat.

Barry Stevens

Certainly, Britain’s National Security Advisor, Jonathan Powell, who was there and attending the talk, said that “Iran’s proposals were significant enough to prevent a rush to war.” That’s the quote, and it’s again worth reminding ourselves and the audience that there was a deal back 10-11 years ago under President Obama, which functioned, although not in the opinion of Prime Minister Netanyahu, but nevertheless generally was seen to have functioned, and President Trump got rid of it.

There was also, I think, back then, President Putin of Russia, no matter what one thinks of him, took control of some of the uranium of the Iranians and has just recently offered to do the same, and has been rejected. So, there seems to be a lot of evidence that there was a deal in the offing and the deal would have prevented, in the foreseeable or the immediate future, Iran acquiring a nuclear weapon, which I think probably nobody really wanted, except-

Miloud Chennoufi

Yes, indeed, and even the Iranians, when they negotiated with Obama, and part of the strategy that I just described– this route of integration into the international community and becoming an emergent power. Iran was not ready to give up nuclear technology, but they were ready to give up the development of nuclear weapons. It’s not naive at all, because what they were seeking is what I like to call ‘proliferation Japanese style’ or Korean style, or even Canadian style.

Barry Stevens

Because we are, in fact, a threshold state.

Miloud Chennoufi

Yeah, indeed. So all these things have a mastery of nuclear technology that if they are– technologically, in terms of knowledge and the mastery of the process, they can develop nuclear weapons whenever they want, but they will not. They will give all the guarantees necessary as long as they get something else in the deal, which is power through economic prosperity, respect for their sovereignty, and the integrity of their territory. This is point number one.

The second point I would like to add to what you just said, and I fully agree with what you said, is that in diplomacy, when you get an accord between two states or among a certain number of states, it’s not the end of the story. You can build on this accord in order to tweak things, to add things to basically get new things negotiated, discussed, in order to make the spirit of the accord, which is Iran not getting the nuclear weapons alive, but also to keep alive the promise to Iran that by giving up their nuclear weapons, they get something more important for them and for their population. This is precisely what Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been working tirelessly, basically, to make it collapse.

Now, of course, you know that President Trump is a very instinctual person, more than an intellectual person, and his instinct was always not to go to war. That’s not his instinct. It’s just the way he is.

Barry Stevens

It’s the way he was, I would suggest.

Miloud Chennoufi

Yes, indeed. Of course. Now it means that somebody used very convincing arguments for him to change from this instinct. I hope that one day we will know what this argument was that was used to make him change his opinion. But in his first term, he already acted against his instinct by leaving the nuclear accord, the nuclear agreement with Iran. He did it simply because it was an Obama achievement, and you remember at the time, everything Obama did, he tried to dismantle it.

So it makes absolutely no sense that after that, he was like, “Okay, now I want a better deal. I want a better deal, and I will put maximum pressure on the Iranians through sanctions, through the assassinations of General Soleimani,” and so on and so forth. You know, the logic of power. “I have power. I can impose whatever I want, and I will get a new accord that is more beneficial for the United States and not beneficial at all for Iran.” It doesn’t make sense.

Of course, it absolutely makes no sense, but that was the logic instead of building on what the American state had achieved in negotiations with Iran. It was not about Obama or about another president. It was really the state of America that basically negotiated and got this accord, and it was in the interest of the United States to build on this accord.

But this means– and that was Obama’s calculation– if we get something with Iran, the logic towards the entire region has to change, it has to go away from the regime change logic, and ultimately, you will have no other choice but to tackle the Palestinian issue. Of course, that’s what Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did not want at all, and that’s why he acted in a way that we will end up with a war like the one we are witnessing today.

Barry Stevens

Just to play the devil’s advocate, just for a second, is that if you are in Israel, a small country, you’ve been attacked, and you learned that weakness is not the way to go, not to exonerate the treatment of Palestinians or the war in Gaza, but when you see an adversary such as the theocratic regime in Iran, call you Satan and call for your utter destruction. I’ve been in Israel, and I’ve talked to many Israelis about it. There’s a genuine fear of that, and I wonder if you don’t see some responsibility for all this mess lying with the Iranian regime, and it’s somewhat isolated intellectually, and so forth. I mean, do you see that at all?

