JP: Yeah, well, that's a very good and rather notorious example. Clinton's war making is on the record, her destruction, and she was the lead destroyer of a modern state, Libya. And as a result of that destruction -- which she gloated, on camera, she gloated about the gruesome murder of Gaddafi -- in that destruction some 40,000 people died. Honduras, she was responsible for the coup against the democratically elected government.
DB: They call her there the Deposer-in-Chief.
JP: Yeah, yeah. And the idea that among certain liberal people that she represented some kind of honorable alternative to the verbose and unpredictable Donald Trump is so absurd. I think, again, I think all this is important because there will not be an opposition, there won't be an opposition to Trump, and there won't be an opposition to the great national security machine that really runs the United States.
I mean, okay, he's anti-establishment, but that establishment isn't going anywhere. And, yes, he will bring in his own establishment. He's talking about defense secretary. Who is it? Senator Jeff Sessions, a Republican of Alabama. And national security advisers will have a hawkish edge: General Flynn and Representative Duncan Hunter of California, there. So all this is unknown. The point is, there was very little between Trump and Clinton. And what really distracted people, diverted people, from understanding this was what is unfortunately called, because there has to be ["] a better term, identity politics.
Clinton was said to represent an advance for women. She's anything but. She's a diametric opposite of that. Clinton, the Democrats were meant to be an advance for people of color. Well, it was Clinton, the two Clintons, Bill and Hillary Clinton in the mid-90's, who devised the so-called welfare reforms that most historians, political historians, now agree was the trigger for sending so many African-Americans into the gulag that is America's prison system.
So these, these have to be confronted because an opposition is going to be needed. At the present, there isn't one, in my opinion. There was never an opposition to Barack Obama, a violent president, who seduced the media. It's interesting that the more unpopular or that Donald Trump was made, with the media, and all of them were against him, all of them, bar some Murdock outlets, and others. But most media was against him. I think that helped to give him support. The media is held in such low regard by ordinary people. The so-called elites are held in such low regard by ordinary people. This is a class issue. There was a class issue running right through this campaign. And that has to be understood.
DB: Indeed, that word class does not come up in the United States. We're the upwardly mobile society. Everybody can make it.
JP: Well, it didn't. But it is, you know, that's what I mean by identity politics. Gender and race are separated from class. And it's not who you are, or what the color of your skin is, sometimes it is, perhaps often it is, but in the final analysis it's the power you serve. And that's class. And until the resistance to an intelligent understanding of that is swept aside, people are going to be mired in this, the distractions of identity politics. Where they don't feel any obligation, really, to find out. To find out about how the rest of humanity, how the rest of their compatriots in the United States live and what their problems are. It's all about "me, me, me." And until that is understood and discarded, discarded, and real feminism returns, not the kind represented by Hillary Clinton, real feminism, to take one major issue, then the Trumps will triumph.
DB: Real feminism? What do you mean by that John, real feminism?
JP: Well, I mean feminism that is part of class. The feminism that understands that it's not just simply the privileges of bourgeois women. That's it not simply the privileges of the readers of the New York Times, and the Guardian in this country. It is the rights of women everywhere. It is the right of women to life, in places like Iraq, but are bombed by Americans. I think it was actually the New York Times source for this but one extraordinary statistic I read not long ago, there were 700,000 widows created since 2003. The last 13 years in Iraq, widows, women...
DB: 700,000...
JP: 700,000... Now until those proclaiming themselves as feminists but keeping their feminism very parochial, very tight, and saying that a woman should be in the White House even if she's Hillary Clinton, I would suggest they consider that fact. Those women have a right too. And those deaths were caused by American policies. And, all I'm saying is that the so-called identity, single issues have to stop being single issues. Feminism should be part of class, all the time. Because it's poor women who suffer most. And a lot of the people who voted for Trump were those women. I read that, is it 52% of white women voted for him?
DB: Something like that, yeah.
JP: Well, that has to be understood. Those women have rights too.
DB: In a little bit, I want to talk more about the press. I'm going to do that with you in the context of Jeff Sessions. Let's talk specifically about one huge foreign policy issue. How do you understand... were you able to understand the difference between Clinton, Syria, Russia and Trump? You know, we know that the Clinton machine played Trump as a dupe of Putin, in Putin's pocket, the Russians sabotaged the election, that's what most people who were supporting Clinton probably now feel that Hillary would have won if the Russians didn't subvert. But the actual policies, what do you understand about that?
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