Guerrilla History - Empire and the Deep State - American Exception w/ Aaron Good

Episode Date: September 1, 2023

In this fascinating and fun episode, Aaron Good comes on the show to discuss his book American Exception: Empire and the Deep State.  This is a great conversation which focuses on Aaron's conceptualizing of exceptionism and how the American Empire works.  This topic is critical for us, as the concept of "the Deep State" has been distorted by the right-wing, and obscures the workings of the actual Deep State here within the belly of the beast.   Aaron Good has a PhD in Political Science from Temple University. His dissertation, “American Exception: Hegemony and the Tripartite State,” examined the state, elite criminality, and US hegemony.  His book American Exception: Empire and the Deep State is available from Skyhorse Publishers, and he has a website and podcast of the same name which can be found at https://americanexception.com/.  Aaron can be followed on twitter @Aaron_Good_. Help support the show by signing up to our patreon, where you also will get bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/guerrillahistory 

You remember Dinn-Vin-Bin-Bin-Boo? No! The same thing happened in Algeria, in Africa. They didn't have anything but a rank. The French had all these highly mechanized instruments of warfare. But they put some guerrilla action on. Hello and welcome to guerrilla history. the podcast that acts as a reconnaissance report of global proletarian history

and aims to use the lessons of history to analyze the present. I'm one of your co-hosts, Henry Huckimacki, joined as usual by my two co-hosts, Professor Adnan Hussain, historian director of the School of Religion at Queen's University in Ontario, Canada. Hello, Adnan. How are you doing today? I'm doing well. It's great to be with you. Of course, it's great to see you as well. And also joined as usual by Brett O'Shea,

who of course is host of Revolutionary Left Radio and co-host of the Red Menace podcast. Hello, Brett. How are you doing? I'm doing great. It's been very excited to have this conversation with Aaron on this wonderful book. Yeah, absolutely. We have a great guest and a great conversation coming up. But before I introduce the guest, I just want to remind the listeners that you can help support the show and allow us to continue doing what we do by going to patreon.com forward slash guerrilla history, G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A history. All of the contributions there are what allow us to continue doing the show. In return for your contributions, you do get some bonus stuff. I know Adnan and I right now are in the middle of a mini series on medieval Mediterranean history for patrons that we've gotten some positive feedback on Patreon from.

And of course, you can keep up with the latest of what we do by going on Twitter and searching for at Gorilla underscore Pod, G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A-U-A-U-S-Skod. As Brett said, we have a great guest today and a great conversation coming up. We have Aaron Good, who is a political scientist who has a new book out, which is what we're going to be talking about, American Exception, Empire, and the Deep State. Hello, Aaron. It's nice to have you on the show. And it's great to be talking about this work with you. Yeah, thanks, Henry.

It's great to be here. So in way of getting into the conversation, your book is excellent, by the way. And I want to open up with what's going to seem like a really broad question because it's basically going to ask you to underline your whole thesis of the book. But, you know, just do a cursory overview of that. And then we're going to dive in and take it a little bit more bit by bit after that. So as I see it, there's kind of two essential things that we have to understand as we get into this conversation, one of which is the tripartite state and your analysis of the

tripartite state. And the other is your conception of exceptionalism, which is. I'm sure many listeners will be familiar with the Schmidian term, the state of exception. But you use the term exceptional, exceptionism, sorry. So if you can take us through your analysis of the tripartite state in brief, because again, we're going to look at these components in much more depth during the conversation and your conception of exceptionism, then I think that we'll have a good basis to jump into the conversation more fully. Sure. So the tripartite state is a revision of the work of some people who looked at the dual state or commented upon the dual state, theorized about a dual state, which really traces back to Nazi Germany and a German expat who came to the United States because things were going in a bad direction in Germany. And his name was Ernst Frankel, and he wrote this book called, I believe the full title was the dual state. study of dictatorship. And if that's close, if it's not totally correct.

And this article said that there's this state in Germany that's like the normative state that we're used to that has all the laws and the, you know, the magistrates and judges and civil courts, blah, blah, blah, blah, all these things. But that in Germany there emerged this other state, this prerogative state, and that it gave the state a dual character. And the prerogative state is supposed to protect the normative state. but it ends up kind of becoming a power into itself and really overrides everything

and it's this dark dictatorial force in politics and so it was a way he wrote it in the during World War II he wrote this so the Nazi state still existed when he wrote this and it was a way to explain how you could have a functional bureaucracy in a modern industrialized state but then have this kind of absolutist despotism at the same time

because fascism is like that It's this weird. It's like it's in the, it's in the future. It's in the present, right? It's not part of like some ancient absolutism, but it's like that same sort of brutality of like, this is the power and there's nothing to check it, right? That we, in the, with the Enlightenment, we think that we are past that, but we're really not. Or at least the Nazis weren't. Now, the U.S., okay, enters World War II and wins. And it takes over, you know, global capitalism, basically. And it starts to change the character of the character of the war. the American state, which always had despotic elements and so on, but it became different when it was decided to pursue world empire. And, you know, I don't dwell on this as much in the book, but I've come to think about this a little bit more. They more or less incorporate a lot of the fascist architecture of the Axis powers after World War II, and they adopt them into the state. And it creates a sort of dark, top-down force in the U.S. politics, not just because they incorporate these elements, but because they were there, because there were parts of the

U.S. elites that wanted to do that in the first place, it points to something rather dark. So what emerges in the U.S. is as C.R.I. Mills tries to write about in the 50s is a, he points to a tripartite power structure. We're talking about the government, you know, the political system, the military, the warlords, and corporate America, the corporate rich. And he saw this is a tripartite system of power structure. But I began to think of this really in relation to the dual state argument and thinking about the state is really a tripartite kind of structure because you do have the security state, which is sort of top down by nature because it's supposed to deal with emergencies and questions of existential security. And then you have the democracy

and the public state that we learned about in school. But you also have this corporate force, this dark force of oligarchic power, and during World War II, it turns out that those are the exact people that, or the milieu, let's say, and some of the same individuals that plan U.S. entry into World War II and the global empire afterwards. And so these are the same people that set about people like Alan Dulles, people that are connected to the top of the corporate oligarchy, set about recruiting Nazis and other people, because they would be useful in running the empire that they were planning after the after world war two and so what we have as a what mills sees as a tripartite power structure i see more of like as the actual system of

