Noam Chomsky Lectures on Modern-Day American Imperialism: Middle East and Beyond

Hello everyone and welcome, my name is Lean Guli and I am the president of the Boston University Anti-AR Coalition. We are a coalition formed as an alliance of students united in support of ending wars and non-violent methods of social change. Our primary purpose is to raise awareness through education and advocacy and develop a legislative agenda that promotes our stated goals. I would like to start the evening by sharing some reflections with you. It's no secret that we live in an extremely complex world and society every day. It creates new problems that become increasingly difficult to solve as technological booms in our collective intelligence expand, boundaries are replaced by innovations our parents could never have dreamed of.

Progress has led to an intricately managed consumer-based mass production society that shows no signs of slowing down, yet in our current situation, you don't have to look far to see our economic slowdown, rising unemployment or lackluster health care, the incarceration rate in the United States is among the highest in the world, while energy prices are skyrocketing and our ignorance of the looming climate crisis continues and, of course, there is the quagmire which is Iraq, which everyone seems to recognize as a blunder, but no one seems to be able to find a way out. Information about Iraq has been outdated from the beginning and is effectively hidden by the mainstream media.

Horrific images of the war and the many actions of the anti-war movement, while diverting the public with lofty rhetoric and distracting them with breaking news about Britney Spears. There are more than 4,000 American soldiers dead and it is estimated that between 80,000 and more than 1 million Iraqis have died. most of them civilians with this war, our government has carried out an attack on our civil liberties, from legalizing and justifying the torture of innocent people to openly spying on our citizens, while all the while the military-industrial complex is generating profits in many different Arenas. and top government officials personally benefit from government resources that serve private companies, with the prime example of Vice President Chenese Halberton. leaving half of our citizens feeling disenfranchised considering this country was founded on the concept of for the People by the people, it is disheartening that public interest in American policies has declined dramatically over time, while the effects harmful that these policies have on the rest of the world the world has grown exponentially how many more transgressions will our unchecked government commit before people get angry?

What will it take for those who are not awake to the urgency of our distress to finally see it, and what will it take for those who are aware of our woes to do so? I feel obliged to solve it, some argue that a tragedy is needed, but when tragedy abounds on every page of the newspaper, people become desensitized to it, the lack of outrage over the war in Iraq and the internal problems that are arising, especially in my generation, it is due to seeing these issues as distant abstractions. Society desperately needs to be dislodged from the complacent backseat of American politics.

Our methods of government are peppered with rudimentary grievances that our politicians try to patch up with Band-Aids. Being a pacifist means much more than simply wanting a To end this war, what we are really fighting is a system that has led to massive destruction on a global scale and will continue without agitation of our ideology or restructuring of our political system. That is why undeniable parallels can be identified between the Iraq and Vietnam wars. It can be drawn and why the social movements of the 60s are used as a paradigm for today's Revolution and that is why hate has been perpetuated instead of unconditional love.

The great Enlightenment of our generation will come but it will not look like it did in the 60s. Today's students in the United States face the difficult task of having to lead this place in the future; some say there is simply nothing anyone can do about it; that the powers that be are too overwhelming to counter; that public dissent is a thing of the past here I would like to invoke Margaret, who once said, never tell me that a small group of thoughtful people couldn't change the world, in fact, it is the only thing that has, we must work within the limits of the structures of society. because in the end it is simply a game of power politics and social status that, when manipulated wisely, can be used to put someone of good intentions in power;

However, this ultra-concentrated power is undeniably polluting and the real challenge lies in combating the culture of greed and intolerance. ignorance and intolerance that pervades the United States because these problems are not identified by our increasingly unbalanced media, we turn to the unsung heroes who have been the voices of dissent, the vanguard of innovative philosophy, and the W sufficiently bold and brave to question reality. I will never forget the day I discovered Chomsky. I had hints that there was something strange about the society he had been living in for 18 years, especially considering the war we had started in Iraq.

I became overwhelmed in an attempt to locate some facts. Going through the media I came across an article that Professor Chonky wrote in December 2002 and my mind was blown wide open. Part of the article titled A Modest Proposal illustrated a persistent pattern of policies that had been occurring for decades and showed no signs of changing. It was as if he had been staring at something for years, but he was actually seeing it for the first time. Mr. Chomsky's work is like a precision laser that reduces the cumbersome ideologies indoctrinated in the social psyche, exposing and belittling its most vulnerable and flawed parts.

A true renegade. Professor Chomsky has remained one of the most celebrated and in-demand voices of the Revolution since he first took a stand in the 1960s, although he is tirelessly sought after by the international media; Undergraduates in the field of linguistics cannot take a course in evolutionary psychology, computer science, or international politics without encountering the works of Professor Chomsky. His high intellect is conditioned by a social consciousness that gives purpose and depth to his works. His flame has been igniting minds and hearts for decades. especially at his beloved MIT School, where he has taught for the past 53 years.

His wisdom is adorned with experience and professes clarity above all. His individual individuality is marked by his unique positions, as he has never allowed anyone to pigeonhole him. By refusing to reside within the established plane of Party politics, he has added a dimension to the otherwise horizontal political spectrum and taught us to dispel preconceived notions. another to recognize the common points of man and the potential for justice and peace that exist within each being. He has taught us to question everything about the reality of him. To criticize and debate those in power. To find a more humane response to the challenges posed by globalization.

His ability to Think in different ways has allowed for life-changing revelations and has inspired my thinking and my hope is that you will all be inspired too. The future at stake is our own and I believe with intelligent reasoning and original thinking the answers to all of these questions can be discovered, so without further ado, I am honored to introduce you to the brilliant author, empowered, talented speaker, adoring father and loving husband. He has received honorary degrees from more than two dozen of the best universities on the planet for which he has been called. The New York Times is arguably the most important intellectual life and is among the eight most cited scholars in history.

I could talk for hours about literally all of his credentials, but ladies and gentlemen, the one and only Professor Chomsky, well, I don't anticipate living up to that, but I'll try. I was asked to talk about

modern

American

imperialism

. That is quite a challenging task. In fact, talking about American

imperialism

is a bit like talking about triangular triangles. The United States is the only country that exists, as far as I know, and ever had, that was founded explicitly as an Empire, according to the founding fathers, when the country was founded, it was a new Empire, that's George Washington, the

modern

American imperialism.

It is simply a subsequent phase of a process that has continued from the first moment without interruption and in a very constant line. So we are looking at a phase in a process that began when the country was founded and has never changed. The model for the founding fathers who borrowed from Britain at the time was the Roman Empire and they wanted to emulate it. I'll talk about that a little bit even before the revolution. These notions were very much alive. Benjamin Franklin uh 25 years old. Before the Revolution, he complained to the British that they were imposing limits on the expansion of the colonies and he opposed this.

He borrowed from Melli, admonished the British and cited him as a prince who acquires new territories and eliminates the natives. The natives will be remembered as the father of the nation and George Washington agreed that he wanted to be the father of the nation. His opinion was that the gradual extension of our settlement would as surely cause the Savage as the wolf. to retreat, they are both b

east

s of prey, although they have different forms, uh, I'll skip some contemporary analogues that you can think of Thomas Jefferson, the most communicative of the founding fathers. I said: We will lead them to the savages, we will lead them with the b

east

s of the forests to the Stony Mountains and the country will finally be free of stain or mixture, which means that red or black was not quite achieved, but that was the objective, furthermore, continued Jefferson, our new nation will be the nest from which all North and South America will be populated, displacing not only the reds, the red men here, but also the Latins, the population to the Spanish-speaking South and anyone else who was nearby, there was a deterrent to those glorious targets, primarily Britain, Britain was the most powerful military force in the world at the time and it prevented the steps that the founding fathers attempted to take, in particular he blocked the invasion of Canada.

The first attempted invasion of Canada was before the Revolution and there were several others later, but it was always blocked by British force, which is why Canada exists. The United States didn't actually recognize Canada's existence until after the First World War. Another objective that was blocked by British force was Cuba. Once again, the founding fathers considered the seizure of Cuba essential to the survival of the new Empire, but the British fleet was in the way and they were too powerful, just as the Russians blocked John F. Kennedy's invasions. However, they understood that sooner or later it would happen. come the great grand strategist, John Quincy Adams, the kind of intellectual father of manifest destiny, pointed out in the 1820s that we just have to wait, they said that Cuba sooner or later will fall into our hands by the laws of political gravitation, so like an apple falls from the tree what he meant was that over time the United States would become more powerful, Britain would become weaker and the deterrent would be overcome, which in fact eventually happened and we should not ignore these early events, they are closely related. with the present.

The history is very clear thanks to studies on current affairs, making it the most important academic work on the Bush Doctrine. The George W. Bush Doctrine. The Doctrine of Preventive War. The most important work is by John Lewis Gattis, who is the most respected historian of the Cold War period. the roots of the Bush Doctrine and traces it back to John Quincy Adams, who is its hero, the great grand strategist, in particular to Andrew Jackson's invasion of Florida, which conquered Florida from the Spanish and which was strongly approved by the then Secretary of State. Adams in a famous state document in which he defended the principle of preventive war on the basis of the thesis that expansion is the path to security, so if we want to be secure, after all, we want to defend ourselves, we have to expand Over time, we expanded into Florida, we were being threatened by what were called the fugitive slaves and the lawless Indians, who were in the way that they were threatening us with their existence by preventing our expansion, and as Gattis points out, there are a straight line from that to George Bush. and now expansion is the path toSecurity means we take over the world, we take over space, we take over the galaxy, there is no limit to how much you have to expand to ensure security and that has been the principle from the beginning.