Miloud Chennoufi

I understand the fear. I fully understand the fear at the popular level. Now, when you’re talking about decision makers or academics or people who know the intricacies of Israeli relations in the region, there are nuances to add. The first nuance is that all that you’ve said is true. You will find Iranian leaders saying all these not-so-nice things about Israel and the United States. That’s absolutely true. What is true as well is that it’s not all of them.

Basically, when you take the Iranian presidents since the death of Ayatollah Khomeini, Rafsanjani, Rouhani, Khatami, and the current president, Pezeshkian. So it means at the exception of Ahmadinejad, all of these presidents were on the reformist side of the political spectrum in Iran, and they have a very civilized way of talking about the geopolitical situation of the region. This is not an endorsement on my part of their political system. It is very problematic because it is oppressive to individuals and groups, but I’m just answering the question about the message coming from Iran towards Israel and towards Jewish communities in general, and you have as many, if not more, civilized, polite messages than the other way around. Even President Raisi, the president who died in a helicopter crash a year ago.

Barry Stevens

Oh yes, right.

Miloud Chennoufi

He was conservative. He was not a reformist. He was a conservative, but still had a political discourse more than an in-control rhetoric similar to Ahmadinejad. This is point number one.

Point number two. If I were an Israeli, I would ask myself, Okay, when did Hamas emerge? And the answer is 1987. When did the conflict start in 1947? It means that Hamas was created 40 years after the conflict. What happened during these 40 years that led to the emergence of such a radical group? So Hamas is not the reason why the conflict exists. Hamas is the consequence of the conflict not being resolved. So if we want to have a sophisticated understanding of the situation, we have to acknowledge the fact that sometimes, when I’m acting in the name of defending myself, I’m creating the conditions for more threats to my security. This is why a lot of-

Barry Stevens

This is the security dilemma that they’ve referred to.

Miloud Chennoufi

Yeah, and exactly, we’ve seen all these Arab states who have been very clear that there will be a comprehensive peace with Israel if the Palestinians recover the rights to a state to sovereignty. It is called the Arab Initiative. This is an initiative led by Saudi Arabia. It goes back to 2002. You can just Google it, and you will find the Arab Initiative. It was adopted at the Arab League, and the idea was that all the member states of the Arab League would recognize Israel the day Israel recognized Palestine as a sovereign country on the 1967 borders. So, there is an alternative to this spiral of war.

Again, if I were an Israeli, I would try to understand what is the logic behind those who always want more war, who think that what we cannot get with violence, we will get it with more violence. What is the end state? What is the end state of their logic? And maybe I will not like this end state, because like Rabin, I would conclude that it’s gonna mean either genocide or apartheid if I don’t go down the road of a peaceful settlement of the conflict. So that’s basically what I would say on this particular issue.

Barry Stevens

To conclude, I’d like to ask how you see this resolving in any positive way at all.

Miloud Chennoufi

Well, let me start with what keeps me awake at night. The temptation of resorting to the nuclear bombing of Iran. The probability is very low, but it can happen. It can happen, and some people-

Barry Stevens

Sorry, do you mean by Israel or the United States? I mean [crosstalk 00:47:55] the United States would.

Miloud Chennoufi

Yeah, so as I told you, the probability is very low, but in desperation, it can happen. I hope it will never ever happen because it really means Armageddon for the region. So this is what keeps me awake at night.

Now, one thing is for sure: no matter what happens next, the United States will never be able to say that it won this war. They have already lost it. They lost it because the asymmetry between their power and the Iranian power was not enough for Iran to be unable to retaliate and resist. Here we’re talking about the United States, who want to confront powers like China, like Russia, and really make sure that they don’t get powerful enough and eventually go to war with them. I think that many people will think again before believing that in the eventuality of such a war, the United States can prevail. So they’ve lost on the symbolic front; they have lost a lot. Militarily, they also lost a lot because the bases have been destroyed, the anti-missile-

Barry Stevens

I think about 12 billion a week or something like that.

Miloud Chennoufi

See, it’s an astronomical dimension of the war. You know, every country in the world looks at the technology used in wars to test how effective the military hardware is, and you know that the United States is a trading nation, including in military hardware. Seeing a country like Iran, which has been living under sanctions for 50 years, being able to basically go around the anti-missile system in Israel and in the Gulf states, it’s a major blow to how the Americans do their marketing regarding their military hardware.

Of course, Iran can be completely and utterly destroyed. Seeing that the Americans cannot say that they won the war, or at least they have lost a lot, doesn’t mean that Iran will prevail. Absolutely not. It doesn’t make sense from a military point of view. But clearly, they have not gone down without a fight and without basically showing a face of the United States that the United States did not want the world to see.

