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Exceptional American Failures (DCC70 - Audio)

🕑 Added 2025-02-07 17:53:39 +0000 UTC

Comments

Aaron Good

I couldn't find either. Maybe it is forthcoming.

Aaron Good

I respect Hudson a lot, but I think that that he slightly misunderstands what happened in the 1970's. So does John in this interview, for that matter. But John wasn't really emphatic about it or anything. He just said that he had a sense that the US tilted more toward Israel under Nixon. I didn't disagree because I didn't want to derail the conversation. I believe that Nixon's moves toward detente, his restructuring the NSC, his IRS investigation/prosecution of Lansky and some Syndicate/CIA banks (esp. Castle Bank), and his efforts to make the DEA new super-drug/intelligence agency were all terrifying to the proto-neocon coalition of hardline anti-communists in the intel community (esp. CIA/FBI), Sunbelt oilmen & MIC profiteers, the mob & mobbed up "legit" corporate oligarchs, the crackpot realists in Pentagon (i.e. the JCS and civilian nutters like Fritz Kramer), and ultra-Zionist oligarchs. The neocons represented by Team B would see Carter then Reagan go for a massive arms build-up. Watergate led to Reagan and a hard-right consensus in the US. Reagan and HW Bush actually made moves in the national interest to move away from Greater Israel Zionism. I believe that for their troubles, they got Iran-Contra, Ross Perot, BCCI exposure, 1980 October Surprise investigation, and ultimately Bill Clinton's defeat of HW Bush. So when Hudson was a the right-wing Hudson Institute in this era, he would have encountered members of the emerging neocon milieu. They either believed--or came to understand--that it was a good career move to back Israel to the hilt. The perils of this strategy would became clear to even Reagan and Bush in the 1980's--but like Nixon, they also lost a political war with the neocons. The Clean Break/PNAC policy (which is really what Ben Gurion et al would've wanted) became US orthodoxy. Even Reagan-Bush realized that this imperiled the US Empire because it was so damaging to US soft-power. Recall Reagan telling Begin (iirc) that he didn't want to see holocaust-type shit on the evening news--Lebanese children blown up and dead under rubble and all that... That is my basic take on the high politics of all this. I agree with you that the Global Majority is strong and growing stronger. I believe that that is what made the Zionists go for the Final Solution after October 7 (which they may have conjured/amplified for just that reason); they realize that time is not on their side. This predictable outcome seems to me to be exactly what the sane evil leaders like Reagan and HW Bush wanted to avoid. But imperial capitalism is an insane system. The sane are at a disadvantage against those who are utterly shameless and immoral in their avaricious pursuits--especially if they also attach their pursuits to some eschatological bullshit. I really did not fully grasp the Zionist-angle to all this when I wrote AE. But if you notice the few times in the book that I do mention Israel, it is to convey the sense that I (A) didn't know how much clandestine fuckery the US has farmed out to Israel and (B) am uncertain how exactly to characterize the diadic US-Zionist relationship.

Kifah Foutah

I think about the aircraft carrier argument often. Michael Hudson always insisted this was a common refrain he personally heard from U.S. officials in the 70s. Is that really the case now? Jordan the Gulf States and even Egypt are also U.S. air craft carriers in the region now and it’s hard to justify the reliance on Israel for this reason. At this point it’s literally just the influence of Zionism itself corrupting the U.S. government. On the other side, my father was in the PLO from the mid 70s until 2000 and he always insisted that one of the main reasons Oslo happened was that the Soviet Union collapsed and the Palestinians major source of funding was limited to Syria, Iraq and a little bit from Saudi Arabia. The unfurling multipolar world now gives the Palestinians options for support that hasn’t existed in 35 years, and they’re now more globally supported than they ever have been before. The parameters of which the so called conflict has always been framed in is vastly eroding and is outdated. The fact of this tells me that something has to change and soon, and this has been the only respite of hope I’ve clung on to since this genocide against my people began.