Gattis is a good historian and cites the correct sources about the so-called Sheol War, Jackson's conquest of Florida, but he doesn't bother to tell us what the sources say and it is worth looking at what they say. They describe it as a war of murder, plunder and extermination. By expelling the indigenous population, pretexts were made but they were so flimsy that no one paid much attention to them. It was also the first executive war in violation of the Constitution, setting a precedent that has been followed since there was no authorization from Congress. Hey, that's all. Li Adams lied between teeth to Congress I mean, it's all very familiar, so Gattis is right, he is the model for the Bush Doctrine, he approves of both, but that is a moral judgment, but his analysis is correct, yes, what is happening now is correct. back to the wars of extermination and plunder and murder and lying and deceit and so on Executive Wars of that John Quincy Adams was Adams's great spokesman by the way later in his life he regretted that he, after his own contributions went well in the past , he condemned the Mexicans The war as executive war and, uh, a terrible precedent, he was not a president, he established the president and also expressed remorse for what he called that hapless race of Native Americans that we are exterminating with such ruthless cruelty and perfidious that they knew what we were doing contemporary history, history likes to embellish it, but if you read the descriptions and observations of the people involved, they know exactly what they were doing, he expressed regret about it, but of course his own role has long passed, well, it is often argued that American imperialism began in 1898 and that was when the United States finally managed to conquer Cuba, what in history books is called liberating Cuba, that is, intervening to prevent it from Cuba would free itself from Spain and turn it into a virtual colony. remained until 1959, causing a hysteria in the United States that has not yet ended, uh, uh, uh, he also conquered, took over Hawaii, which was stolen by force and G of its population, Port Rico, another colony that soon moved to the Philippines and liberated the Philippines also liberated a couple hundred thousand souls to heaven in the process, and again the reverberations of that extend to the present with widespread state terrorism and the only corner of Asia that has not experienced high development, something we are not supposed to notice, uh, but the U, the belief that the entire imperial advance began in 1898 is an example of what historians of the Empire call The salt water fallacy, the belief that you have an Empire if you cross salt water, in fact, if the Mississippi River was as wide as the Irish Sea, the imperial advance would have started much sooner, but that is irrelevant.

I mean, expanding over colonized territory is no different from expanding over waters, so what happened in 189 was just an extension of the process that began when The Next Empire, as it saw itself, formed in its early days. moments, uh, uh, uh, and the extension to the Hereafter was again. A lot of this starts right in New England, with New England merchants who wanted, you know, very eager to take over the Pacific. trade The fabulous markets of China that were always on their minds, which meant conquering the northwest so they could control the ports, etc., meant driving out the British and others, and so on from right here, the goal as William.

SE, who was Secretary of State in the 1860s, noted that, uh, the central figure of American imperialism, that we have to take command of the Empire of the Seas, uh, we conquer the continent, we are going to colonize it, take over it . The Monro Doctrine was a declaration that we will take charge of everyone else, stay away and the process of doing so continued throughout the 19th century and beyond until today, but now we have to have command of the seas and that meant, when it came the moment, 30 years later. When the apple began to fall from the tree, given the relative power, he headed abroad towards the Overseas Empire, but basically no different from the previous steps, the philosophical imperialist leader Brooks Adams, he noted that in 1895 we are about to move widely abroad, that all of Asia must be reduced to our economic system, the Pacific must become an inland sea just as the Caribbean had been, and there is no reason, he said, why the United States should not become a seat more important. of wealth and power that England, Rome or Constantinople never was, well, again there was an element of deterrence, the European powers wanted a piece of the action in East Asia and Japan by then was becoming a formidable force, so that it was necessary to explore more complex ways of uh, gaining command to turn the Pacific into an inland sea and continue, and that was lucidly explained by Woodro Wilson, who is one of the most brutal and vicious interventionists in American history, the likely permanent destruction of Haiti is one of its many, uh, achievements.

Of you who study international relations theory or read about it know that there is a notion of Wilsonian idealism. The fact that that notion can exist is a very interesting commentary on our intellectual culture and our academic culture if you look at your current Act. ACS's beautiful words are easy enough, huh, but these are some of his beautiful words that he was smart enough not to publish, he just wrote them for himself, I said, since commerce ignores national borders and the manufacturer insists in having the world as a market, the flag of your nation. must follow it, must follow it and the doors of nations that are closed against it must be torn down even if the sovereignty of a reluctant nation is outraged in the process, no useful corner of the world can be overlooked or left unestablished, uh, unused, that's 197, there's a current version of that, a crude version of Thomas Fredman, who says McDonald's can't prosper without McDonald's.

No useful corner of the world should be left unused uh there was a turning point in this process at the time of World War II uh at the time of World War II the US already had by far the largest economy of the world and they had been for a while For a long time, uh, but it wasn't a major player in world affairs. Britain was the leading player. France, second, the United States lagging behind, controlled the hemisphere. You know, he had done four RSs in the Pacific, but he wasn't the lead actor. However, during the United States war planners understood that the war was going to end with the United States as the dominant world power, however it turned out that other competitors were going to destroy themselves and others and the United States would be left alone.

Comparable security, in fact, the United States gained enormously from the war. uh in industrial production practically quadrupled the war ended with the depression the New Deal measures had not done so uh the US ended at the end of the war the US had literally half the wealth of the world and competitors were virtually distributed either damaged or Be or destroyed uh and uh unparalleled security controlled the western hemisphere controlled both oceans controlled the opposite side of both oceans nothing remotely similar in history and during the war the planners understood that something like this was going to happen it was obvious from the nature of the war From 1939 to 1945 there were high-level meetings, periodic meetings of the planners of the State Department and the Council on Foreign Relations, the type of main external non-governmental input into foreign policy and they laid out careful plans for the world they hoped would emerge.

It was a world, they said, in which the United States will have unquestioned power and will ensure the limitation of any exercise of sovereignty by states that might interfere with us. Global designs. I'm not quoting neoconservatives. I'm quoting the Roosevelt administration. At the peak of American liberalism, uh, uh, uh, they called for what they called an integrated policy to achieve military and economic supremacy for the United States and prohibit any exercise of sovereignty by anyone who interfered with it and they would do so in a region in which Well, in the first part of the war, from 1939 to 1943, was called the Great Area.

The Great Area was usually defined as the Western Hemisphere, the former British Empire, which the United States would take over, and the Far East, which would be the great area they took over. that at the time when there would be a German world and the rest would be a non-German world, that is, us and the German world, as the Russians gradually crushed the Nazi armies after 1942, it became quite clear that there would not be a German world, then, the large area expanded to encompass as much of the world as could be controlled, uh, uh, uh, uh, Unlimited, which simply pursues the old position that expansion is the path to security for the nation. .

Empire of 1776, uh, uh, these policies were established during the war, but then they were implemented right after the war, in fact, now that we have available in the classified record planning documents from the late 1940s, It turns out that they are not very surprising, very similar to the work time planning one of the main figures was George Kennan, who was head of the State Department, the policy planning staff, uh, he, uh, wrote one of his many important articles in 1948, PPS 23, if you want to look it up, uh, uh, he pointed out that the United States has half the wealth of the world but only 6% of its population and our main foreign policy objective should be, as he He said, maintain this disparity and to do so we must leave aside all the vague and idealistic slogans about democracy and human rights, uh, those are for public propaganda and universities, etc., but we must leave them aside and stick to the concepts of pure power, there will be no other way to maintain the disparity and then, in the same newspaper and elsewhere, he and his staff, uh. went around the world assigned to each part of the world what would be what they would call their role within this global system in which the United States would have unquestionable power, unquestionable power so that Latin America and the Middle East would obviously provide the energy resources that we would control gradually expelling Britain, expelling France immediately, and slowly expelling Britain over the years and essentially making it a junior partner.

British Foreign Office Ruul described his role at the time. Uh, Uh, Latin America, just control is our little region here that has never bothered anyone, as Secretary of War sson said while the United States violated the principles it was establishing by creating a regional organization in violation of the Charter of the United Nations and so on, so Latin America we maintain at least we control Southeast Asia, its role would be to provide resources and raw materials to the former colonial powers, meanwhile, we would also buy them to send dollars there, which the colonial powers would not take the population and they could use those for Britain, France, the Netherlands could use the dollars to buy American manufacturers, it's called a triangular trade agreement, which would allow the United States to have the only really functional industrial system in the world, to have a huge surplus of manufacturing products and there was what was called a dollar gap. the countries we wanted to sell it to didn't have dollars, that's basically Europe, so we had to provide them with dollars and the role of Southeast Asia was to play a role in that, hence the support for French colonialism and the recovery of their territory.

Chinese colony, etc., there were several variations, but that's the basic story. Then Kenon traveled the world and signed his feature on every part when he arrived in Africa. He decided that America really didn't have it. There is a lot of interest in Africa at that time and therefore we should hand it over to the Europeans so that they can take advantage of it, his word is, take advantage of it for their reconstruction. He said it would also give them a kind of psychological relief after the damage of the war and while they were taking care of everything they did.

Well, you could imagine a different relationship between Europe and Africa in light of history, but that couldn't even be considered. I mean, it was too outlandish to discuss and it still is. So Africa was going to be exploited by Europe for reconstruction with consequences that we know has since gone into the ACT, well that was Kenan, he was removed from office shortly after because he was considered too good-natured, he was not prepared to deal with this harsh world and was replaced. with really tough guys Dean AES and Paul Nitzy and others and there's no time to analyze it, but if everwant an education in hysterical jingoistic bigotry, you should really read their papers.