Barry Stevens

Well, do you think that the regime in Iran will survive (A) or (B) Will we see a collapse of the regime? You have said that the Israeli leadership would like to see a failed state, civil war, or chaos. Which of those possibilities do you imagine, say three months from now?

Miloud Chennoufi

Yeah, it’s very, very difficult, and you know what they say: never trust the political scientists with predictions. I will not make straightforward, clear-cut predictions, so I will talk with a lot of prudence in terms of probabilities. There is a probability of a collapse because people are not very happy. Not about the war, but they’re not happy with their economic situation.

Any authoritarian system tends to educate its population, and this is its worst mistake. Take all authoritarian regimes, they will spend a lot of money on their education system, in their university system. They educate them, and you see the progress of education in Iran since the Revolution. It is amazing. It’s really remarkable. The problem is that when you have generation after generation of educated people, especially educated women, it means educated mothers, you are preparing a society that will have a hard time accepting an authoritarian regime. So even without American hostility, there is a genuine desire for change or reform.

There is a possibility that something like that happened. It will happen in one of two cases. The first one, the regime is too weakened by the war, and the loss of human resources and the infrastructure makes it too weak to resist any uprising. But the second possibility is if the system does not collapse, but the same system does not respond in any way or another to this expectation of change coming from the population.

Here I would like to bring your attention to one thing. When the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was assassinated, there were a few days when the new guy had not been elected yet. During those days, the Iranian president, who is a reformist, who always wanted negotiations with the United States, who would like a more open system in the society, more liberty for the individuals, said just that. He said that the next leader has to listen to the messages coming from the population and adjust their policies towards society accordingly. So if after the war the regime survives and does not respond to this one step forward in reform, in openness, it will be just digging its own grave.

Barry Stevens

One thing about the collapse of the talks around fissile material and nuclear weapons is that the lesson I would take if I were an authoritarian dictator, which thank God I’ll never be, but if I were having seen what happened to Gaddafi and Saddam and what’s happening now and to see what’s happening in North Korea, I would want a nuclear weapon as quickly as I possibly could. And that is a fear I would have for the world, that this is the lesson. You need a nuke.

Miloud Chennoufi

Well, you know, I’ve heard an eminent professor at an Ivy League university in the United States say one day– I cannot give his name because it was a Chatham House rule event. So he said that– and he’s by no means on the progressive side or let alone on the Iranian side. He’s well known for his small, conservative opinions. He said that Iran’s desire for nuclear weapons is by no means just the expression of radicalism. There are objective reasons that can justify their desire for nuclear weapons.

The problem is that this can trigger an arms race. The Israeli nuclear weapons have already justified the fact that other states would like to balance this nuclear power. But Iran getting nuclear weapons will trigger a new arms race in the Gulf states. The Saudis will say, “Okay, well, next step, nuclear power.” I mean nuclear weapons. So-

Barry Stevens

Well, we’re in a situation where Poland and Sweden have both been talking about getting nuclear.

Miloud Chennoufi

Indeed.

Barry Stevens

So it’s a different world with respect to that. I’m sorry to interrupt you. You wanted to finish the point?

Miloud Chennoufi

No, I just wanted to say that I’ve always said that non-violent political action in the Middle East is not only a moral choice, but it’s also a strategic choice. Each time violence has prevailed, it has empowered extremists among Israeli politicians, extremists among American politicians, and extremists all over the Middle East region. And when extremists are the only game in town, it means that everything can only escalate, and the victims are always innocent people. But not only innocent people, because this logic will end up consuming even those who tried to make it the only game in town.

Barry Stevens

It’s as though you’re saying that nonviolence or morality is a long term strategy.

Miloud Chennoufi

Indeed. Absolutely. There’s no question about that, and you know, very serious people understood that. I’ll give the example of George Bush Sr., Obama, and many others in the United States and elsewhere in Iran. In Israel, they’re a minority today, but they do exist, who understand that it’s in the interest of nobody to think that with violence and violence only, with power, and power only, we can always win. It’s simply not possible.

Historically, the very idea of international law, international regimes, norms, rules, and stuff like that was not the outcome of moral preferences. Of course, these are moral preferences, but they made themselves unavoidable because the other alternative led to catastrophes one after the other in Europe.