governance because even if you go back and read mills who's running in the mid-50s and he was really brilliant he says a lot of this stuff is not totally surfaced i don't really i can't say exactly what they're what they plan and so on because this is the power that that is enjoyed at the top of this system it's like they can do things in secrecy and they can act in ways. They can create new institutions or they can co-opt institutions. And we're governed in a top-down way that is only partially visible. And so this concept of this deep state emerges. And it comes from Turkey originally, but the Turkish deep state is really NATO. I mean, when it comes down to it, it's basically NATO. So it's not an exotic oriental phenomenon. It's

actually, in this case, the modern one is really, you know, it's surprised. It's Uncle Sam, right? I mean, that's NATO. And so the term from Turkey comes to be applied to the West by a guy named Ola Tenander, who's writing in around him in 2007 or 2009. He's running this article, the Democratic State versus Deep State, Swedish academic at the Oslo Peace Research Institute, right, Johan Galatong's place. And he writes this really brilliant article in Eric Wilson's anthology called Government of the Shadows. And it lays out a lot of the arguments that I make about the deep state, about the dual state in the West, in the U.S., except I make the revision that it's more of a tripartite structure because you have the elected politicians in NATO countries and you have the security officials, but they are vetoed and overridden by networks that are connected to some sort of supranational formation, which is really NATO.

So the tripartite model can apply to NATO countries as well. And NATO is essentially the deep state or really the U.S. oligarchy or whatever. In the U.S. case, this tripartite power structure or tripartite state structure is the public state, the government that we learn about. That's the nice part. The security state, which in theory is supposed to protect the Constitution, they all take oaths to uphold the Constitution. And then the deep state, the sort of oligarchic power that overrides the, the kind of democratic basis of the security state and the public state and intervenes in politics and acts in a lawless way to get what it wants.

And that's where exceptionism comes in. I take that term from Carl Schmidt, the Nazi jurist, legal theorist, who talked about how the sovereign, and really in any country is he who decides the exception, He who decides when the law needs to be broken because it's an emergency, that's who's really the boss in any country. That's who is the sovereign. Sovereign is he who decides the exception. And so, and the Nazis take this idea and with the furor principle, they give it legal, you know, standing in the country. And they, that becomes to characterize the whole regime of the Nazis, just like the furor principle, right? The U.S. version is a little more low key. The democracy pretense is there. and the despotism, such as it is, has to be worked out covertly because we have to defeat this communist menace, just like the Nazis, right, with the Reichstag fire. You have to defeat this communist menace, and of course the gloves have to come off, and you can't be restrained

because it's an existential threat. So they institutionalize it. And so exceptionism is the term that I used to describe the institutionalized abrogation of the rule of law in a never-ending stage of emergency. And that's really what the U.S. has been in since within the World War II. You can find enormous amounts of things where the U.S. just violates international law, its own constitution, the U.N. charter, and there's never any accountability for it. And that, to me, points to this kind of the lawlessness of this regime that still pretends to be the guardian of democracy and the rule of law worldwide. And it's, the contradictions are just so insane after a point. And it's, it, it, we're saddled with.

with this totally, not totally, but largely despotic, top-down regime that governs in a dictatorial fashion, but with procedural things that give it a democratic veneer. And we're all, all of us who are, you know, unhappy about these crises that we can't deal with, we're all trying to figure out how to respond to this and what we can do to address this situation. And so this is, I wanted to try to explain it as well as. I came because of the criminal, the brazen criminality of it all, when you look at it soberly is just, it goes against everything that we are taught. To me, the more I looked into these areas, the more I felt that we were academics and everyone else are kind of living in a made-up world.

And if I could try to shed some light on it by building on the work of other people, that's what I wanted to do. So I spent about 10 years doing that. Yeah, fascinating. And I hope that we'll have more types of. to talk about utilizing the state of exception analysis later, but I just want to make a couple plugs before Brett goes in with his question, which is each of our shows have episodes that are relevant to what you just talked about. So Brett on Red Menace has an episode about Schmidt, and so listeners who are interested in Schmidt should check out that episode. Red Menace isn't only analyzing communist texts. They're also analyzing things written by Nazis. So quite interesting.

And also, in terms of our show, I believe it was our second ever interview that we did. It was a long time ago, like two and a half years ago, we interviewed Hidal Keraveli about his great work, how, why Turkey is authoritarian. And I actually think, guys, that we should remaster that episode sometimes soon and put that back out because it really was a great conversation and a great work. But listeners, I bring that up because as Aaron was talking about the conceptual. of the deep state coming originally from Turkey. That was one of the things that we talked about in that conversation. And so it might be worth giving that a look at. And like I said, maybe we'll remaster it and put it back out very soon. But Brett, go ahead with your question. Yeah. So I know that you've already kind of laid out what you mean by the deep state. But I think in modern

American politics, and of course you gesture towards this in your book as well, the term deep state really came to like sort of public prominence through the Trump campaign. And now, even to this day, the radical right of various stripes is constantly talking about the deep state. It goes way off the deep end into conspiracy theories. Everything's a sci-op. Everything's a false flag, right? And the deep state is this amorphous entity that anything and everything can be pinned on, blamed on. I mean, at this point, they're even saying climate change is caused by lasers that are controlled by elements of the deep state, right?

Climate change is happening, but it's not actually because of human activity. It's because of these deep state figures. So I'm wondering in the first part of my question, what reactionaries of this sort get right about the deep state and what they get wrong? So their conception of the deep state, is there any truth to elements of it? And then what are the elements that they don't get right? And then the second part of the question is the role of the mainstream media, because it's definitely not the deep state as traditionally thought about. It's very public-facing. It's very corporate.

it. But at the same time, it's often a mouthpiece that the deep state and the intelligence agencies feed information and then they regurgitate it, you know, as if it's objective reality in fact, which of course skews Americans' perceptions of reality. So yeah, what do reactionaries get right and wrong about what the deep state is and how do you configure the media into all of this? Well, the right wing critique of the deep state, which of course there's some diversity on the right wing, so there's going to be some variation among the very critics that we'd be talking about but in general what they get right is that they recognize that there is a top down system of governance that is not responsive to their to their needs

and doesn't really govern according to like the consent to the governed and so on they where they get it really wrong is that they they seem to think that it's a cabal of liberals or secret communists. This kind of goes back to the birchers and other people. I mean, people thought like the trilateralists were like, you know, back, some of them were pushing for detaunts in different ways and making business deals with China and so on back in the 70s. And there were people on the sort of bircher old style, right, that thought like the trilateralists

are communists. The trilateralists are like, that's Rockefeller. That's like, I mean, this is, if you're thinking that the richest people in the world like Bill Gates and Rockefeller are communists. like that I that's a that's a real problem okay like they don't believe a communist means property should be held in common right I mean in general that's like and you're saying the people with the most property in the world are like that's the I mean I don't even know where you go with that but I think like part of it is that these political discussions on

political economy are so detached from just basic you know definitions and reality and such that it's very hard to even go anywhere with that so it's not a petto-cabal of liberals, you know, and people who want to make you trans or whatever. It's not, we're not talking about that. As a synecarchy, you could say the deep state is oligarchy. You know, sometimes I'll say oligarchy or establishment more than deep state because it connotes the top-down sort of oligarchic power, but the deep state has been tainted in a certain way, and it's a shame because it's a useful term.