If you've studied these topics, you've at least heard of North Carolina. 68 that is discussed by everyone but their rhetoric is omitted and you have to look at their rhetoric to see what is going on in these crazy heads of the great thinkers um and this is true for the entire culture of the National Security Council; There is a wonderful book about it. which came out a couple of years ago by the sinologist James P, who called Washington's China, which is the first academic book that analyzes the entire culture of National Security and it's like reading a Madmen collection, you know, but okay It is worth studying it much more.

It is worth studying that most of what people study in their courses on these topics, well, anyway, that is, what do we do with Latin America? What no one has, you know, is our domain. Well, Kenan was quite explicit about that too, he said in Latin. The United States should prefer police states, the reason being and said that harsh government repressive measures should not cause scruple as long as the results are unbalanced and favorable to our interests, particularly as long as they guarantee the protection of our resources. It happens to be somewhere else, but that's a historical accident, they're our resources and we have to protect them and if you have to do it with your fist wrapped, okay, that's the way you do it, like I say, it was eliminated, uh , uh there.

It's a long, ugly story, there's no time to go over it, but the history of the Cold War essentially follows this pattern. The Cold War was a kind of tacit pact between the superpower and the smaller power, the United States. and Russia, the pact was that the United States would be free to carry out unlimited violence, terror and atrocities in its own domains and the Russians could run their own dungeon without too much American interference, so the Cold War is in effect. It was a war of the United States against the Third World and of Russia against its much smaller dominions in Eastern Europe, and the events of the Cold War illustrate that each great power used the threats of the other as a pretext for repression, violence and destruction of the United States much more than Russia, if you look at the record, what it reflects is their relative power, but that is essentially the picture, you can see, in fact, for the United States, the war was basically a war again , the Cold War was a war, basically, a war against independent nationalism in the third world, what was called radical nationalism radical means do not follow orders, so constant fight against radical nationalism, in particular, the main thesis in Every sense is that even the smallest place, if it becomes independent, is a serious danger, it is what Henry Kissinger called a virus that could infect others, even in a small place, you know, Grenada or something, if has a successful independent development, others might have the idea that we can follow it, the rot will spread, as Aeson put it, so you have to eliminate it directly at the source, uh, it's not a novel idea, any gangster Don will explain it to you .

The Godfather can't stand it when a small shopkeeper doesn't pay protection money, it's not that he needs the money, it's just like a bad idea. Others might get the idea. In particular, small and weak countries have to be crushed with special violence so that others, because it's easy there, you know no one can stop you and others get the point which is a big part of international affairs to this day, well, for learning about what The Cold War was the obvious place to look, is what happened when it ended well, so no, on November 19, 1989, the Berlin Wall fell.

The Soviet Union soon collapsed, so what did the United States do, how did it react? I mean the pretext for everything that had happened. in the past, you know, the Russian monster, the monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that was trying to take over the world, as John F. Kennedy rightly called it, now the monolithic and ruthless conspiracy was gone, so what do we do? Well, it turns out that's exactly what we do. Same thing but under different pretexts and that became instantly clear a couple of weeks after the Berlin Wall fell, the United States invaded Panama, uh, killing an unknown number of people, we don't count our victims according to Panamanian human rights groups , maybe a couple. thousands of people bombing the poor neighborhood Alia slum uh the Panamanians take this seriously in fact last December they once again declared a national day of mourning uh uh about the reference to the invasion I don't even think it was in the newspapers here, I mean, when you crush ants in your path you don't pay much attention to them you know what they might have to say about it uh but they invaded Panama they had the veto of Security Council resolutions the goal of the invasion was to kidnap some kind of thug minor uh Nora who was kidnapped brought to the United States judged sentenced long sentence a sentence for three crimes that were real but he had committed them when he was on the CIA payroll almost without exception uh little footnote uh so uh but but that's what we had than to invade Panama and kill many people, there were probably a couple of thousand, and install a government of bankers and drug traffickers that the drug traffic kept quiet and so on, but it was a successful invasion and applauded here, it was a kind of footnote of the story, that's the kind of thing.

The United States does it in its domains all the time but it was a little different on the one hand the pretexts were different uh this time it was not that we were defending ourselves from the Russians uh but that we were defending ourselves from the Hispanic drug traffickers who were going to come and, you know, he would shoot our children and destroy the country, etc., and in fact, Norga was a minor drug dealer who had been working primarily for the CIA, but became unacceptable when he started to drag his feet in following orders like him.

He didn't participate enthusiastically enough in the US terrorist war against Nicaragua and so on, so obviously he had to do well. One difference was that he had different pretexts, another was that the United States was much freer to act, that was immediately pointed out. by Elliot Abrams was now, having returned to his post directing Middle East Affairs, immediately pointed out that the invasion of Panama was different from the one that had preceded it because we didn't have to worry about Russia causing trouble somewhere in the world. In the world we were free to use the Force without hindrance, and correct observation counts continue to this day.

Many of the violent acts the United States has carried out since then would have seriously questioned whether there was a deterrent, but now there is no deterrent. more so do what you want uh that was a change uh uh uh again if you want to learn more about what the Cold War was check out the documents that were produced right after uh this is George Bush, me first uh right After that in the early 1990s they gave us a new budget request, there was a new National Security strategy and they described what the post-Cold War world would be like and it would turn out exactly as before.

We still have to have a huge massive military force, but we have to maintain what they call the defense industrial base, that's a euphemism for the high-tech industry, uh, and you know, for the public, etc., you talk about our belief in free trade and free enterprise, etc., but anyone who knows anything about the US economy knows that it is based on in the state broadly in the state sector uh, the high-tech industry is largely Measured within the state sector and it is under a government, it is generally under a pentagon cover, as long as it is based on electronics and that is called defense industrial base, so we have to maintain the huge public subsidy to high-end industry. technology called defense industrial base uh we have to have a massive army but it has different targets uh as you pointed out before this uh we were targeting some rich weapons uh The target is Russia now uh we They are targeting a target rich region i.e. the third World.

They have no weapons, but there are many rich targets there, so for that we need the main military forces. In fact, that's pretty much what it was in the past. but now it is openly admitted, we have to, with respect to the Middle East, specifically, we have to maintain intervention forces directed at the Middle East and then comes this interesting comment, we need the same intervention forces directed at the Middle East, where The problems we face they could not be L could not have been attributed to the Kremlin gate. Well, sorry folks, we've been lying to you for the last 50 years claiming we're defending ourselves from the Russians, but now the Russians aren't.

So it turns out that the problems could not have been raised in the Kremlin tent, which is true, the problems were independent nationalism and remain so, but now it is said openly and clearly because the pretext is gone, we have to do it too . Now we must worry about what they call the technological sophistication of the third world powers. It is a truly overwhelming threat. It's like Hillary Clinton a day or two ago said that if Iran attacks Israel with nuclear weapons, we will destroy Iran. The possibility of Iran attacking. Nuclear-armed Israel is somewhere under an asteroid hitting Israel, but it doesn't matter, it's a nice throwaway line, uh, but uh, but that's the kind of threat we have to worry about, it's kind of like Ronald Reagan in 1985 putting on his cowboy boots and declaring a state of National Emergency due to the threat posed to the National Security of the United States by the government of Nicaragua, which was only two days from Harlington, Texas, so really We had to shake in terror, you know, well, that's you.

I know that's standard, it had to increase after the end of the Cold War, when the main pretexts disappeared and it has uh, uh, uh, this is also consistent with a conception of aggression that has developed over the period. and even today it is very lively today uh regression aggression has a meaning but that meaning does not apply to us uh the uh by American leaders aggression means resistance, so anyone who resists the United States is guilty of aggression and that makes sense If we own the world, you know, any active resistance is aggression against us, so when the United States invaded South Vietnam in the early 1960s under Kennedy, Kennedy said we were defending ourselves against what he called The Assault from Within and, uh, the leading liberal light.

ADL Stevenson described it as an indirect internal aggression, an internal aggression of the South Vietnamese against us and of course we are there by right because we are in the world, the and and that, that continues to the present, so we skip a lot time because Nothing changed much and continues to this day, so the big problem of the Middle East. Now read the Washington Post a couple of days ago, it's Iran's increasing aggressiveness, that's what's causing the Middle East problems. At least you know, aggression has a meaning that it means sending your Armed Forces into the territory of some other State, where when the last case of Iranian aggression was a couple of centuries ago, unless we count the Iranian aggression that took carried out under the Shah, who we approved of the Tyrant we imposed.

I conquered a couple of Arab islands, but that was fine, but we still have to defend ourselves from Iranian aggression, uh, in Iraq, in Lebanon and in G there are where Iran is carrying out aggression, which means that the people He is doing things we don't like and Russia doesn't. It doesn't exist, so we'll blame Iran, that's aggression, and there's even a lot of discussion about aggression inside Iraq carried out by the renegade cleric mtad elad. If you read the press, you can get the idea that mt's first name is Renegade, it is not a phrase that refers to him that he does not talk about the Renegade.

Why is he a good renegade? He opposes the American invasion of his country. that makes him a renegade or a radical obviously and that's routine no one questions what it is Something of a reflective description, eh, a moment ago Lisa Rice was asked in a television interview how we could end the war in Iraq and she said which is a very easy way to end the war. She said it's pretty obvious to stop the flow of guns. to foreign fighters, stopping the flow of foreign fighters across the border that will end the war in Iraq, well, you know, if someone was watching this and hadn't been properly brainwashed by a good Western education , would collapse into ridicule.