Barry Stevens

Yeah, I think that’s a very good place to leave it. I really value this conversation and the insights you provided, and perhaps in a month or two, we could, if you have the time to talk again.

Miloud Chennoufi

With great pleasure.

Barry Stevens

Thank you, Miloud Chennoufi, and may we see a more peaceful outcome.

Miloud Chennoufi

Thank you very much for having me.

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Barry Stevens

Welcome to theAnalysis. I’m Barry Stevens. In a few moments, I will be joined by Mikey Weinstein of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, which has been receiving complaints from military personnel serving in the United States Armed Forces that some commanders refer to this war in Iran as part of God’s divine plan to bring about Armageddon and bring about the Second Coming. So this is a pretty big story.

If you like and want to support the work theAnalysis does, please go to our website, theAnalysis.news, and hit the donate button. You can subscribe, of course, to the show on YouTube or on podcast services like Apple or Spotify. See you in a second with Mikey Weinstein.

Joining me now is Mikey Weinstein. He is the founder of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, which is a nonprofit organization in the U.S., dedicated to the constitutional right of religious freedom in the United States Armed Forces. He also formerly served as an officer in the U.S. Air Force. He’s a lawyer and served as White House Counsel to the Reagan Administration for three years. He’s the author of many books, including With God on Our Side: One Man’s War Against an Evangelical Coup in America’s Military.

As I was saying in the introduction, you’ve been getting a lot of complaints about military commanders telling their personnel that this war is part of God’s divine plan. Can you tell me about this complaint?

Mikey Weinstein

Well, first of all, we’re in our 21st year as a civil rights advocacy organization. We have one mission, which is to protect the wall separating church and state in the technologically most lethal organization ever created by humankind, which is our U.S. military. We represent a little more than 100,000, actually a lot more than 100,000 members of the military now. About 95% are actually Christians themselves who are being terrorized by their chain of command for not being Christian enough.

After we all woke up on Saturday with this surprise attack on Iran, although there has been a lot of jingoistic saber-rattling about this, a number of hours later, we started getting calls, as we often do from military members, because we provide them AARP, and not the one you’re thinking about, Barry, but anonymity, action, results, and protection, particularly anonymity. They feel comfortable coming here. They know their identities will never be revealed. They were telling us that people in their chains of command were giddy, euphoric, and gleeful about this news because it buttressed their understanding of the Book of Revelation, which includes the Christian eschatological aspect of the end times in the Battle of Armageddon, and that this was showing that all the pieces are coming together.

Barry Stevens

Commanders were actually saying this.

Mikey Weinstein

They were saying it, yes. Some were inviting their subordinates to their houses on Sunday for Bible studies to further discuss this.

Now, this wasn’t across all the military, but initially, we got over the period of about two days, about 110 complaints from 30 different installations. We don’t know if it came top down from Hegseth or not, but just like when people watch the Super Bowl or the halftime show with Bad Bunny, everybody talks about it. Well, this was shocking news. We’re suddenly at war. We attacked unprovoked. We attacked Iran, a country that had been intimidating us as much as Mickey Mouse was doing, and we had no congressional approval for it.

In any event, this was something that was considered to be pretty shocking, certainly as I’m trying to justify our War Department, following some version of this extremely conservative but very prevalent in MAGA, Christian Nationalist perspective.

We got about 110 for the first couple of days, and then we broke the story with one particular reporter, Jonathan Larsen, and it went viral. Then we got another 100 more, so way in from 20 different other locations. We’re not going to give the exact numbers out because we don’t want to provide any further help to the Pentagon.

Remember, our clients noted three things in particular. Well, the first was that our Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, does something beyond repugnant, repellent, and unconstitutional. Every month, he has a Jesus praise service in the Pentagon, in the largest auditorium in the Pentagon, Barry, held during the duty day with people in uniform there, espousing this exact Christian Nationalist rhetoric, which Christian Nationalism does not like the Constitution, and it wants to change our country into, if you’ve read Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale or seen the Hulu series, Gilead. It’s a fictional Christian. We actually had the showrunners of that show years ago reach out to us for input. They were first thanking us for fighting this dystopian future that they show on their show, and we gave them some input from the military.

Barry Stevens

Now, Hegseth is a guy who actually has, if I recall, a reference to Matthew 10: 34, where he says, “Jesus says, I do not come to you in peace, but with a sword.”