It's really Peter Dau Scott brought it, was written about it in the New York Times about this, and he got his sort of 15 minutes of fame that way. The first guy to write about him in the West really was Olitinander, but it comes from, as you said, like from Turkey. But then it gets adopted. There was a moment where it hadn't been adopted by the right wing yet,

but it had been put on like Bill Moyers, of all places. Bill Moyers had this guy on them, Mike Lofgren, who ended up writing a book on the subject, and his take on it is similar to mine. He says basically, he says pretty candidly, actually, in his book, that at the end of the day, it's probably Wall Street that's run and everything. So even like for somebody to go on Moyers and basically say, yeah, this is the top-down

Deep State, Wall Street, that's interesting, but then it sort of disappears from the conversation in a way or it gets overcome by Trump and so on. So in my mind, the Deep State we could call all of those, there's a couple ways to think of it. I think of it as in a broad sense, all those institutions that allow for top-down governance in a nominal democracy. So in that way, we can think of the deep state. But I think of it also as a kind of pluralistic thing, and that sometimes they're competing factions of this kind of power. And so you don't want to think of it as a monolith. The other way to think of it is that pinnacle of sovereign power that is kind of opaque and ultimately top down and can intervene in politics

in ways that you're never able to really adjudicate or even, you know, insist upon disclosure of. So for events, you know, some of these spectacular events that couldn't possibly have happened the way the state says they did, like the Kennedy assassination, that element at the very pinnacle of power that we can't even know what it is exactly, that was able to decide that, you know, on the removal of a president and enforce a cover up for decades, like that, that would be one way to think of the deep state in a kind of compact and sort of narrow, overriding Schmidian sense, basically, that sort of deep state. Now, when you get into the MSM and this question of how do we think of the MSM because they're not exactly the state, this is where in the systemic

sense, if you say the deep state is capitalism or the deep state is oligarchy, the deep state is the establishment, it's a useful way to think of it, perhaps, because it is, people want to talk about everything being an op, right? Oh, everything's an op, this person's an op, that person's not. But in this system as a whole, especially the more power gets consolidated and big corporations owning all the media and so on. If you're trying to rise in these hierarchies, these corporate hierarchies, you're going to behave about as if you were a CIA asset because the CIA is the secret police of corporate America. And so if they were telling you what to do, they would tell you to do things that corporate America would want you to do because that's who they serve. And so you

would go out there and you'd be doing these things, but with like, you know, a certain governmental focus, like a focus more on like the way CIA thinks about things. It's not exactly the same as like the way Standard Oil thinks of things, but it's, there's a lot of overlap. So if you're, but if you're trying to rise at like Fox or MSNBC, you would act just like a CIA asset. And so this is, as the, the fact that they serve these interests that social media sites can be told that they can be regulated or threatened with antitrust actions. or they could be advertisers could threaten to withhold funds unless they do certain things and censor things a certain way.

All of the incentives in this structure are towards people acting as though they are working for the deep state. I mean, it's, it's, it's, but the clandestine elements of the, of the, the, of these clandestine interventions into politics and into civil society, like and the manipulation of the media, these all impact over time to really move things further the right and to make the democracy such as it is just weaker and weaker and weaker over time because the deep state and the despotism just intervenes. If there's a conflict, time and again, they would intervene to make sure they won. And the result is we just get further and further and further the right in every meaningful sense. And so this is where it has overridden democracy and this is why the system

isn't able to self-correct, we're not able to create a system that works for the best interest in the majority of the population. So the media is a part of that. And the right-wing version of the deep state is it serves in a wood. By amplifying it, they actually serve to delegitimize in a way leftist critiques of this kind of despotism, which I think is, I think that was a conscious choice at some point. Some people realize, like, they looked at like what Moyers and Loughgren were saying and thinking about this discourse and some enterprising person somewhere mischievously, I don't know, Bannon, who, I don't know how these things work. I'm not privy, but it's too perfect the way that they have like turned this into kind of a

shitcoat, as they call it, on this sort of a critique of our society, which is actually pretty straightforward and hard to argue against when it comes down to it. Just to underscore one thing quickly that Aaron said before, Adnan goes in with this question. It's worth underscoring that, as you mentioned, Aaron, the deep state is not a monolith, and they don't act. They don't always act in a monolithic way, these different elements active within the deep state. And one of the conversations that we had that really underscored this was with Brandon Wolf Honeycutt on his book, The Paranoid Style and American Diplomacy, oil and Arab nationalism in Iraq, which really examines the role of the United States intervening in Iraq. the 1950s and 60s, really up until the nationalization of oil in 1972 in Iraq. And what we can see is that there's many different elements that would be constituted within the deep state, as you conceptualize it here, Aaron, including the intelligence apparatus and oil corporations, particularly. And in many cases, throughout his work in that book and also as we see in the conversation that we

had with him on the show, again, listeners, you can go back and listen to the episode. What we see is that while in large part their interests aligned, there are definitely occasions where the interests of, for example, the Oriole corporations diverges from the interests of the American intelligence apparatus. Now, these would both be constituted within the deep state, but we don't see them acting in unison. So it's definitely worth underscoring the point that you made that when we think of the term the deep state, we think of this like coordinated effort working together towards a common goal. And while in many cases, that's true, it's not always the case. It's not always the case that all of these different elements within the deep state are working