I do. There are foreign fighters in Iraq and a lot of foreign weapons there, specifically from the country that invaded Iraq, but they are not foreigners. Remember that you are indigenous because we are indigenous everywhere, which comes from owning the world, uh, returning to the national empire. spread, therefore, we are not foreign fighters there or innowhere else, we are indigenous and it is the foreign fighters that need to be stopped, and in fact, the concept of aggression has been expanded recently, a couple of times in January, you may have seen it. There was an important statement by five former NATO commanders that was reported, the big problem was that they had said that we had to base our military posture on the possession of nuclear weapons, but it is nothing new, it has always been true, it was strongly advocated by the Clinton administration, but in fact much stronger terms, but that was what was reported, however, it was interesting and the only thing that was known was his expansion of the concept of acts of war, they said acts of war against the which we must defend ourselves. ourselves by using nuclear weapons if necessary, is using Finance weapons.

Okay, so if a country uses Finance weapons against us, that is an act of war and we have to be ready to use nuclear weapons, if necessary, two months later. In March, the US Treasury Department warned the world's financial institutions against any dealings with Iran's state banks. Now those warnings gain strength thanks to the Patriot Act. A little-noticed element of the Patriot Act allows the United States to ban any country that violates its orders from accessing the U.S. financial system, meaning that if a German, Chinese, or other bank tries to do business with Iran, it will be can exclude you from the US financial system, which is a cost that very few are willing to bear and can and Could and is in fact a declaration of war and in the judgment of the five NATO commanders, a act of war against which Iran has the right to respond in any way it wants, perhaps with nuclear weapons or terrorism or whatever, according to them. judgments now you will notice that there is a serious logical fallacy in what I just said: it ignores two fundamental principles that are the crucial principles of world order, the rest are footnotes, the first principle is that we own the world and Not Iran.

It doesn't, therefore the principles don't apply to us, they only apply to others and a sort of corollary of that is that everything we do is necessarily with the best of intentions, that's a topology of which You don't have to give evidence or arguments, uh. and that is a constant feature of intellectual culture almost without exception across the spectrum, so, for example, during the invasion of Vietnam, I don't expect to not have to describe it to you, but it killed several million people and destroyed three countries. uh it's just a monstrous atrocity uh but and it was if you look at it, there was a lot of discussion about it in the general discussion, but if you look closely you'll find that there was never any criticism of the principles of the war that was not permissible.

Uh, typical, just stick to the leftist type of critical ending and the rest gets worse at the end of the war. Anthony Lewis The New York Times concluded it, he said. Talking from the liberal left wing that the United States entered the war with misguided efforts to do good, look at the efforts to do good, is a phonology, we did it, for So, their efforts to do good, so they're not saying anything wrong because it didn't work as good as they wanted, at least it worked pretty well, but not as good as they wanted, so we started with clumsy efforts to do good, but by 1969 it was clear that we could not establish democracy in South Vietnam at a cost acceptable to ourselves.

Well established democracy in South Vietnam is on par with some Soviet commissions that say Stalin was trying to establish democracy in Eastern Europe, but that doesn't matter, it's us, so we were doing it, but the problem with this was the cost. for us it was fine, so that meant we had to start retreating well, that's the criticism on the far left. Let's take one more example: the prominent American liberal historian, perhaps the most famous historian of his generation, Arthur Schlesinger, who at first was a superhawk like the entire Kennedy administration was no alternative to victory in his invasion of South Vietnam. , which is what it was, but in the late '60s he was having doubts and he wrote a book expressing them and he said that, uh, he said that everyone Pray that the Hawks are right to hope that the great flow of troops of the day will be successful and If they are, we will praise the wisdom and statesmanship of the American government in winning the war and he was aware of what It was he who said that leaving a land of ruins and ruins with its institutions destroyed may never recover, but of We'll still be praising the wisdom and statesmanship of the American government, and we pray they're right, the Hawks, but he said they probably aren't.

It's not right, it's probably going to be too expensive for us, there's no doubt about the cost to the Vietnamese, I mean a land of shipwreck and ruin, so maybe we should have a good rethink, that's the criticism at the critical end of the spectrum, doish criticism. Then from there on to the jingoistic end of the spectrum there's a bit of a debate: could we have had one stronger or was it a lost cause anyway, etc., pretty amazing that the population is out of it, so In 1969, the year Lewis noted that 70% of the population thought the war was fundamentally wrong and immoral, not a mistake, try to find anything in the literature of the educated that says it was anything but a mistake, that was fundamentally wrong and immoral, that is not unusual. uh internally the government was aware of this uh one of the things that is not taught but should be read because it is very enlightening is the final part of the Pentagon Papers.

The Pentagon Papers are not declassified files, they are stolen from archives so we know we have a better idea of ​​what they were thinking The Pentagon favors ended in 1968, just after the Ted offensive in January 1968, which convinced the world business that this is going to cost us too much. We better start reducing it. There was a request from the government to send. Another hundreds of thousands of troops to Vietnam, but they were hesitant to do so and ultimately did not because they were afraid that there would be an uprising in the United States, a popular uprising of unprecedented proportions, and they would need the troops for civil disorder control due to to the protests among disadvantaged people, women, young people and others who simply were not going to take it anymore, that tells you that they were, they did not admit that they were listening, but they were and always do, they needed the troops. for control and slowly began to recede another six years of war that devastated Los Angeles, Cambodia and Vietnam, but at least they began to subside, well, that was in 1969.

Note that you can take the rhetoric about the Vietnam War and translate it almost word for word into the In the debate over the Iraq war there is no main criticism within the mainstream and no one can do it. By principled criticism I mean the kind of criticism that we would reflexively carry out and make when someone else commits aggression, say when the Russians invade Sakia, Afghanistan or Chia, eh. We didn't ask if it was too expensive, in fact it wasn't expensive at all, it killed virtually no one in Czechoslovakia cnia after reducing the place to ruin, it is apparently working quite well, in fact, according to Western correspondence, if David Petraeus could achieve something in Iraq liked what Putin achieved in chni, he would probably be crowned king or something, but we still rightly condemn it, no matter if it worked or not, if it was costly for them or not, or when Saddam Hussein invaded The massacre is likely a fraction of the number of people Bush killed a couple of months earlier when he invaded Panama, but we still denounce it as aggression.

No, that is a principled objection, but when we carry out aggression it is inconceivable and that goes back to The principles I mentioned own the world and everything we do is by definition good and intentional, so the worst that can be It is what Barack Obama calls a strategic mistake or what Hillary Clinton calls entering a Civil War that we cannot. In fact, Iraqis overwhelmingly blame us for the Civil War, but that's also irrelevant, that's the level of criticism, and it follows from the principles I mentioned that also govern news coverage, quite a bit in fact. openly here is John Burns, who is the dean of correspondence, the most senior and respected correspondent in Iraq after a long, very long career, says that the United States, the United States, is the most prominent economic, political and military power in the world and has been the greatest Force for stability in the world certainly since World War II it would be a dark day if the outcome in Iraq destroyed the credibility of American power to destroy America's will to use its power in the world to achieve good to fight against totalitarianism authoritarianism and serious abuses of human rights, okay, in other words, that is the framework for reporting, the reports must encourage the local team, nothing else is conceivable, due to the depth of these principles that They are instilled in people in the education system and propaganda that cannot be seen. to the world in other terms, so it is a neutral objective report to say that we are rooting for the home team and it is quite open, it is interesting that he said it so clearly, but he says that that is particularly true, he says that in the Middle East You realize, it doesn't. the slightest difference what people in the world or the Middle East think is not relevant or, indeed, what people in the United States think, so the Vietnam War were benign efforts to do good that were too expensive for us even when 70% of the population said it is fundamentally wrong and immoral, it is not a mistake.

The population here is as irrelevant as the population of the rest of the world, unless you are afraid of them and have to keep your troops here to control civil disorder. People think well of what people think we know from regularly conducted international surveys. They think America is the most dangerous and scary country in the world, not John Burns. This line, what about the overwhelming opposition towards us? Strength almost everywhere. It's also true for the Middle East and there's nothing new about it, so George, our current George Bush after 9/11, asked why they hate us and when they hate our freedoms etc., remember that, what he should have done the press.

What is reported is that he was simply repeating a question that President Eisenhower asked in 1958. Eisenhower asked his staff why there is a hate campaign against us among the people of the Middle East and the National Security Council, the planning agency higher, had provided an answer. He said that people in the Middle East have the perception that the United States supports brutal tyrannies, blocks democracy and development and does it because we want control of their oil and then they went on to say that yes, the perception is more or less correct and That's the way. It should be so, therefore there is a hate campaign against us and it continues after 9/11.

The Wall Street Journal, to their credit, did some polling in the Middle East, they didn't care about the general population, what is legally degrading called the Arab Street they took out what they called wealthy Muslims, bankers, managers of multinational corporations, already You know, guys that we like, and they found more or less the same thing as in 1958, there is a field, no, they have no objection to neoliberalism or anything else. In fact, they love this, but they condemn the United States for supporting harsh tyrannical regimes, which it does, and opposing democracy and development, which it does because we want to control its energy resources by 2001.

They had other objections, namely, that of Israel. the cruel US-backed repression and dispossession of the Palestinians that continues, and also the sanctions against Iraq, the sanctions against Iraq did not have much effect here because we do not pay attention to our crimes, that is crucial, that is part of the principle of that everything we do is good uh but they do pay attention uh and uh in fact we know a lot about them or we can if we want there were uh two directors of the oil for food program supposedly the humanitarian part of the sanctions both resigned because they considered the sanctions as genocidal , carrying out a huge massacre of the population, the Clinton administration did not allow them to transmit their information to the Security Council, which was technically responsible and the media agrees with the SEC, State Department spokesman James.

Burns said he meant to hunt down the second one, since he said this man in Baghdad is paid to work, not to talk, and the press agrees and the scholars agree, so they are repressed. . They knew more about Iraq than any other Westerner. They had hundreds. of observers going around the country sending reports, but you can do a Google search and find out how often they were allowed to speak in the United States in the lead-upto war, as the WR speaker, who is a very distinguished international diplomat, wrote a book about this about two years ago called A Different Kind of War.