Mikey Weinstein

Yes, on his right bicep, it says, ‘Deus Vult’, which means God wills it, which is a motto of the crusades, which went from the 11th century through the 13th century. It’s the exact wrong thing to be doing, to be providing such a profound propaganda bonanza to ISIS, Al Qaeda, and the Taliban. We’re at war now with Iran. It’s the worst possible thing. But Hegseth does these Christian prayer services during the duty day, and he’s done 10 of them. The last one was on February 17th, not even a month ago, where he brought in his personal pastor, Doug Wilson, who’s well known for saying that women should not have the right to vote. They should be consigned to raising children, getting pregnant, raising children, buying food, cleaning up after food, serving meals, etc. He believes that slavery in America was biblically justified, and he points out that many slave owners actually were nice to their slaves, the way they were nice to their living room furniture. Jews killed Jews.

Barry Stevens

I suppose there he’s not violating the Constitution of the 18th century. But there is this First Amendment, which says that the United States is not supposed to have an established religion, written by James Madison, to make it safe for many religions and to have religious freedom. Isn’t Hegseth violating the Constitution?

Mikey Weinstein

Of course he is. His oath to it. Absolutely. But it’s not just that. When we founded our country, our constitutional framers looked at Europe, where most of the bloodbaths that had occurred there had been when men of the cloth had been men in political power. Barry, they looked at Cromwell in England. They didn’t even have to leave our shores. They looked at the Salem witch trials. They said, “Not here. We’re going to cleave a Grand Canyon between the spiritual and temporal church and state.”

They also put something else in that most Americans are unaware of. A lot of Americans don’t even know about the separation of church and state in the First Amendment. But Clause 3, Article 6, Barry, says, “We will never have a religious test for any position in the federal government.” Let me tell you, when you’re a marine, sailor, soldier, airman, or Guardian, that’s what they’re called in the Space Force, you’re in the federal government. Hegseth has created a de facto religion test as well, also violating his oath.

Why would anyone be surprised in an incredibly competitive military, Barry, where they look every month at this guy doing what he’s doing, that commanders wouldn’t sit there and make these statements?

As of this morning, 30 members of the House of Representatives, all Democrats, sent a demand letter to the Pentagon Inspector General saying, “Do an investigation.” Now, we don’t have any high hopes that under Hegseth, these particular Inspector General stormtroopers will do anything other than make it clear that this didn’t happen, or if it did, we want to know. If you validate that this happened, is it okay? Is it okay that they said that? Are you down with this? Even if you’re saying, “Of course, it didn’t happen,” I guarantee you our clients aren’t going to trust anybody from the Inspector General’s office from Hegseth.

Remember, most of our clients are junior enlisted or junior officers. They’re young. They have families. They’re pregnant. They’re raising kids. Although we have them all the way up to four-star generals and four-star admirals. But when they look at vulnerability, they look at someone who is actually not quite so vulnerable. This person was a naval fighter pilot, a war hero, an astronaut from NASA, and he’s a sitting U.S. Senator, Mark Kelly. Hegseth had to drag him back in off of his civilian status, drag him back in, retry him in a court martial for violating the Uniform Code of Military Justice, the military criminal code, because he simply, along with five other members of Congress, did a video reminding military members to do what, Barry? Only follow legal orders, not illegal orders like shooting college students at Kent State or slaughtering Vietnamese at My Lai. They look at him, and it terrifies them. They’re not going to trust anybody else to go talk to.

We’ve been working for 21 years to create a brand of safety, and we will protect our clients at all possible costs with their anonymity. Our job was to get this out in the media, and that’s why we’re talking to you today.

Barry Stevens

Well, one question I would have is if you believe that Armageddon is part of God’s divine plan, and this war is part of that divine plan, do you think you’re more likely to try to make it come about? Do you think you’re more likely to be more aggressive in your-

Mikey Weinstein

I think that’s fairly intuitive. Fundamentalist Christians delight in the fact that they are given a particular metric that is disgusting, that there will be a 200-mile-long river— it’s a long way, Barry— four and a half feet deep, filled with nothing but the human blood of those that their version of has slaughtered at the Battle of Armageddon.

Now, you can believe what you want, but the bottom line is your personal Christian Nationalist views will always be subordinated to the civil rights of your fellow Americans; that includes in the U.S. military. There is not going to be a place where you can displace our Constitution because our members of the military swear an oath to not support, defend, and protect a particular person like Trump or a particular weaponized version of Christianity, but to our U.S. Constitution, which makes our country beautiful the way it is. No one has ever done that before. Israel, as a matter of fact, doesn’t even have a Constitution. This is extraordinarily dangerous. Our clients are thrilled because we got it out. It is all over the world now. They want to hear from the Pentagon. Are you going to deny it? Are you going to investigate? What I want to hear is that— I don’t mean to cut you off.