in unison with one another. In some cases, they're actively working directly against one another. So it's something that's interesting to keep in mind and something that's worth keeping in mind as we think about how the deep state is acting in each of these different instances. Adnan, feel free to go ahead. Sure, yeah. Well, there's so much course here to talk about. I mean, your book, is wonderful in bringing together so many different components of basically the big kinds of questions do we have to deal with with, you know, 20th and 21st century history. So it's very exciting. I could pull a little bit more on trying to talk a little bit more about this conception of the deep state

and, you know, how to distinguish it from its use in right-wing circles. But I think I want to, you know, ask you about the other component of the subtitle here. empire. So, you know, an empire in the deep state, deep state in the empire. And you briefly mentioned in your, you know, kind of survey of the summary of the, of the book that you think that some of these things really took off with this plan, you know, for, you know, EU, a hegemonic empire, you know, in the post-World War II period. So I wanted, you know, to ask you a little bit more about how you see the interrelationship between this. kind of world of, you know, the kind of permanent foreign policy establishment and these connections with dark power being wielded domestically where exceptionism, you know, enlarges. I mean, there's clearly such a crucial dynamic between these two things. So perhaps you could tell us a little bit more about the role of U.S. Empire in facilitating, expanding, developing, you know, the deep state and its consequences in both directions.

But one other component of it that I'd like to ask you about is also the history of this. You know, in this sort of stages, these different stages of the U.S. kind of project and that early, you know, historiography, U.S. history kind of characterization of, you know, how the U.S. state has basically changed. A lot of those, you know, talk about the closing of the frontier, turning to like now a new stage where U.S. will be an extra-territorial or extra-continental, colonial or imperial power now. But I wanted to ask if you thought, this wasn't something that I saw too much discussion

about in that history and historiography, is really about some of these analyses about U.S. settler colonialism as itself, you know, something fundamentally constitutive of that move in operation to, you know, are there not continuities in some ways between the kind of project? I mean, U.S. like commerce during this settler colonial era was about, you know, stealing land from people, smuggling in the transatlantic kind of world, whether it was slaves or other things. The opium, you alluded to this, you know, in parts of it, you know, there's a kind of, that same kind of network, you know, seems to be involved in the origins, you know, of the U.S. state project and as a settler colonial project, even before it becomes an independent nation state. And so how much of that really carries over into the subsequent era that we really think about as U.S. empire as a new stage, you know? So those were the kinds of questions that I had. I hope it's not too much to discuss, but it's a testament to, you know, what your book

is doing is really pull up and together so many of these strands. So what do you think about about how to relate U.S. empire and the deep origins in settler colonialism of the U.S. project? Right. I mean, the origins in basically, you know, the modern form of capitalism that we have. I mean, it all, you could trace it back to England and, um, the you know the enclosure movement creates all these pressures on the land there and you can read that in the writings of like the puritans and the pilgrims they say oh england is so it's so shitty a sheep is valued more than a man there you know it's a reference to like how the land basically got taken over by the original capitalists who created the original textile industry in england and that created pressure to colonize and they wrote about this in policy planning documents whatever like the the 1500s version of the the Council on Foreign Relations or the Roundtable or whatever is. I mean, there's these like these policy documents written up by people for the crown or for parliament saying, like, we need to like unburden the realm by having them settle in the new world. So they started

to go to, they really ramped up their exploitation of Ireland, you know, settler colonialism in Ireland, basically kind of genocidal policies in Ireland. And then they just keep going west even further. And when they, when they established colonies in North America, they're, they're they're bourgeois from the beginning. I mean, they're explicitly bourgeois. They are the Virginia company, like the Virginia company, the Massachusetts Bay Company. Like these are, I mean, some of them were for religious reasons, but even those are often material as well because they were complaining about it. There's no land. They went to Holland. There's no land. They come to the U.S. They try to go to Virginia. They get blown off course. Pilgrim's land there. But it was a material thing as well as much

as anything they needed this land that the capitalists had deprived them of in Europe at this point. So it's a business enterprise from the very beginning, and they do start taking people's land, you know, genocide against the Indians. And then they bring these indentured servants over. And that's the main source of labor. But it turns out that some of them started surviving past their indentures. And then they would need more land to the West, which would cause wars with the Indians, which were expensive. And so it became as an imperial venture a kind of untenable. And their solution to that problem was slavery. Right. And so there's this new slave. commerce economy. So it's all imperialist and it's all intertwined with, with capitalism and capitalism modes of production from the very beginning. So America is bourgeois to the core. It's in its DNA. It was bourgeois before it existed, you know. It was bourgeois from conception. Yeah, I mean, you could you could say the original power was corporate power, these colonizing companies, as you're, as you're pointing out. Yes. Yeah. And they go and they just keep going west. I mean, they go west. The British are basically, in part, the war and the red coats and everything

else. The reason they have red coats is to keep them from going further west and fighting more Indians, which would cause the Crown War Wars. So they really only wanted to tax the colonists to pay for the red coats to keep them from going further to the west. It wasn't that they were trying to, they mostly made money off of the colonists through like putting them in debt peonage and, you know, the mercantile system. Like that sort of was a, was, was, how the colonists were pissed about it because there was a lot of latent economic potential that the Brits were holding back on them. So they go, they keep, they eventually revolt and they become independent and they just keep going west. The Louisiana purchase, you know,

the Northwest territories, they settle those, Louisiana purchase. Then they based, the slave power basically has some way to plot and take over Texas. And then Texas joins the U.S. and then the Mexican-American War, which is just total gangsterism. But as soon as they get, it. So once they've got all this territory, before the Civil War even starts, they send Admiral Perry over to Tokyo, and they are like, we want to actually get in on some of this European, or this trade in East Asia. Some of the richest people already were involved in trade in East Asia, opium trade, right? Like the, all the people around Boston, Boston Brahmins, the Forbes family, Roosevelt's family are the Delano side of it, right? Yale campus, it's all

opium money. So opium and slavery, those are the most lucrative things in the early U.S. Like, that's the source of art, which is pretty gangsterish. So this was it. They go, and they're already looking at the Pacific before they fight the Civil War. Part of the Civil War must be understood as just a war at the top, in a way of section of the oligarchy that sort of rallies people that won't land for free settlers and so on to us, to a into an electoral coalition that Abe Lincoln gets elected and they fight the Civil War, you know. But once they do that, you have this era of. corporate greed, you know, the reconstruction fails, the Gilded Age builds up this modern industrial economy, and then by the end of the 1800s, they're going into the Pacific more and more.

