I don't think it's a mistake that the rise of the American military industrial complex has emerged simultaneously with the rise of the carceral state, mass incarceration, police violence, overall economic violence, radical inequality. I think all these things come together and I think most Americans were ... we feel like we're spectators to this. You have two options at that point. Either you tell yourself there must be something I don't know that justifies all this or you start trying to learn. You start trying to know, so to speak, what's really going on, but the second possibility makes demands on you, it requires something from you, and I think most Americans, either because they're too busy or they're struggling too hard just to put food on the table, either stick with the first choice or they just don't feel like committing to that second choice.
RS: Let me end this with a critical question because it's so easy to hate Donald Trump and now, he's become this sort of whitewash for everything. Oh, he's so evil, Hillary Clinton must have been wonderful and then everybody else, you know? The fact is, you went to Afghanistan and I have a lot of respect for Jimmy Carter as ex-president and I like the guy, but the fact of the matter is we lied our way into Afghanistan. We helped create the, bringing the foreign freedom fighters and everything, was all part of a Cold War maneuvers, Zbigniew Brzezinski's maneuver, and so lying has been sort of woven into the fabric and a problem with militarism and neocolonialism or colonialism in the end, is you end up with a Donald Trump. You end of with this extreme nationalist, but maybe Trump is the natural fulfillment of a certain kind of militarism, a certain kind of neocolonialism, certain kind of arrogance, and that, yeah, we'll make peace if we can on our terms, we'll blow them up if we have to, and never really questioning it. I just would like just your last thought on this that Trump is not an accident of our history. He might be the fulfillment of this history.
LR: Oh, yeah. I think there's a direct line that runs from Jimmy Carter -- and you can go much further back than Jimmy Carter -- to Donald Trump. I think it's this, again, this idea of American righteousness, this idea that America is the leader of the free world and in order to bear that fact out, it must continually apply violence in the rest of the world to secure that freedom. This is a bipartisan belief and Donald Trump did not emerge from a vacuum. He is the embodiment of that belief.
RS: That's a depressing, but unfortunately a maybe all too accurate view of it. I've been talking to Lyle Jeremy Rubin. I hope that you will, in addition to getting a doctorate, which is a wonderful thing, but that you will write books in addition to columns and that you will bring greater enlightenment to this subject. I want to thank our engineers here at KCRW, Mario Diaz and Kat Yore. Our producers are Joshua Scheer and Isabel Carreon. Today, we had the great assistance of engineer Martin Gleitsman at Hippo Studios in Providence, Rhode Island. That's it for this edition of Scheer Intelligence. See you next week.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
1
1
1
