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Vijay PrashadIn fact, that's a very good thing, but now, unfortunately, Obama's voice is in my head. So, in reading the memoir, the charm does come through. But you can see there is a sequence: Obama, John F. Kennedy, FDR. There is this trajectory. So, here's this man from that school of Democratic Party liberalism who excited the base in various ways, comes to power, and comes into the White House. Now, he is informed that he has the power to assassinate people around the world without a warrant, without an investigation, without a trial, without all the basic architecture of liberalism. You can just put a name on a list and the person is assassinated. That's an extraordinary power. That's a god-like power. Now, you would imagine this sort of Democratic Party liberalism would hesitate and say, look, this is not on. We need to have trials and we need to arrest people. They need to have a right to defend themselves. Just the basic points that are there, not only in the US Constitution, but, you know - hello? - in international law.
No, Obama accepts the enormous responsibility - you know, this is the kind of way they think about it - enormous responsibility bestowed upon the United States to maintain order. And he says that his chief of staff told him that the reason we need to do this, the reason we need to sit on Thursday in the Situation Room and go over a list of people that have to be killed and you have to sign off on this killing - the reason we have to do this isn't actually about the enormous responsibility of American power and so on, but it's because a Democratic Party, a liberal Democratic Party president should not look "weak." I mean, that is something that should chill people. When the perceived need for the appearance of strength justifies using this amazing, awesome amount of power that is going to destroy the lives of God knows how many people. This is chilling.
So, when we say, let's look at Biden's record and so on, I fear that whatever the oscillation towards reason, towards liberalism, whatever that might be, the enormous capacity of the United States to wreak havoc in the world, married with this hesitancy amongst Democratic Party politicians not to appear weak makes them very dangerous people when they're in the White House. So, I don't have a great deal of anticipation that Biden is going to be a peace president. I fear that once more we are going to have another war president, because, in a sense, Paul, they've all been war presidents.
Well, before we dig in more to what we might expect from Biden, dig in more to the mindset of this kind of liberal face [i.e., facade]. As you said, Roosevelt is the liberal face. In fact, the New Deal was about as liberal as domestic policy ever got. And of course, he was doing it to save a system of private ownership, as he said himself. But it was a rational approach to it, as opposed to fascism, which was really the alternative in the '30s. There's even a speech from Roosevelt in '39 [sic, a speech from April 29, 1938] where he talks about corporate control of government. When a specific group of corporations start to control government, he says, this is the definition of fascism.
And he warned against this barbaric bombing of civilians during World War II, and then he allows this guy, General LeMay, to become head of STRATCOM. The guy is a fascist. When I say he's a racist, the guy ran for vice president after he retired: he was George Wallace's vice president. Apparently, he was so crazy, rightwing, and militarist that Wallace started getting embarrassed by LeMay because LeMay was advocating for a strike against the Soviet Union. He was making Wallace look crazy.
But not only did Roosevelt have this guy as head of STRATCOM and orders the firebombing of Tokyo, which was actually worse than the atomic bombs, because in one night they killed 100,000 civilians. People should look this up because one of the pilots wrote about what he saw from the air. He describes tens of thousands of people running into the canals to try to escape the flames. The water itself was already boiling. People start to melt. And then there's so many thousands of people running, they can't prevent themselves from being forced into the canal. The bridges, the steel gets white hot. Like, the description from this pilot"It's incredible. And Roosevelt had to know all this. There's no way these reports don't get to him. But the same liberal mindset that can do the New Deal can accept the slaughter of tens of thousands of people.
Then Truman, as we know now, authorizes the dropping of the atomic bomb when Japan's already ready to surrender. The whole thing was unnecessary. And then again, in Korea. After doing it in Japan, they do it again in Korea, which never gets talked about. What is it, like, three million Koreans, I think, were killed? And the same guy, General Curtis LeMay, again.
So, what is this bloody mindset where they can think of themselves as liberals - "We're not like the Republicans." And then act - I don't know if it's more dastardly because I'm sure the Republicans in the same situation would be as or even more so - but act in a completely dastardly fashion.
Vijay PrashadYou know, there are two books I'd like to add to the reading list. And fortunately for people in the United States, they're both written by people from the United States so you don't have to doubt the authenticity of the writer. [Laughter.] Because I know that there is a seam of parochialism that sets in. If I gave you the name of a Japanese writer or a German writer, even you might not believe them. But I highly recommend that people go back and take out their high school copy of Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five, Vonnegut's account of being in Dresden when it was firebombed. And it's exactly those kinds of descriptions. It is one of the most powerful anti-war books. And I don't even think that Vonnegut meant it to be an anti-war book. Vonnegut meant it to be a sincere account of something that totally, totally bothered him for the totality of his life.