I don't think there's a reference to this in the US, much less a review. We don't want to publicize our genocidal actions, but people in the Middle East noticed and didn't. I don't like it and that increased the hate campaign among wealthy Muslims. Our friends there don't have to think about each other, but it doesn't matter what they think. The same goes for the invasion of Iraq. Iraqis consider it worse than the Mongol invasions, they are the great successes that Iraq may never recover. I mean, you know, Petraeus's big success story is establishing armies of warlords who will probably tear the country apart in the future and also, say, Baghdad, it's true that the violence in Baghdad has decreased in part because there are less people to kill.

You know, there has been massive ethnic cleansing and that has been accelerated by Petraea's strategy of building essentially walled communities. There is a comment by n Rosen, who is one of the two. or three journalists who actually report seriously from Iraq, speaks fluent Arabic and looks Arab so can move around easily, travels everywhere, not with armed guards, you know, ab tanks etc., he says talking about Baghdad , recently says he's looming over what's coming. the houses in the district you are looking at are 12T high walls built by the Americans to confine people to their own neighborhood, emptied and destroyed by the Civil War that the US fueled, walled in by The Surge, the sections of the city feel more like a post-apocalyptic desolation.

Labyrinth of concrete tunnels than an inhabited neighborhood, they are controlled by separation walls and, indeed, by the increasing use of air power, but they are a little quieter, so critics without principled critics do not They talk a lot about that, well. What does the public think about all these things? Well, we know about Iraq. The public wants to go out, but they are irrelevant. What about Iran? The next big crisis looming that will make Iraq look like a tea party if they keep going. opinions on this is the opinion of the American elites that you can read, say, in the New York Times or the Washington Post or in liberal magazines, etc., they will tell you that Iran is defying the world by enriching uranium well exactly, who is the world?

We can discover that there is an organization called G77. 130 countries include the vast majority of the world's people and vigorously support Iran's right to all rights guaranteed by the nonproliferation treaty, including the enrichment of uranium for nuclear energy. You are not part of the world. What is happening to the American population? An overwhelming majority of the American population agrees with the G77, meaning that Iran should have the right to produce nuclear energy but not nuclear weapons, so the American population is not part of the world. - all countries are not part of the world, you know, the American population is not part of the world, obviously, the Iranians are not part of the world, so who left?

Well, the world is made up of people who follow Washington's orders. It can't be said to include the United States because the overwhelming majority of Americans are not part of the world, they oppose this just like many other issues and that goes on without comment, you know correctly if we are cheerleaders for the home team and that is the discussion framework, is there any solution? The crisis with Iran, which is extremely serious if the United States goes ahead with its plans, the parents' plans, as I said, could make Iraq look like a tea party, well, there are potential solutions.

One of them is what I just said: Iran should have the rights of any signatory to the nonproliferation treaty. Israel, Pakistan and India should also have those rights if they sign the treaty, as they have. They haven't done it, they don't have those rights, but of course they are doing it because we say it's okay, uh, uh, uh, but that is the opinion of the vast majority of Americans and this same vast majority is around 75% that It says a nuclear plant. A weapons-free zone should be established in the region, including Iran, Israel, US forces deployed there, etc., that would end the crisis.

Is that possible? Well, it has the support of the vast majority of Americans, but as I mentioned, they are not part of the world. It is Iran's official policy, but they are not part of the world. The United States and Britain are formally committed to it, in fact more than any other power, for a very simple reason that we would read about if we had a free press. The United States and Britain went to war with Iraq and tried to find thin legal cover for it, appealing to UN Security Council Resolution 687 of 1991 that ordered Iraq to get rid of its weapons of mass destruction and , as you may remember, Britain in the United States.

The States claimed that they had not lived up to it. Well, you know that everyone knows how to read and write. You can read resolution 687, which commits the United States and Great Britain to working to establish a nuclear weapons-free zone in the Middle East. It's okay, if you can. Appeal to it as justification because you are obligated to follow their, uh, their provisions, but pointing that out would really be breaking the rules and you can go back to doing a Google search and see if you can find anyone near the mainstream who has ever bothered. in pointing this out.

Another way to move toward a solution would be to end threats against Iran. Threats, if anyone cares, are a violation of the UN Charter, but for outlawed states that is irrelevant. Again, the vast majority of the American population thinks we should end the threats and move toward normal diplomatic relations with Iran. If these measures were taken, the crisis would essentially be over, so we can ask who is challenging the world if the world includes its people, you know, including the American people and The answer is very simple and direct. Those who are defying the world are those who are in power in Washington and in London and in the editorial offices and the university faculties, etc., they are defying the world.

But not to Iran, not in these. and in fact it is a serious issue because it could lead to a total disaster and the same goes for other issues, so the other big live issue in the Middle East is Israel Palestine, well what does the world think about this? There is an international consensus. supported by approximately two-thirds of the US population supported by former non-aligned countries supported by the Arab world formally at least supported by Europe obviously Latin America in fact everyone Iran supports it Hamas supports it is in favor of a two-state agreement two-state agreement on international borders with meaning June before June 67 borders with minor modifications huh, who's against that?

Well, for the last 30 years, the United States has opposed it and continues to oppose it and Israel, of course, opposes it, although if the United States did. support it, since Israel would necessarily agree, so the problem is in Washington. This begins in 1976, when the United States vetoed the First Security Council resolution calling for an agreement on these terms and was introduced by the PLO-backed Arab states. It dates back to 1971, when President Sadad of Egypt offered Israel a comprehensive treaty in exchange for its withdrawal from the occupied territories. What he meant was to withdraw from the sin in which Israel was driving out thousands of peasants and establishing Israel.

I didn't say anything about the Palestinians, they weren't a problem at the time. Israel recognized it as a genuine peace offer and decided to reject it. They made a faithful decision, preferring expansion over security. The peace treaty with Israel would have ended the security problem. Egypt would have ended security. Problems The important question is what would happen in the United States, you know. The Godfather, Kissinger handled well, there was a battle in an internal bureaucratic battle in the United States. Kinger won. He and the United States followed his policy, which he called stalemate, meaning no negotiations. force that set the stage for the 1973 war and a whole list of horrors from and until today, the United States and Israel have been leading the rejecting camp at this point, they are the rejecting camp, not the American population but the government.

So who is challenging the world on this issue? Is there a possible agreement? Sure there is, but it lies here, in fact, in issue after issue, the major problems happen here, which is a very optimistic conclusion because it means we can do something about it. It is here where we can have influence, not in other places. I will stop at some point, yes, if anyone has any questions, there are M set up M, contrary to what was said here in the introduction, the New York Times, of course, did not say that you were the most important living intellectual and You know it well, it was simply an outside professor at Stanford who said it in a review that appeared in the New York Times.

Interestingly, you have used that quote in several of his books and it is also a made-up quote. I've also said that whenever that comes up during an introduction like tonight, you always say something about it and correct it and that, of course, is a falsehood because you didn't do it here tonight and that's happened in the past too, number two . I couldn't. Don't miss the reference to Arthur Schlesinger. Apparently you still have something on your plate about your relationship with him. I guess it was around 1970, when he exposed you for making up some Harry Truman quotes, which was The Exchange, which he nicknamed you on. an intellectual hustler, so I guess that still bothers you even now, and finally, as to this notion of rooting for the home team, which you obviously don't do, there's someone else you're rooting for, so I'd like you to be very As candid as some leftists are that they say they are cheering on our opponents in various places around the world, it is very clear that you have the courage to tell us right now that you are fighting us in Iraq and Afghanistan, that you expect us to fail, that you support to terrorists or you could call them freedom fighters hoping they will kill Americans, we get the point, yes, can I go over these points?

In the first, the quote was not from someone interviewed, it was from a critic in New York, he said. was interviewed, he wasn't, you said he was interviewed, I didn't say that, listen, you did, but it doesn't matter, book review, it was a book review, right, and you know it's true, I didn't bother to correct it tonight. but I almost always do it because he's funny, it's very funny, what he really said is, uh, he's the greatest intellectual in the world, how can you write such terrible things about US foreign policy? .? I like that quote, so I invariably invariate or correct it.

If you say you see it on the back of books, if you take a look at the publishing industry, you will find that the author has absolutely no control over what appears in advertisements. Nothing. If I had the choice, I would tell them not to do it. Use it of course, and I do it often, but they like to use it and then I correct it when it comes up, that's because I think the actual quote is pretty interesting, so that's for Schlesinger, huh, you got the story backwards . I criticized Schlesinger. on these points in a book that appeared in 1969 about which he was furious and in his review of that book, which was a furious review, he tried to find some error and found an absolutely trivial error, so small that it was corrected two months later in the second printing, but he's been screaming about it, screaming about it ever since and people like you do too, the mistake was that in quoting a speech by Harry Truman, okay, instead of quoting his actual speech, I quoted a practically verbatim paraphrase of was written by a prominent and respected commentator James Warberg, so the words were slightly different, although the content was exactly the same, as I say, it was so trivial that it was corrected two months later in the second printing, that is a rare book that doesn't have some small errors, uh, but yes, you know that the defenders of state violence are desperate and if they can find something they can point to, they will follow it forever, so that's the truth about the second point, As for the cheering, you heard what I said. and that's what I've written, I think we should pay attention to the population, okay, population of the United States, population of Iraq, population of the world, eh, we should pay attention to what they think, of course, those who are supporters of state violence.