They go to Hawaii, they go to Guam, and finally fight the Spanish-American War, which was controversial because the U.S., even though it was an imperialist project from the beginning, it also branded itself as being anti-imperialist because it fought with Britain. And so there were, there were great convulsions over the Spanish-American War, and the Anti-Imperialist League emerges. And partly, people like Mark Twain supported the Spanish-American War in the first place, even though he later joined the Anti-Imperialist League, because the idea was that it was an anti-imperialist war to liberate Cuba, and a lot of people believed that, which it wouldn't have been the worst thing

to just kick the Spanish out of Cuba, but that was never how it was going to happen. Of course, they start the war in the Philippines, which also belies, you know, any sort of idea that they were like trying to liberate the Cubans, but it wouldn't be the last time that the U.S. was not quite honest about wanting to liberate some people. And so this, they go to, once they get C to Shining Sea, there's a question in the U.S., right? They've gone to the West Coast, you have the closing of the frontier,

and there's this question of whether we become an empire or whether we would, if we're not an empire, then you have to build up a domestic economy. And, and, you know, that's, and you have to focus on improving things at home. And imperialism allows you to avoid having to make those choices. And that's what the U.S. is the U.S. oligarchy, time and again, has not been, has been able to impose a kind of imperial crusade, an imperial orientation and expansionist orientation on the rest of the world or on the U.S. public, you know, taking over U.S. democracy. And so this expansion is, it gives the oligarchy enormous power because they control the global political economy, especially after a world. World War II. To me, this is what makes them so powerful. And this is what I think not all people on the left or the liberal left really recognize the way that after World War II, the empire

becomes the end-all be-all of understanding U.S. politics. It's the amount of money that comes from owning this system and being the hegemon of global capitalism is really what makes them so powerful. And it has made it so that they didn't have to solve problems. like in the way that you would think of a democracy as needing to according to like basic liberal theory and ideas and so on. It's like this empire has been the main, the main show in the U.S. They went to the west, see the shining sea, and then they just kept going west. Hawaii, everything else. And now they just want the whole world.

Now Niger, you know, everything else, it just can be seen this way. It's just wanting more and more and more of the world and trying to control more of it. But that all, that eventually brings about your downfall if you're an empire. And now we're seeing that, too, which makes this a very interesting time delivering. Yeah, I'd like to circle back to the state of exception for a moment from a more, I guess, theoretical basis and how to use it. And Brett, I appreciate that you might also have thoughts on this. I know that you discussed this a little bit in your episode on Schmidt. So as Aaron is answering the question, you know, feel free to also hop in and add as you see fit.

But, you know, as we mentioned, this conception of the state of exception was theoretical. by Schmidt, who was a Nazi. And many times we see criticisms, or maybe not criticisms, but, you know, concerns from people like us on the left, thinking, should we be utilizing concepts that were put forth by Nazis in our own analysis, right? You know, like, how do we, how do we square this idea coming from a Nazi and then using this conception when we're analyzing the world? And this is something that I've also thought about, including when going through the Lucerto text that we translated, because Lucerto himself uses the term state of exception multiple times throughout this book, and I'll just pull out two very quickly to kind of underscore

the fact that, you know, we're actually utilizing this term that was put forth by a Nazi in our own analysis. So one of the points in the book, he says as far as the Bolshevik revolution is concerned, one must not lose sight of the permanent state of exception caused by imperialist intervention and encirclement. And another point, he says, says, and so born ideally when no one could foresee Stalin coming to power, and even before the Bolshevik revolution, quote unquote, Stalinism is not primarily the result either of an individual's thirst for power or of an ideology, but rather of the permanent state of exception that has been afflicting Russia since 1914. I mean, this is a concept that's being used

throughout this work, written by a Marxist-Leninist, you know, communist academic. And so in your work also, you're of course utilizing this term. I mean, it's more or less right in the title of the work. But, you know, in my opinion, and I'd be interested in yours, even though we might have reservations of using terms or concepts put forth by reactionaries or outright fascists, sometimes we do actually see utility in using these sorts of concepts like the state of exception. We see in the case of the Soviet Union that, of course, there was something akin to a permanent state of exception that had been in place for years, as Lacerdo points out here. And of course, you're going to have very strong forces acting upon you when you're encircled

by imperialist powers that are consistently acting upon you. Or if we look at the case of the United States, as you do, they're acting in akin to a state of exception. even when there's not an explicit threat, but they use the guise of a threat in order to act under the state of exceptions. So, you know, whether that's the Cold War, when we knew that there was not going to be an invasion of the United States by the Soviet Union, you know, the Soviet Union, they lost 26 million people in World War II. They're not going to come marching into Los Angeles from Vladivostok. Like, come on, let's be real. Nobody thought that that was going to happen. The Cuban missile crisis, did we really think that, you know, they were going to

start launching missiles from Cuba towards, of course not. That would have meant annihilation for the world. Or even today, there's no Soviet Union at all anymore. And yet we still see them operating under what can be conceptualized as a state of exception, whether the threat is terrorism and the war on terror, or whether now it's the rise of hostile states like China, as hostile according to the United States government, at least. We see them operating in a way that is consistent with the conceptualization of a state of exception. And so, well, we might be hesitant to utilize this conception because it was theorized by a Nazi. There is utility in using it. So how do you go through thinking about this issue? We're using a Nazi, a Nazi term,

a Nazi concept, but we're not utilizing it in the same way that they are in terms of justifying these sorts of things in a Nazi society, it's just a way of analyzing what's actually happening in the world. So I'd like your take on that, Aaron. Two things here. We're not in looking at the exception as it's, thinking about the Nazi exception, right? It's like a type of fascism. What we're describing is essentially a kind of a fascism. And you're saying that like this really operates according to. to a top-down sort of despotic logic of a permanent state of emergency. So it's, if you're going to understand a regime that operates on a sort of disguised fascist basis, which is more or less what I

argue, I argue it more explicitly now than I did when I wrote the book even, but it's, it's in there if you're looking. It's like, it's a parapascism system is what you could call it. It's fascism that denies its sort of fascist core. And I say that there's a fascist core because when it comes down to it ultimately, there is a top-down power that can intervene and override the law. and any democratic checks on it in the capitalist system. That's the essence of fascism, as much as you want to dress it up with whatever. It's capitalism, capitalist despotism and, you know, an advanced industrialized society. That's, we could more, let's say that's fascism, right?