You tell us whether this behavior is okay. You think it’s okay? If they go, “No, no. It didn’t happen. It’s completely preposterous.” I doubt that’s where it’s going to be. We’re very fortunate that we even got one email from our several hundred clients to write in to explain what was going on. Of course, people can attack that, going, “Well, that’s bogus. It’s not real. You’re just trying to get attention.” We are trying to get attention for our clients because they do not have a voice. If you’re even being gently evangelized, Barry, by your military superior, get the hell out of my face. Our man is not an option for you, so we do it for them.

You’ve got to remember, most people don’t realize that the military is peculiarly adversarial, communal, ritualistic, and tribal. And that your military superior, Barry, is not, not, not, not, not, not your shift manager at Starbucks or your boss at IBM.

Barry Stevens

I understand.

Mikey Weinstein

They have complete control over your life.

Barry Stevens

You mentioned Armageddon, which, of course, is an actual place in Israel. Israel is, in this war, an ally of the United States, a leading ally, you could say. What’s the relationship between this Christian nationalism and Israel?

Mikey Weinstein

Well, it’s really very hypocritical. In the concept of Christian nationalism, they need to have all the Jews aggregated in Judea Samaria, which will serve as an accelerant or lubricant to bring back their version of Jesus on a white horse. As a fundamentalist Christian Nationalist, former three-star general Jerry Boykin said, because the Revelation says that (Revelation singular), that indeed Christ will be coming back on a white horse with a sword. Jerry Boykin says, “No, it’s going to be an AR-15.” They need to have all the Jews in one place.

From my perspective, it’s very much like the night before the first Thanksgiving. You say you love the turkey so much, but you end up killing the turkey and eating the turkey. It’s not as if they love Jews. They need to have all the Jews geographically, Jewish hegemony in the Middle East, and that triggers where things are.

The concept of thinking that we need to do this, start this war to help Jesus come back because he can’t do it on his own, there is a time, place, and manner to express your religious faith.

Barry, let me ask you a question. You look like somebody who owns a vehicle. Do you have a car?

Barry Stevens

I don’t right now, but I have.

Mikey Weinstein

All right. Do you have a driver’s license?

Barry Stevens

Yes.

Mikey Weinstein

Does that mean with your driver’s license that you can drive a car whenever you pretty much want to?

Barry Stevens

Not when I’m drunk.

Mikey Weinstein

That’s the answer. If you’re drunk, stoned, on medication, or too tired, you may not drive your car. It’s time, place, and manner. If you want to proselytize a particular weaponized version of any faith, but particularly in this case, Christian nationalism, that’s fine, but there’s a time, place, and manner to do it. Let me tell you something, Barry. That time, place, and manner is not during the duty day in the Pentagon’s largest auditorium in uniform, where they are televising on Channel 2 everywhere. That sends the message all the way down, and it terrifies, but it obviously incentivized a large number of people who are subordinated and figured, “Well, we got triggered by this surprise war. I’m going to tell my troops that, hey, it’s okay because the Lord selected Donald Trump to be the signal light, the North Star.”

Barry Stevens

Anointed by Jesus.

Mikey Weinstein

Right. Again, my point is this: we’ve got it out everywhere in the world now. People are discussing it, and they’re not going to find our clients. Our clients have the guts to come forward, and we will always protect them. In our 21-plus years of doing this, we’ve never come within light-years of exposing this to anybody else. That’s what we want answered. We want to hear that from Hegseth. Is this okay?

Barry Stevens

You’re hoping or you think he won’t say this is preposterous. He’ll just say you’re lying.

Mikey Weinstein

Well, right now, Barry, he’s gone five days saying nothing. Nothing at all. Although we were telling members of the media, let me just get this in, please, shortly. Telling members of the media that we’ll have something for you by the end of the day. They’ve done that five days in a row. Today was supposed to be by noon. That’s what [inaudible 00:15:24] did, and noon East Coast time, and they blew right by that as well.

I’m sorry. You go ahead. I’ve got another couple of minutes.