We shouldn't, we should pay attention to the guys in power and the kind of section that applauds him among the intellectuals who support them well. I don't agree with that, if we just take the case of Iran, I think. The opinion of the American population is very sensible and I support it, and the same is true in Iraq. I think the opinion of the Iraqis is very sensible. Last December, the Pentagon published a study on focus groups in Iraq andreported. As good news, they give a very optimistic report. They said the opposite of what people say.

They say they know the critics. There is much agreement among Iraqis and therefore there is hope for reconciliation. Alright. And then if you read a little further, what their agreement was. Well, there was overwhelming agreement among Iraqis that the United States is responsible for ethnic cleansing and sectarian violence and that the United States should get away with it, there is agreement on that. Well, yes, I think we should pay attention to our victims and I can go. later, if you want, everything else you said is pure invention and you know it, if you want, if you want, write me an email about it.

I'll be happy to give it to you, you know you don't have the courage to say who you are who you're rooting for sorry, you don't have the courage to tell us who you're rooting for, you've made your point clear, come on, so decades ago the United States instituted a policy of undermining foreign food markets, could whoever is speaking raise their hand? Oh, sorry, yeah, go ahead. Decades ago, the US instituted a policy of undermining Ford's food markets through US subsidies. Recently, agricultural subsidies have moved into ethanol markets to the chagrin of uh almost every third world nation and furthermore to the disinterest of almost every major media uh Network what role, if any?

Do you think this food crisis will play a role in US expansionist policies? Well, just to clarify a little when the ethanol craze started. It was overwhelmingly applauded by the media and commentators, etc., not everyone. I mean, I wrote an article criticizing it, in fact, there was even a Foreign Affairs article criticizing it, so there were critics, huh, but it didn't take much thought. realizing that shifting farmland to producing ethanol for fuel was going to cause an increase in food prices and food shortages. I mean, you'd have to be a genius to figure out that's especially true when we're the ethanol.

It wouldn't have been so obvious and maybe wouldn't even have been true if it were Brazilian ethanol. Brazilian ethanol is made from sugar, it's much more efficient and much cheaper, and to keep the ethanol industry here going, the government has to do it. First, provide huge subsidies to agricultural companies and also impose a huge tariff to prevent much cheaper and more efficient Brazilian ethanol from entering the country. The technical term for that is free trade, okay, but if so, it's a big gift to Agra business, it takes a lot of land away from crop production, which means there's a shortage of corn, but also a lot of other things. things you know if if the land is moved to corn production, the inefficient corn production for ethanol is not used for soybeans. and peas, etc., so that the same thing that happens in the third world is reduced, the third world countries that claim to produce soybeans can start using crops that will be bought by the rich to obtain ethanol and that is also happening, so that becomes a spiral and yes. is leading to it being one of the factors leading to a very serious food crisis.

It's quite difficult to estimate how much of a factor that is, so the drought in Australia is also a big contributing factor, but you know, that's all kind of irrelevant, we can't do anything about the drought in Australia. , the only factor we can do anything about is the use of cropland as fuel and it is not particularly efficient from the point of view of pollution or energy inputs, etc., worldwide. I think it was a disaster and it was understood that anyone who thought about it from the beginning should end it. If someone wants to use ethanol, they should break the protectionist barriers and subsidies to the Agra business and use.

Brazilian ethanol is causing all of this to be part of an entire system that undermines Third World farmers, so one of the great effects of NAFTA is to expel Mexican farmers from their lands. Mexican farmers cannot compete with highly subsidized countries. The US agriculture business is pretty obvious, so slowly being pushed out of the country, it's going to get worse now that Mexico has been forced to eliminate all tariffs and, uh, flood the cities, drive down wages, which is very well for us manufacturers we are Exporting production there, eh, and then they try to flee across the border, so we build walls.

I know all these things are interconnected just like with Haiti. I mean, when one of the things you know American cheerleaders are supposed to cheer up the government for is that Clinton sent the Marines to end terrorism in Haiti in 1995, that part is true, but there's a little more , the elected government, the RSD government, the first elected government in Haiti, was a populist, independent government, led by what we call a radical priest, that is, a liberation theologian concerned with the poor, was overthrown in a couple of month. later, through a military coup as anticipated, the United States had done everything possible to try to undermine it, in those few months, the United States immediately turned to support the military coup violating the organization of the American states, the embargo that had under Bush and under Clinton, rapes increased. uh Clinton actually authorized the Tasco oil company to send weapons to ship oil to the military and the wealthy elite in violation of his own presidential order uh in 1995 Clinton decided that the public population had been sufficiently tortured and it was miserable enough that I was there for a while, then he thinks that is enough, we will let the elected government return, but on the condition that they accept a very harsh neoliberal regime, i.e. eliminate all tariffs, eliminate all support for local production, etc. ., well, the result.

It was completely predictable, I don't say that in retrospect, I and others wrote at the time, Haan rice producers are quite efficient, but they cannot compete with the highly subsidized American exporters in Agra, so now Haiti has a shortage of food and they are getting rid of it, yes. Predictively, that is the consequence of following such policies, and again, it doesn't take a genius to figure it out, it's like an elementary school student could understand it, and this is happening in many places, so your point is very significant, there's a major food crisis and we're doing it we're not helping uh uh hello first of all thank you I want to thank you so much for uh all the uh intellectual ual uh inspiration uh all of these issues are much more interesting now that they make sense and Uh, I've been following a lot the news lately about Iraq and it seems that there is some escalation in Iraq and a few weeks ago, Vice President Cheney took a major trip to the Middle East and from then on, Surly, The Iraqi government began a large scale offensive against the forces of the soldiers in Basra and subsequently there were more large-scale actions against the soldiers' forces in Soldadura City in Baghdad and there was an interesting phrase that was used in an article.

I saw the Iraqi tanks attacking. Sater City Sorry, I didn't hear the list, it was interesting that they used the phrase "Iraqi tanks assaulting Sat City", but I was thinking about this and it seems that our policy on the war in Iraq has been almost noticeably restricted, it seems that we We've been focusing primarily on the green belt and oil infrastructure, so given these recent escalations, I was wondering if you thought maybe we're going to try to ferment some kind of increased violence in the blood. bathroom and perhaps use that as a pretext for further actions in Iran and I was wondering what you think about this well you are right that the war in Iraq is restricted by comparative standards, it killed a hundred thousand people, maybe for a million there may have been destroyed the country forever, it's worse than the Mongol invasions and so on, yes, but that's restricted, for example, it's nothing like the attack on Vietnam, I'm not even close, the Iraq war has never reached the scale of Vietnam around 1965, you know?

There were no protests at the time, but there are a couple of reasons for that. One of them is that the American population is much more strongly opposed to aggression than in the 1960s, which is part of the civilizing effect of the activism in the 60s had a great effect on the population in all kinds of things. , support for civil rights, for women's rights, the environmental movement, you know, all the kinds of things he was citing about American Indians, those were standard attitudes in the '60s, I didn't even question the kinds of things that children read in school textbooks, they say that my own children in the late 60s could not be found in the most backward part of the country, today it would not be allowed.

All this is a civilizing effect. That's why the 60s are constantly condemned as the time of trouble, you know, the children went crazy and so on, they committed a crime, they civilized the country and one of the forms of civilization was the opposition to aggression, so contrary to what is commonly said, protest against the Iraq war goes far beyond protest against the Vietnam war at any comparable stage. At this stage of the Vietnam War there was no talk of withdrawal and, in fact, the first book on withdrawal was written by Howard Zen, who you know, and I think it was 1967, it was a time when, you know, there were half a million American troops, countries were torn apart, it spread to the and that could barely be mentioned because it was so far away, in fact, he asked me to write a review, which I did. in ramp parts because no one would mention it, well, now at a much lower stage of aggression in Iraq, everyone has to say something about the withdrawal, maybe they don't mean it, but they have to say something, you know, that It's a big change.

The reason it is restricted by comparative standards is simply that there is much more opposition. I mean, after all, the Iraq war is the first war in the history of Western imperialism that was the subject of mass protests before its official inauguration and that had never happened before, not that I can think of, so that is one factor, but there is another more important factor: Vietnam did not matter much to the United States. I mean, if the country was wiped off the map, the United States didn't care. I mean, Eisenhower tried to get some support for his country. early stage of the war talking about tin and rubber and so on, but that was a joke.

I mean Vietnam didn't have significant resources for the United States. The concern about Vietnam was what I mentioned, the virus infection. Theorized that there was deep concern that successful independent development in Vietnam might stimulate others to undertake the same efforts. The VIR, the rot could spread to Thailand, maybe Indonesia, maybe even Japan, which was called the super Dominoes by John Da, Japan's leading historian. Japan may have to adapt to an independent southeast. Asia, that would have meant that the United States had lost the Pacific War, something they were not prepared to do in 1950, so there was concern about Vietnam, but it had nothing to do with their resources and, in fact, the concern was The United States basically won the war in the 1970s, but it did not achieve its maximum objectives, but it did satisfy its basic objectives.

Iraq cannot be destroyed. It's too valuable. I mean, Iraq has probably the second largest energy resource in the 1970s world, uh, they're very cheap and easy to get, it's not like the Alberta tar sands, you put a pipe in the sand and you know the oil comes out. gushing and it's right in the heart of the main energy producing section of the world, which is a valuable asset, not like Vietnam, so yes, there has to be a limit to destructiveness, you can't destroy an asset that you want to keep and The United States wants to keep it.

Today I happen to have just taken a look at the Christian Science Monitor morning newspaper. has a front-page article about the opening of what is called the American Embassy in Baghdad. I mean, the embassy is not like any C Embassy in the world, it is the size of the Vatican, it has 21 buildings, it is a completely autonomous city within the green, you know. Inside the protected area of ​​Baghdad, they are not building that to tear it down. The major air bases being built around Iraq are huge facilities and are not being built with the intention of tearing them down. and they are supported by the Democrats, they fund them and the idea is clearly to try to find some way to establish a client government that can function, but in a very similar way to how the government works in Chia.