The second book is - well, there are two, but I'm going to suggest one - John Hershey's book, Hiroshima, has to be read again and again. These are books that I believe used to be read in US high schools. I'm not sure it's still being read, but Hiroshima is an extraordinary book. Hershey goes to Japan right after this horrendous act; arrives in Hiroshima. He's there with a legion of Japanese journalists and he writes for The New Yorker, perhaps the most sincere piece of writing that's ever appeared in that magazine. And his book is extraordinary. I highly recommend it.
Well, you asked a very important question about how we square the circle between people who have this high-minded sense of themselves and this ruthlessness. In the book that I've written, Washington Bullets, it opens with Paul Nitze's journey to Japan. Because Nitze also goes to Japan just after Hershey's essays appeared in The New Yorker. I mean, they knew already. You didn't even need internal, secret OSS - that is, the intelligence agency - briefings on what had happened in Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Tokyo, and so on. Nitze was right there. And he interviewed some of the leading generals and people for a long after-action survey that they were doing.
Now, here's a person who comes from that American elite, that, you know, liberal establishment, let's call them. Whether they were Rockefeller people or whether they were FDR people, it didn't matter. They were basically the country-club elite from the eastern seaboard. And he goes there and he sees the destruction wrought by both the atom bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and, as you quite rightly pointed out, the incendiary bombing of Tokyo. He sees this directly and writes about it in his report. And then very soon after, he and his team sitting in Washington, DC, concoct a line which I have quoted, I think, for twenty years now, because I think this is really important for an understanding of the bipartisan consensus around US foreign policy. And the line hasn't changed, and it is quite simple. Of course, they use a term which is not used anymore; it's arcane. It refers back to their sort of Harvard/Princeton/Yale classics education. But they basically write in this important foundational document that has never been repudiated by the US government. In other words, they've never said that the policy has changed. But this is the policy after World War II. They say that the goal of US policy is to seek "preponderant power." To seek preponderant power; that's the goal of US policy.
You know, the gentler word thrown around now is "primacy," that the United States must be - well, I suppose if we're going to go all classics and Greek and Latin, it's primus inter pares, first among equals. Although I don't think that this elite sees anybody as their equal. They see themselves as superior to everybody. I mean, this is what in popular culture is known as US exceptionalism. This is the kind of thing you see every time anybody runs for office in the United States of America, whether it's for city council or all the way to the presidency. They'll always say it's the greatest country in the world, has a mission for the world. You know, God bless America. Thank you, God, for making me a citizen of the United States and so on and so forth. There is this constant reiteration of the superiority of the United States and its mission for the whole planet.
Now, I don't need to be a psychologist or even a social psychologist to do an analysis of this. I'm not interested in analyzing this. But I know that this is the motivation. This is what drives them. You know, this sense that, oh, gosh, we can't allow a multipolar world. We can't allow China or Russia or any other country to share the table with us. We have to drive the agenda. You know, what disturbed this sort of liberal, conservative, bipartisan elite in the United States about Trump was that Trump was eroding their moral standing, the self-image that they have of themselves. Trump was making them look buffoonish on the world stage, and they therefore wanted to return in a way to something that resembled how they see themselves, which is, you know, this great colossus of liberalism that stomps around the world putting out fires and telling people how to behave.
I mean, I read the Pentagon documents on a regular basis. And in the last twenty years, they've basically continued to say we cannot tolerate any anybody challenging the absolute authority of the United States of America, least of all China. And I just want to make a distinction as I end this answer. The distinction is between power and authority. I think nobody should have an illusion that US power is as great as it has been for a long time. And by power. I'll just give two examples. The United States is the largest military in the world. It can, as I say, bomb destroy anybody. Enormous nuclear arsenal. Nobody can challenge the United States militarily in a one-on-one fight; not a chance. Secondly, the United States continues to have an overwhelming advantage over world financial institutions. The dollar, even though marginally declining as a reserve currency, marginally declining in terms of the reconciliation of trade - you know how people do bilateral trade. Russia and China are increasingly doing bilateral trade in rubles and in yuan. But nonetheless, there is no question the dollar is supreme around the planet. So, United States power is not affected much.
The US's authority, on the other hand, has declined greatly. In other words, the United States is having a much harder time driving its own agenda, whether it's in trade agreements or it's the climate issue or anything. I mean, recently, one third of the world's population signed a trade agreement. It's called the RCEP [Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership]. You know, this is all the countries of Australasia, essentially, including China. Australia, Japan, countries that are in a military alliance with the United States against China have signed on to a trade agreement with China that excludes the United States. So, US power remains. Let's not have any illusions about that. But US authority has eroded.
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