Barry Stevens

Yeah, thank you. I just want to ask, we’re working on a documentary about nuclear weapons. I must say it scares me a little bit without revealing any... breaking open the anonymity. Can you tell me if any of the people who have this Christian Nationalist attitude are working in control of nuclear weapons?

Mikey Weinstein

The answer to that would be yes. Yes.

Barry Stevens

Well, that’s a very scary thought.

Mikey Weinstein

Well, of course it is. Look, our United States military is the technologically most lethal organization ever created by our species, Homo sapiens. It’s where all the nukes are and the drones and the laser-guided weapons and the conventional weapons. I can’t go any further than that. We do ask them what their MOS or AFSC or SFSE is. That means their occupational codes for the Space Force, Air Force, Marine Corps, Navy, and Army. We don’t force it out of them, but they will gladly tell us. It’s part of our best effort to do due diligence when they call in. But the idea that this was a massive synchronized ballet where people called in or were lying about it. No, my friends, we are here to bring their voices forward.

It reminds me of one of our very first cases, and I’ll end on this. When we had first started, we got a message from a young 19-year-old Navajo sailor on an enormous U.S. Navy aircraft carrier in the Pacific. His faith, I live in New Mexico, the Navajo Nation, he’s Navajo, is the largest geographically for a Native American tribe and the largest enrolled number of members. He was being viciously proselytized to by his chief petty officer. We were able to get that chief petty officer, certainly not under Trump, he would probably be promoted, disciplined, and moved to the far side of the ship. They’re like cities. There are 5,000 sailors there.

About a week or two later, we got a message through a place called Window Rock, Arizona. I’m in Albuquerque, and that is the capital of the Navajo Nation. To this day, it gives me goosebumps. The message was simply from the parents of the young sailor. The young sailor had said, “Please tell Mr. Weinstein in the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, thank you for being the voices we’re not allowed to speak with.” I think about that every day, in every way. And that’s what we’re here to do. We can take criticism, everything else like that, but that’s what we’re here for.

Barry Stevens

One tiny more question. You’re talking about this within the military. You know a lot about Christian nationalism within the military. Presumably, it’s a fairly strong movement. Do you fear domestic issues that, in other words, the military could be used against the Constitution within the United States because of Christian Nationalism?

Mikey Weinstein

Trump has already talked about using the Insurrection Act to ‘trump,’ if you will, the Posse Comitatus Act, which prevents the use of the military for law enforcement. But that’s already been threatened. My fear is that-

Barry Stevens

Are there enough Christian Nationalists to make a threat against the Constitution?

Mikey Weinstein

Yes. It is our best estimate that somewhere in the high 20% or low 30% are Christian Nationalists. But remember, Hitler only had 7.9% in his white Nationalist Socialist Movement. Stalin had 2.9%. When you graduate from a military academy, as I did, the Air Force Academy. My dad went to Annapolis, and three of my four kids went to the Air Force Academy. When you graduate as an ensign or second lieutenant, on that day, you outrank 90% of the military because you’re an officer. And I fear that even if we have a blue tidal wave in November and take both houses of Congress, Trump will be impeached, and maybe this time might actually be found guilty. You think he’s going to leave? I don’t, and I think that could trigger a civil war. The damage being done to our military in our country right now is not going to be solved by midterms. I think it’s generational.

We have to be able to follow what the girlfriend of Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, said, which is that action is the antidote to despair. To anyone watching this, do something. Get off your asses, go to a demonstration, support organizations like ours. We’re nonprofits that are out there fighting for this. We’re not the only ones, but we’re fighting. Be like the people of Minneapolis. If you hear something, in a mall or in a restaurant and you don’t agree with it, have enough guts to tell somebody that. Stand up, contact your members of Congress. We’ve got to use the tools of democracy to fight against this or we’re going to be gone, and I don’t want to live in a Gilead. You have to have an answer for your children and grandchildren who, if we get out of this, will someday look at you and say, “What did you do, Mom and Dad, Grandma and grandpa, to fight against this?” I know it says March 6, 2026, but it feels like March 6, 1933, in Nazi Germany. I very much appreciate the opportunity to be on this today.

Barry Stevens

Thank you, Mikey Weinstein of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation. Very much appreciate the interview.

Mikey Weinstein

Please shoot us a link when you’re done. We’ll get it out there.

Barry Stevens

Absolutely will.

Mikey Weinstein

Thanks again. Take care, Barry.

Barry Stevens

Bye bye.

Mikey Weinstein

Have a great weekend.