They are Chin, they have their own security forces or they like to say that the Vichy government under the Nazis was a French government. French security forces, you know, French police, French officials, etc., the Germans are in the background, it's actually pretty much the way the Russians ruled most of the time.part of Eastern Europe was Czech troops, Polish troops, etc., so we tried to establish something like that, the traditional imperial structure, but making sure that it is a base for our power and that the US controls it and really We don't have to debate this any longer because it's public, there wasn't much fuss made about it, in fact I don't think it was reported, but last November there was a statement, an agreement. by George Bush and what is called the Iraqi government, which is a small enclave within the green zone that never leaves it, which we call the Iraqi government, the client government that follows our orders, so an agreement was reached between them, which is interesting.

It allows the US to maintain effectively permanent military bases and operations within Iraq. All kinds of pretext, but that's what it means and, to my surprise, quite blatantly, it says that the Iraqi economy must be open to foreign investment, privileging American investors. That's unusual to see such a blatant declaration of crude imperialism. You already know us. The Iraqi economy means oil. No one cares about the asparagus they grow, so they should be open to foreign investment, unlike other countries that have controlled their own resources. And it should privilege us, the investors. I mean, you know, that's more extreme than the most extreme critic of the war has ever said, and Bush underscored it in one of his many hundreds of signed statements a couple of months later, in January, in which he said that signed some laws because I'm not going to comply with them.

In fact, I will not comply with any legislation that interferes with the United States' goal of maintaining some kind of permanent capability for military operations there and having good control over energy resources. that's totally different than Vietnam we didn't care we didn't care once the country was destroyed and Lis was destroyed and Cambodia was destroyed the US didn't care much about what happened happy to withdraw this is just a completely different situation so much nationally and in terms of geopolitics, it goes on, but I think I'll tell the other people who are waiting, yeah, hello, I really enjoyed your consent to book making and I was just curious over the last few days, the Mainstream media outlets have behind this irrefutable evidence that North Korea has built a nuclear reactor in Syria and that Israel was able to successfully remove it.

I was kind of curious to hear your take on that and maybe cut or cut the blurb, yeah. That's a very interesting story, I've actually written a little bit about it if you're interested and I'll give you some references, but I happened to be listening to NPR on the way here on the evening news and you know they had one of their sober intellectual reports. , which was a perfect example of what John Burns was describing about how to root for the home team, described about half the story, saying that, you know, this is all very interesting evidence that North Korea is not delivering. with their obligations and then there are the Hawks who say we should break up all the old arguments and attack them or something and the doves who say maybe we should give them a little more time and so on, well, yeah.

It is probably true that North Korea is not fulfilling all its obligations and its declaration, but it is also true that the United States is not fulfilling its obligations, in fact, in the rare reports about this that can occasionally be found in the latest report . That the United States the original agreement was that Iraq would dismantle its nuclear facilities and submit a declaration of its nuclear activities and that the United States would join the other six powers in providing fuel to Iraq with other aid and the United States. would enter into normal diplomatic relations and remove them from the uh, remove the isolation of North Korea by removing them from the list of states that support terrorism, etc.

Well, the United States has done none of that. You know, also, there is a story about this as well. Negotiations reached virtually the same agreement in September 2005. North Korea agreed to dismantle to end all nuclear weapons operations. All nuclear operations and all of them verifiably and in return the United States would engage in diplomatic relations. They would eliminate threats to Korea provided. a light water reactor and a couple of other things, and ending all the threats, okay, which ended the crisis, a couple of days later, the United States carried out what the five NATO generals now call an act of war against North Korea, they shut down the North.

The Korean financial operations that happen to be in a small bank in maau were probably a test of what they are doing now against Iran to see how well it would work. You know, it's a very serious attack on a country to isolate it from the The international financial system does not export or import, etc., and it was almost certainly done to undermine the negotiations that had just been reached and, in fact, North Korea reacted As expected, it carried out a nuclear test that you know continued. developing missiles and so on, and that's been the story forever, yes, North Korea may have the worst government in the world, but they've been following a pretty pragmatic course on this when the United States becomes more aggressive.they become more aggressive when America becomes more conciliatory, they become more conciliatory and it's been working steadily throughout the whole process, so that's the other part of the story and there's another part of the story that's even more significant, uh, I don't know.

Yes North Korea. has been providing something to Syria or not, but there would have been an easy way to stop this, a very easy way in 1993. North Korea and Israel were on the verge of an agreement whereby Israel would recognize North Korea and North Korea would put an end to everything. weapons-related activities in the Middle East now that would be very important for Israel's security, but the Clinton administration said no, they would not let him do it and when the Godfather speaks, you have to listen, so that agreement was never reached, and if that had been a deal we wouldn't have any discussion about whether North Korea is doing something in Syria or not it's okay, that part of the story is out now, not that it's a secret, you know if You do some research or read up on gun control. literature and so on, yes, you can find it.

Actually, I've written about it too and I have others, but it's certainly not the headline where it should be, it's not something that people know. Another small point was made by Andrew Cisman, who was one of the top US security specialists who suggested that maybe this whole scandal is just a warning to Iran saying you know we've got you covered and if you do anything or even if You don't do anything, we'll pretend you did, you're in trouble, you know it, so yeah, there's a lot to the story, but we don't know exactly what's going on and we probably won't know until the declassified documents come out someday, if that. so, thank you.

Hello, I think I have read your books and I think you are excellent. My question is most people. I mean, we can sit here and have a discussion about the problems we've had in the past. in honeycomb or Guatemala and Cuba and we can also talk about how we supported Shaw and basically affected the Iranian revolution, but the fact is that most people in America don't even know that at one time we supported Saddam Hussein, so Knowing this fact, how can we help educate the rest of the American public about all of these issues when it seems like you know the media won't do it and all this information that you say is easy to find may not be so easy?

For the average person, yes, look, first of all let's talk, you're right about supporting Saddam Hussein, but very few people know the extent of the support. I mean, in 1982, Saddam Hussein was hanged a couple of months ago or a year ago, whatever it was. and if you look, he was hanged for the crimes he committed in 1982. He was alleged to have ordered the murder of about 150 people, which by his standards was like, you know, a toothpick in a mountain, but that's why he was tried, but It was interesting to see the comment on this. Something else happened in 1982, in 198, when the Reagan administration removed Iraq from the list of states that support terrorism, which is a name for the list of states that we want to go to after they have nothing to do with supporting The terrorism.

He was removed from the list so that the United States could begin providing aid and support to his friend Saddam Hussein. Donald Rumsfeld went shortly after to sign the friendly agreement and during the 1980s, the United States was one of several states that uh, supported, provided support to Saddam Hussein, much of it was agricultural support that he desperately needed and it was a great help to us. , the agri-food business, uh, but also weapons support, you know, means developing weapons of mass destruction, etc., this continued until the end. Saddam Hussein's worst atrocities, you know, the Halabja massacres, the fall massacres, you know, everything, the use of chemical weapons went all the way down to the rat.

There were some protests. Congress protested from time to time, but Reagan vetoed any effort to do anything about it. George Bush arrived first. He had long been a particular admirer of Saddam in 1989, at the very time of the invasion of Panama, just as the invasion of Panama was underway. Bush overturned the Treasury Department and authorized new aid to his friend Saddam Hussein. The press cooperated by not reporting it uh uh in also in 1989 Bush invited Iraqi nuclear engineers from the IR to the United States for advanced training in weapons production nuclear weapons production okay, that's also 1989 early 1990 uh Bush sent a high-level senatorial delegation to Iraq led by Bob Dole, Senate Republican majority leader who was then a presidential candidate a couple of years later and the goal of the delegation was to send George Bush's good wishes to his friend Saddam to assure him that could ignore the kind of protests he hears from time to time from Americans.

Press, we have this Free Press thing here and we can't shut up all these guys and tell them that I would kick anyone who criticized it off of The Voice of America, which was generally a Kind of Love session that was in April of 1990, okay? ? A couple of months later, Saddam said that he disobeyed orders or perhaps misinterpreted orders, which is possible, and invaded Quade. Well, he instantly went from favorite friend and ally to Reincarnation of Hitler. You know he doesn't disobey orders. You know, like I said, any mafia. Don understands that that's the support and by the way, shortly after that, Washington came back to support Saddam Husin after the war, the war was a murderous and destructive form of warfare.

Beyond anything that was necessary to get Sonam out of the situation, but right after the war, in March 1991, the United States had complete control military control of the region control of all the air and there was a major Shiite uprising in the south that probably would have overthrown Saddam, eh, but the United States authorized Saddam to crush him, they authorized him to use planes, military helicopters and so on to crush him. the uprising probably killed tens of thousands of Shiites in the south uh general, what was his name? Policeman Schwarz, who was a general, later said that he was deceived by Saddam.

He didn't realize that when he authorized Saddam to use military planes, he had actually Use it, that's nice, you know we were fooled, uh, but the New York Times explained it quite openly and frankly. Chief Diplomatic Correspondent Thomas Fredman, Chief Diplomatic Correspondent means State Department spokesman at the New York Times, simply broadcasts State Department propaganda. said he wrote a clear column said he said the best of all possible worlds supported the decision to allow Saddam to crush the uprising said the best of all worlds for the United States would be an iron-fisted military government Iraq as it was Saddam did, but with a different name CU, now he's kind of a shame and that's why we have to settle for second place, you know Saddam and himself, the Middle East correspondent of the New York Times who is still there and going being its main correspondent in the Middle East.

