(cont'd from above)
[JVB] What do you do now?
[SG] I have been working in the non-profit sector, mostly on liberal political and social justice issues. Right now, I am the field organizer for an environmental group concerned about nuclear energy risks. I should say that I am not a liberal. I find most liberals to be conservatives who want to be forgiven.
[JVB] How do you feel about those years in the military? How do you feel about the military now?
[SG] I've written quite a bit about how I felt about various aspects of my military life. There's no one monolithic impression. Parts of it I liked very much. The travel. The economic security. The exposure to other cultures. The highly physical nature of the life. Other aspects of it I hated. Bureaucratism. Institutionalized stupidity. The hegemonic sexism and homophobia. I don't regard military people as any more or less culpable for what they are sent to do, however, than anyone else. Lots of people like to stereotype the military, like to sit up on whatever privileged hilltop they can perch on and cast little stones of sanctimony at the military. These are people who say we live in a system, but they don't really believe it. In their most secret hearts, they've bought the whole bourgeois narrative about personal responsibility, individualism, the history of kings and generals, all of it. Now once someone understands the nature of that system, and they are in the military, well, then you've got a genuine role conflict. And that's my issue with the U.S. military. It is an instrument not of defense, but of control and plunder of peripheral peoples.
[JVB] What do you think about Bush's build-up of the military?
[SG] Bush is making more politically fatal mistakes than I can count these days. His so-called build-up of the military is one of them. He is not in fact building up the military, depending on how you define that. He is building up the weapons industry, at the behest of his mad military advisor, Donald Rumsfeld - a weird man who has convinced himself without a shred of evidence to support it, that he is a military genius.
Rumsfeld has convinced himself that technology can replace human leadership and ingenuity on the battlefield, so he is prevailing on his intellectually challenged boss to buy lots of expensive toys. I write at length about this Rumsfeld Doctrine in "Full Spectrum Disorder," the book that's coming out in December from Soft Skull Press. This whole trend is being reinforced within the administration by his coterie of neo-con economists who think they can replicate the Reagan era recovery through military Keynesianism. Like I said, the sum of these errors will be far greater than their parts. Unfortunately, other people will pay with treasure and blood, and the whole clique will retire in comfort to write their bullshit memoirs and give lectures. The military itself, if you look at the humans who populate it, is undergoing the same kind of attacks on its living standards as the whole rest of the American working class, in order to pay for Rumsfeldâs killer drones and super-subs.
[JVB] What do you think about him reducing veteran benefits? What do you think about his giving tax cuts to the rich while reducing vet benefits?
[SG] I think it will bite him in the ass at the end of the day. The problem is, they have to cut. They are trapped on the runaway train of their own economic nostrums, their own overwhelming rich-white-boy hubris, and a very real, very deep crisis of capitalism itself. In response to a column I wrote recently taking Dubya to task for his inane 'bring 'em on' comment, I was flooded with supportive emails from pissed off vets and military families. They were all talking not only about the hypocrisy of this faux-cowboy preppy daring people to attack soldiers while he sat in the air conditioned White House, they expressed a profound sense of betrayal at benefits cuts, for active duty people and veterans. Bush's entire neo-con hallucination about world domination is based on the projection of military power, yet he manages to alienate the very people who will lay it all on the line.
[JVB] What did you think about the invasion of Iraq?
[SG] I think it has turned into a tremendous tar baby. And the more he fights this tar baby, the deeper he will become stuck in it prior to 2004. People know it had something to do with oil, but they don't understand the complexities of oil.
Americans are not critical thinkers by and large. We suffer from a collective sociogenic learning disability based on the complete commodification of our consciousness by consumerism and electronic media. So we are not only bitterly unhappy and alienated, we are intensely stupid and attached to denial.
So understanding what invading Iraq had to do with oil takes a little study. They didn't just go there to steal. There was a confluence of factors that were economic, strategic, and political. People like Andrew McKillop and Michael Hudson have written at length on these points. The main point is that the US economy has been converted into a credit and debt scam aimed against the rest of the world, and backed up by military force. But the scheme is falling apart as the rest of the world is losing the ability and willingness to pay. The US economy is dreadfully weak, with the real material economy now gutted by parasitic speculation, and the only source of strength left is the military, which they are now trying to use to gain control over the world's energy supply.
[JVB] About the fact that we now know that Bush lied about WMD's?
[SG] Every thing this administration has told the public has been a lie from the very beginning. The way you determine whether on not the Bush cabinet is lying is by whether or not their lips are moving. They started with a fraudulent election, consolidated by a right-wing judicial fiat. They had planned the invasion of Afghanistan as a first step for developing a standing military presence in the region the summer prior to 9/11. They'd even informed the Pakistanis of their intention to invade in October. Then the 9/11 hijackers fly in like a scourge against the nation, but like Santa Claus for the Bush's neo-con clique. All the plans were put on fast forward, and the pretext was now available for advancing a very aggressive domestic agenda for the development of a police state infrastructure. September 11th was a neo-con wet dream.
[JVB] What about Afghanistan?
[SG] Afghanistan and now Iraq have fore-grounded the just deserts of overweening pride and plain imperial racism. They underestimated their putative enemies, failed utterly to understand the cultures they were invading, and maintained an unshakable faith in the ability of high technology to deliver stable apolitical military victories. Now they have a dual quagmire.
[JVB] Bin Laden? About the fact that we didn't find him and now no one is even focused on him at all?
[SG] That's because he was never the issue. Controlling the region as a way to position for economic war against Europe and China was... and is.
[JVB] What about the Patriot Act? What about the Military Tribunals? The Guantanamo detainees? The "unlawful enemy combatants"? Do you think the Bush Administration is violating the Constitution? The Geneva Conventions? (Other international laws?)
[SG] This is the most lawless administration in living memory, and that's a real accomplishment given the parade of arch criminals who have occupied the Executive Branch for the last 100 years. There is a wealth of material available on the net and elsewhere warning us about the Patriot Act. The Patriot Act has one major flaw. Once the decision is made to apply it generally, instead of against scapegoat populations, the U.S. government will be faced with the most heavily armed population in the world. There's a certain grim poetic justice there. The tribunals and detentions are just plain exercises of impunity against every internationally recognized standard of legal practice in the world. This is also well known. The Geneva Conventions forbid unilateral invasions in the absence of a real and immediate threat. Period. It's unequivocal. People say we should be cautious with the term fascism. I agree. We are now faced with a wannabe fascist administration. They would do well to recount how Mussolini ended up.
[JVB] How do you feel about Bush's war on terror?
[SG] Bill Blum once said that the difference between a terrorist and a superpower is that the latter has an Air Force. This whole slogan, 'war on terror', is used to tar any government that fails to comply with the U.S. diktat. They actually allege that Cuba sponsors terrorism. That's preposterous, and everyone damn well knows it.
(cont'd)