So this idea of it being a Nazi, the concept being tainted because it's Nazi is, you know, we're studying things that are related to the Nazis. So it's quite relevant to understand what they think and what kind of legal, you know, institutions they create and theories inform their own analysis and the way that they govern. The other issue is you don't have to go to the Nazis for to look at this, a critique of this. You can go to the main founder of American liberalism, I mean, in the classical sense, right? I'm talking about John Locke. He writes about prerogative powers. And he basically says very similar things to Hobbs when it comes down to it. He's saying that if there's an emergency, you can't expect

an executive to act according to, you know, laws of legislation. There's no time to consult parliament. You've got to respond. And then he also says, like, of course, if somebody, if an executive abuses this kind of power, well, then you're really in trouble. There's nothing you can do. All you can do is make an appeal to heaven, which is his way of saying, all you can, their only revolution is the answer. There's no, if an executive abuses this power, then that is a dire situation. And he doesn't even have an answer for it. So ultimately, you know, Hobbs, Schmidt, John Locke, they're all kind of in the same way that you have to uphold the regime, the regime must survive and it has to be protected. If you're talking about applying it to other systems or describing about how the Bolsheviks were exceptional or were an exceptionalist regime at times, there you get into like the question of like, well, would it be legitimate and acceptable or understandable or at least inevitable that this logic would be applied under certain circumstances? And I think it kind of has to be. Like, We understand this.

We know that we're not supposed to, like, eat each other, but when people crash in the Andes or whatever, and the only way they can survive is by eating each other, we give them a pass because it'll either that or die, right? So, like, Stalin's sending out punishment battalions to, like, shoot, to hunt down and just slaughter people who were trying to, like, desert from the battlefield, you know, instead of fighting the Nazis.

It's like, damn, that's some grim business. But what's the choice? with that or annihilation. I mean, they ends up losing 27 million and just barely surviving as a people extermination from the Nazis. So you know, are you really going to say like, well, I mean, is a liberal, what's the

liberal even going to say to that? Like, he should have followed due I mean, what do you do under those circumstances? But the, what does happen is the regime of the U.S., and this is going to be the case in any imperialist regime, they define the

empire as this core interest that is sacrosanct. And so things that threaten the empire become endowed with the gravity such that you could declare a state of exception if they are, you know, endangered in any way. So this is a way that you, you just define the national interest as global hegemony so that, because if you don't have global hegemony, somebody might, another power might emerge that could challenge you and threaten you. So of course, you must make sure that you rule the entire world always. That's more or less the logic of the U.S., right? So it's a logic that you have to, whether you're looking at Locke or you're looking at Schmidt,

you kind of understand the logic of a state of exception if it's that or die on an individual level or on the level of a nation. But with the Nazis and with Schmidt, what they were talking about wasn't necessarily the existence of the state. He doesn't specify it this way because I think it just goes without saying, but it's the entire relation, the entire class hierarchy, I think, is what. but that's what the risk was to in world when the Nazis came to power and they were backed by enough of the German establishment and then they had some international backing and people like

John Foster Dulles selling bonds for them, you know, on the international bond market. This was, uh, the, the emergency was to the, the class power of the, you know, the German super elite. And so that was where they said, oh, this is an emergency, the states in danger, but they meant that in a sort of class-based version of like Louis the 14th, you know, we are the state. We, we, you are the owners of all the property. We are the state. Yeah, there's plenty to say there. There's a certain sense in which the American Empire, by its very, and this is just an

exclamation point on everything that's been said so far, there's this sort of perpetual motion machine that creates exceptions and crises, like capitalism in itself is always crisis prone, is constantly going through cycles of crises on the economic level. But of course, you can look at something like 9-11 where this is a direct blowback result of imperial empire in the Middle East, you know, trying to control resources and peoples and overthrow governments. And of course, you know, killing innocent people is never justified. But 9-11 in large part is sort of a response to that, at least in bin Laden's word. But then that creates a new sort of state of exception that then, you know, you get all these draconian policies in the Bush era, but the consolidation and, extension of the surveillance state, the Patriot Act, all these things that in so many ways are still with us. So, yeah, and then to say nothing of what's coming with climate chaos, right, it's going to be, and it already in a lot of ways is a perpetual state of emergency and thus a perpetual state of exception that governments, especially the U.S. Empire, will use to its

advantage if it can. But I want to go back to mid-century. And you mentioned this earlier. You mentioned JFK. In the book, there's a subchapter on J.S. I'm definitely not a conspiracy theorist, but if I had to pick one quote-unquote conspiracy to more or less believe in, it's the JFK thing, although still it's kind of vague and foggy in my own head exactly how it plays out or what he did to run a foul of the deep state. But yeah, just can you talk to us about JFK and his assassination, what you make of it and how it's related to these deeper themes? Right. So JFK takes over after Eisenhower, and it's hard to put your mind in what it would have been like at that time because it was so recent after World War II. And there was more room to move, I think, politically, in a sense, even though it was a prerequisite that you had to be kind of a belligerent Cold Warrior and so on. So JFK takes, comes to power and barely wins.

His father is an oligarch, you know, essentially, but an unusual one. Irish. They're not quite accepted by the waspy people in Boston. He's not connected to that old the Brahman clad, the old Brahms like the Forbes and, you know, Intercapital Lodge, all those types. So he's

and he was called a class trader for working for the SEC under Roosevelt, you know? So he's a more or less a new deal person. People have tried to say he was more of a Nazi supporter, but my understanding is that a lot of that had his appeasement, you know, endorsement, had more to do with his assessment of the weakness

of Britain. I don't really know. But Joe Kennedy really does, is an oligarch and he's an establishment guy. But he also was on the Bruce Lovett committee under Eisenhower, which was a committee which sought to kind of rein in the intelligence agencies. It was by a Wall Street guy, but somehow they come to Wall Street guys, Bruce and Lovett, but somehow they come up with like saying, like, this is what we're doing here with the CIA and all these covert operations. corporations, dirty tricks around the world. This is really a huge problem for us and we should really rein it in. The power of Alan Dulles and everyone else, they disappear to this report until the Cuban missile crisis when Bobby Kennedy finds it and they use it to fire Dulles. So Kennedy, Jam K, takes power.