Alan Cowell said, "Well, you know, it's a little bit unpleasant to see all these people being slaughtered," he said, but there is a consensus among the United States and its allies, namely Britain and Saudi Arabia, that the best hope for stability in Iraq it is Saddam Hussein, not the people. those who are trying to overthrow him, okay, so we have to let Saddam crush the uprising that could have overthrown him. Stability is a technical term, it means following our orders, okay, that's stability and Saddam has more hope for stability than the Iraqis, in fact, what? What has been said is that the worst possible outcome is for the Iraqis to govern Iraq, we are not going to allow independent nationalism not to be accepted, that is why Mad Alad is a renegade, etc., and in fact, during the 90s, the same story YeahWe look at the main effect of sanctions.

The Clinton sanctions, I mean, they were murderous and destructive, but they strengthened Saddam Hussein, they undermined opposition to him, they forced the population to depend on him for survival, which is probably why it was. You wouldn't dethrone him, you know, otherwise he would probably have met the same fate as Chesu, Suharto, Mabutu and a bunch of gangsters not unlike him whom the United States supported to the end. But in fact, that's exactly what Dennis said. H and Hun criticize the two directors of the Oil for Food program who, as I said, knew more about Iraq than any Westerner, so maybe you know that it is crucial that Iraqis not rule Iraq, so yes, there was support now, right? how do they do that?

We brought all this to the American people, well, do you know how to get something else to the people? Were you the one who quoted Margaret at the beginning? Yes, that's the way you do it. Everything happens exactly as you said exactly and you know, take the civil rights movement, the women's movement, the anti-Vietnam War movement, take your pick, you know, the environmental movement starts with small groups of people doing things. and it gradually grows and eventually it gets to the point where, like in the case of the anti-Vietnam war movement where the government was afraid to send in troops because they were released to control civil disorder, all that happened in about 2 years, you know , yeah, and it just changed the world.

I mean, a striking example is the women's movement. I know it's not like there were feminists before, but until the 1960s not much was happening and in a couple of years it changed the country and the world dramatically. It is probably the biggest impact of the 1960s on the world. it happened just because of awareness groups, larger groups, you know, activism when necessary, etc., the civil rights movement was the same couple of black kids who were at a lunch counter and you know the passengers on the Freedom bus Fri started traveling and you know very soon you had a huge mass movement that obviously didn't solve the problems but it solved a lot of them it made it much better okay I have time for one more question.

You mentioned earlier Latin America and the US, preference for police states, and I think we see that. The police states are falling apart, a preference for what I did not control, the states, the police states in Latin America, um, and those states are falling apart, most recently there were elections in Paraguay and although we never heard anything about the generations of rulers in Paraguay this weekend, It was an important election, you know, we met Korea and Ecuador, who say that American military bases have no place in Ecuador, in Venezuela, a revolution with resources, a rich revolution, and Eva Morales in Bolivia, right now, as you know, is being threatened and there is a worldwide um call for um to take advantage of the hostilities anyway my question is how do you see Latin America um advancing on its leftist path or just in their own path um and challenging the US?

This is one of the most important things happening in the world, I think it's not Latin America, unfortunately it's South America. Central America was so devastated by the Reaganite terror that it may never recover, so they are not part of this. I mean, a little bit, but not a lot, but South America is going through a really dramatic change. It is the first time since the Spanish invasions that the countries of South America begin to face two fundamental problems that have turned them, like a horror story, into one of the worst poverty and miseries in the world in a region with enormous resources and a lot of potential. , you know, it's not like it's not like, you know, it's not a desert somewhere, the two problems are problems of a kind of disintegration, one of them internal to each society and the other between all societies, each Latin one.

Latin American society has typically been run by a very small, rich, very rich, mostly white elite, fairly close racial class correlations with a mass of suffering and misery that has been an internal problem, so if you compare it to the east of Asia, it's amazing. I want to say that Latin America has many advantages over East Asia, it should be far ahead in development, but in Latin America, capital is exported by the small rich elite. Imports are luxury items, so they can live with it. Their second homes are on the Riviera. or somewhere like that the children go to school abroad but they have almost nothing to do with their own population there is no responsibility they do not pay taxes anything uh the disintegration between countries is that they are all separated from each other as if there were very little interaction between them during the colonial period and even the period of Independence you can see that in the transportation systems and almost everything good those things are changing uh strikingly I think the most dramatic case is Bolivia, what happened is really impressive and you are right en Now, under great threat, the white elite that has always ruled the place is angry because they had a democratic election for the first time and America is just as angry.

Democratic elections are a real danger, but they had a remarkable democratic election in which the vast majority of the population, mostly indigenous, entered the political arena and elected someone from their own ranks on crucial issues. uh issues of cultural rights of justice and so on and they won and they weren't just pushing a button on election day these were continuous struggles uh control over water all kinds of things, sometimes very bitter struggles and they had developed popular mass organizations and they had a democratic election of a type that is unimaginable in the United States or in the West all together uh and yes, now there is a serious effort to reverse it, this strong secessionist movement we do not have documents but I am sure that it is backed by the United States to try to support the rich minority, mostly white, to leave and that's where most of the natural resources are and the majority wants to keep the country together and, you know, carry out the significant changes that are occurring and that are also happening in other countries that you mentioned, including Brazil. important and there is a lot of integration going on, in fact, the entire region almost the entire region is moving to the left, you know, very well, the United States had means to stop these two means, violence and economic strangulation, and both media have been seriously weakened.

The fact that Korea has dismantled the Manta air base is a symbol of the weakening of the weapon of violence. Traditionally, the United States, when something like this happened, the United States just carried out a military coupe or, you know, instigated a military coup and robbed a group of gangsters and that was the end, huh, but they can't do that now . The last time the United States attempted a military coup was in Venezuela in 2002, where they managed to get the United States to support the military coup, they managed to overthrow the government, but it was annulled in a couple of days and there were large protests throughout Latin America and the United States.

The United States had to back down and has not been able to do so since the economic strangulation has also weakened. The economic strangulation in recent years has been the The instrument has been the IMF's international monetary fund, which is basically a branch of the US Treasury, so the idea is to get countries into deep debt to give them debt impossible things that they will never be able to pay. Debts do not come from the population they come from. The elites of the population did not borrow the money and did not earn anything with it, but international rules are the ones who have to pay it, well, that is being overcome country after country, as the Argentine president said, by getting rid of ourselves . the IMF restructured the debts, paid the debts, Argentina did it with the help of Venezuela, Brazil did it its own way and the IMF is actually in trouble, it is not getting enough financing by paying the debt, so the economic strangulation method, in general, is declining. partly because of integration, countries are working together, the standard US line, now press scholarship, etc., is that there are two types, they have to admit that Latin America is moving to the left, but There is a good left and a bad left, the good left. are Lula and Brazil, the bad left is, of course, Chavez and Morales and maybe Korea, but to maintain that party line you have to be quick, for example, you have to overlook the fact that one of the strongest Chávez supporters is Lula who does not fit the party line so it is not reported uh after Lula in Brazil after he was his second after being re-elected his first act was practically flying to Karacus to support Chávez in his campaign electoral and to dedicate a joint Venezuelan and Brazilian project, there are now more projects in development.

Shortly after, there was a very important meeting of Latin American presidents in Cochabamba, in Bolivia, a very important place, that is where the Bolivian revolution took off, that is where the peasants began to protest against the World Bank. The American programs to privatize water, meaning the water no longer exists, you know, people can't drink it because they can't afford the cost, so they scrapped it, they managed to drive out the beel corporation and block the efforts. It was not easy for many. they killed people, that's coach ofoma, he's a real symbol, that's where the Latin American presidents met, it was December 6, 200 and they made interesting plans, joint plans for a European Union type integration and, in fact, they took measures to achieve this, and the United States simply does not.

They don't have much they can do about it, you know, they've lost their main weapons. Now there are many internal problems to overcome, so it will not be an easy road, but this is the first time they are faced seriously and in the future. with the participation of important popular mass movements. That's the basis of democracy, it's one of the reasons we don't have a functioning democracy, we don't have mass popular movements, so popular opinion can be ignored for the most part as it is, eh, but they. We are overcoming that it is a real model to look for.

There is no way America will give up. You may have read in the newspaper a couple of days ago that a training of military officers from the State Department is being moved to the Pentagon. In fact, it's been going on for some time now, but they finally reported it, that's pretty significant. Training within the State Department is, at least theoretically, under congressional oversight, which means there are human rights conditionalities, etc., once you enter the Pentagon, you're just a black guy. hole, they can do whatever they want, no one seems to train and torture, whatever you do, it is weak control, but it is something that, in addition, the training of Latin American officers has skyrocketed, the United States is trying with all its might to recreate a corps of Latin American officers who will be able to follow their orders I think it is now higher than ever during the Cold War years and the purposes are explicit the training is designed to combat what is called radical populism in the Latin American context radical populism it means uh human rights activists union leaders priests who organize the peasants, you know anyone who gets in the way and that is the explicit goal of officer training and officer training does not mean simply teaching them but it means providing them with technology, weapons and connections, etc., so the United States is certainly I'm trying to recreate the weapon of violence and also the economic weapons, but it's not as easy as it was, on the one hand there are a lot more protests here, which is good, On the other hand, the entire world has become more diverse, so Latin American exporters can go to China in search of markets and investments from China.

Relations were also developing with the South, so Brazil, South Africa and India now have relations. All of this, I think these movements are very positive and could lay the groundwork for some kind. of authentic Independence and also to overcome the enormous internal problems, so I think that these are all very hopeful signs.