He's immediately kind of sandbagged in a way with this stupid Bay of Pigs plan, but he's told that if you do it, the Cubans will rise up, it'll be a revolution. You won't have to just invade like some sort of, you know, gangster. It'll be an indigenous revolution with just a little bit of sorts of a hell from us, but it'll be cool. And it doesn't work that way. And Kennedy, to their surprise, he says, and I'm not going to do it. I'll take

the L. I'll take the L rather than invade. And that really shocked people. He fires Alan Dulles. He fires Bissil. He fires Cabell. He says, I want to smash the CIA into a thousand pieces. And at the same time, they're trying to get him to invade Laos as well. He refuses to do that. And he says, in part, man, if it hadn't been

for the Bay of Pigs. I'm going to actually listen to you guys. So they try time and again to get him to go into war. And his rhetoric is as a cold warrior, but he's also said more than anybody else in the Senate about third world nationalism. And, you know, there's this question at the time as to, which you can look back on how much of this is just rhetoric trying to woo the third world and how much of it is sincere. I think in Kennedy's case, he did seek to allow the third world to develop along its own lines. This is why when he gets the news about Lumumba's assassination, he is shocked and horrified by it. It's why he tries to help Sukarno in different ways, you know, and then he learns all these things about Sukarno, like that they were trying

to overthrow him in the 50s. And he actually says, like, yeah, you know, if I were, if they, no wonder he hates us. We were trying to overthrow his government. I mean, there's quotes from Kennedy to that effect. So Kennedy represents, I think, something akin to like the new deal part of the government that still survived and that sort of outlook. And he was given some, he had some backing because of his family's money and Democratic Party connections. And I think they thought they could manipulate him more. He was briefed by Joe Alsop, this super establishment guy about the Bay of Pigs and other things. And he used that information in the debate. And he actually moves to Nixon's right in the debate on Cuba. Okay, which is pretty

amazing because Cuba, Nixon's a very anti-communist. Dude. But then you've got to think about the fact that by the time he dies, Castro is talking to someone who's a back channel to Kennedy and then John Danielle who's saying, you know, we could, relations could be normalized with Cuba. We could look into all sorts of, as long as you stop like actively exporting violent revolution, then we can, we can work with you. And Castro is very excited about this. When Castro gets the news that Kennedy is killed. okay Kennedy who started off with the Bay of Pigs and then had the Cuban Missile Crisis by the time Kennedy is killed Castro is saying

oh this is bad news this is bad news this changes everything and it did change everything and he goes on the radio right away he says who is this guy he's a communist but like boy he sure is like Mr. I'm a communist isn't he now they're going to blame us for this but like who really would have the power to do this

and he more or less figures out the plot in the days after so Kennedy by refusing to go to war in Cuba, the Bay of Pigs, Cuba in the missile crisis, Berlin during the Berlin crisis. He wouldn't put troops into Laos. He wouldn't put troops into Vietnam. In October, he signs a kind of convoluted plan for withdrawal.

But I think the documentary record establishes that this really was the plan. I mean, McNamara more or less explains it in his own memoirs. It's just one of those things that's so awkward that like the historical establishment can't accept it. But, you know, in October, early October, 1963, you have Kennedy signing this order. You also have an article appearing in the New York Times saying the CIA is out of control in Washington or in Vietnam. And if there's ever a coup in the United States, it'll come from the CIA. They're totally unaccountable. Kennedy himself had actively worked to get a movie version done of seven days in May

about the generals treasonous generals who wanted to overthrow a president for working with the Soviet Union and signing a treaty. Kennedy arranged to be out of town so they could film in front of the White House because he wanted the film to be a warning to the people. And Robert Kennedy

wanted his book, The Enemy Within, to be made into a movie. And it had Paul Newman sign onto it. And they couldn't get that made because the teamster said, no, we're not, we'll sabotage you every way. So it didn't matter that it was RFK and that it was Paul Newman. They actually couldn't get this movie made. And that was a movie that was about organized crime, but it was really more

than that. It wasn't about the mafia. It was about saying that like the teamsters and this criminality in high places represents a dark threat to our system of governance. So the Kennedy's, you know, when Kennedy tangles with Wall Street and he says, you know, all businessmen are sons of bitches, you know, when he takes on U.S. Steel. That's more than any president has done sense in taking on any major corporation. That was the biggest corporation in the United States. He said, he said, Wall Street or all businessmen are sons of bitches. He said, I want to take the CIA and smash it to a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds. He said, all of these generals are, you know, he called them Joint Chiefs, Sons of Bitches. And he said that they're not,

before he came in here, he thought their word was worth a damn, but he's glad that he's been like shown otherwise. You know, he fires people like Limnitzer. He wanted to fire LeMay, but like didn't really feel like he could um he he tangled with these people Schlesinger himself said we were at war with the national security people and if you the the lynchpin of the whole assassination is just the forensic part of it which is it gets beyond political theory this is just like common sense like the magic bullet theory was not believed by Hoover wasn't believed by Russell on the commission or Senator Richard Russell wasn't believed by Hoover LBJ like it's it's impossible he gets shot at a lower point on his back from way up high, and then it supposedly goes out of his

front, goes into the back of the dude in front of him, exits out his chest, goes through his wrist, shatters bones, goes into his leg, and then pops out in perfect condition. It is impossible. And on top of that, the chain of custody for the bullet, it would never be admitted in court, as is demonstrated in the last Oliver Stone documentary. So it's really like, if you want to see the ultimate example of the exception overriding democracy in the U.S. and just how it can be done and how the media works and lockstep with it. And it just dictates reality from on high. The Kennedy assassination, I think, is very interesting.

And Kennedy was, if you were, the system itself is so corrupt that Kennedy had to accept many bullshit orthodoxies of the day of the Cold War to try to move things back to sanity. I think he had, he was interested in these things before the Cuban Missile Crisis and he was restrained compared to the people around him. But the missile crisis, he saw the abyss. At one point before, I think it's a little bit before the missile crisis, he walks out of a meeting. The Allen Dulles and the Joint Chiefs are presenting a meeting to him saying, we think we can nuke the Soviets around, let's say, November 63, by our calculations, we should be able to launch a preemptive strike on him. Kennedy walks out

of the meeting, just walks out in the middle of it. He turns to Rusk and says, and we call ourselves the human race. So he was disgusted by these people. 1962, Autoscore Zeni, 9.000. Nazi assassin, you know, got to rescued Hitler once, but then gets picked up by the CIA. He's meeting with an Air Force officer in Europe talking about, and the Air Force officer is complaining. He's come to Otto Scorzni, Nazi assassin, to say, you know, this Kennedy guy's bad news. He's given too much to the communists and too much to the blacks. This is just no good. So there were all these rumblings about getting rid of him. It's quite clear, really, what happened. And of course, he's not a socialist. Kennedy is not Debs, you know. I mean, he's,

He's not, he's a new deal liberal, but he's actually basically believes in the rule of law and was wanting to move towards, I think, Daytonant and a relax at the end of this quest for global dominance everywhere. Between his desire to pursue de Tant with the Soviet Union and normalizing relations with Castro and his support for third world nationalism, he was really undermining the basis of all the things that these guys wanted to do. And, you know, he ends the Cuban Missile Crisis. He gives his famous peace speech calling for peace in the summer of 63. And months later, he's killed. And that's really a remarkable speech. And it's the mood at the time. It changed. The end of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy's peace speech, you didn't have the

Pope issuing, you know, proclamations calling for world peace and such. Even Malcolm X at this point says around this era, he says there actually could be a peaceful revolution in America. And he was right because it was in a sense he was correctly identifying that the American public was not as bellicose as these Cold War leaders. The conditions had changed. And if things were without disaster, you could eventually have a move towards peace. Malcolm X knew what happened to Kennedy. He said the chickens come home to roost, right? That's what got him into trouble. He was asked to explain that later. And he said, yeah, I'm a farm boy. I know I was a farm boy. You send chickens out. They always come back home to roost. Your chickens come home. back to your farm and other people's chickens go back to their farm and all these chickens America's sending out, well, they've come back to roost. That was what he said. Well, actually what he said, Aaron, that as a farm boy, chickens coming home to roost always make me glad. I think that's what really put him, because it wasn't just the analysis of it, but it was also his suggestion that, you know, we shouldn't just be, you know, mourning this because this is just systemically

and structurally what's going to happen, and the U.S. Empire essentially, you know, has to fall. So I just wanted to follow up a little bit on that. Maybe you have more, you want to say, by way of conclusion, but I think a lot of the cases, so this Kennedy case is one interesting component you deal with, but of course there are a lot of other assassinations, and you discuss those too. And it's people like Malcolm X and MLK who cross a certain line at a certain point in their public political careers that makes them dangerous. And that line is when they do question the prerogatives of U.S. foreign policy and U.S. Empire. So it's when Malcolm X says, hey, you know, we shouldn't just be fighting for civil rights, but we should take the United States

to the world court and try them for human violations, you know, and try, you know, the United States, you know, this is like dangerous stuff because he's saying also, you know, we should be in support of black liberation anti-colonial struggles in Africa, and we should, you know, ally with them and bring that struggle home here and think of this as an anti-colonial resistance to free black people. And so it's the kind of way in which he's seeking, you know, to have a kind of broad, more transnational resistance against exactly what you're talking about as a sort of deep state network, supernational network, which is when he becomes a real problem. It's when MLK says there are three evils, one of which is, you know, war, you know, and we've got to question

the Vietnam War. That's when these guys become suddenly really dangerous. So I think that analysis that you're pointing out, where empire becomes the national interest, that is a crucial kind of problematic. And that's quite interesting to me, you know, this whole idea that even starts before World War II, of course, Henry Luce and, you know, his call for the American century is essentially saying U.S. is an exceptional, you know, country and it should be the hegemon for the world. And we have to all get on board with that. Once you have that, then, of course, there's also going to be these huge domestic consequences. So I don't think the story from my perspective of the JFK, you know, assassinations that we should necessarily

imagine him as some radical, you know, kind of, you know, figure who's some, you may be heroic in certain other elements. But the point is, is that there is a structural kind of, you know, militancy towards U.S. Empire that can't be questioned even by, you know, U.S. president. That's the whole point is that this is beyond, you know, electoral accountability. It's beyond democratic control. And that's a wonderful illustration of that in that case. So I guess my question here, of course, if you have any further follow-up you want to say to my long-winded kind of, you know, yes, yes and kind of comment here is just that supranational dimension. I think is quite interesting. and important. And I was sometimes puzzled a little bit by how you said that, you know,

that one of the sort of decays in the system is seeing sort of the weakening of nationalism. And wondering exactly what we mean by that. I think it's related to also Brett's original kind of question or point here about how the right wing has sort of imagined this, which is that part of the way they view the deep state is identifying maybe correctly, you know, the supernatural kind of dimensions of it, but their sense of it is as a global conspiracy. So for them, globalism is like the worst thing something could be is that it's got networks. They're outside of the national kind of scope. They're not accountable to the nation.

They're not in the interest of the nation, understood as kind of regular sort of people. And so I think the question here is after the Cold War ends, you know, that sort of period, how do you understand globalization as functioning in this? Because clearly U.S. Empire shifts in different ways and there's different ways in which it's being organized. And likewise, the response to it, you know, even by the right, is this pro-nationalist anti-globalization. But, you know, that's not typically, you know, how the left looks at that global kind of transnational, well, like Malcolm X, transnational links in struggle with peoples in the global South, you know, against U.S. Empire is a good thing. But for the right wing, there is a kind of investment in, you know, in right wing populism in a kind of nationalism, while at the same time they do have a kind of transnational, supranational counter. kind of network that they want, which is, you know, you've got far right groups that, you know, are opposing, you know, kind of the global elites at a global sort of level that we need

affiliations. We like Putin because he's like a conservative leader, like Bannon, you know, kind of imagines. We need an alliance. So I'm wondering how you parse that kind of in our contemporary politics out of the analysis that you've been making of this tripartite state and where the deep state is the supernational structure. Yeah, this nationalism question is really fascinating, and I am not as, because I've dealt with a lot of historiography, especially in the realm of, you know, parapolitical things, I haven't, I didn't frame everything, I don't reflexively frame things in a Marxist, you know, in a Marxist way. So my, and my take on nationalism probably differs with most,

nominal Marxists in that I to see like internationalism kind of presupposes nationalism right internationalism is not super nationalism it's it's cooperation between nations and when I think of nationalism I uh that I would talk about you know worrying about the decline of American nationalism when I'm saying that I'm not it is an argument for American nationalism as we would understand it to be stronger I mean more of it in the literal sense of the definition of the word of a nation as being a group of people who come to imagine themselves as having a shared identity and some sort of fate together or, you know, position in the world together. And that when I think they're nationalists like, you know, Bolivar or, uh, uh, or, um, Ho Chi Min or, uh, Kwame

the Krumma, right? They're nationalists, right? And, oh, I mean, Canada, that American president is going to be a nationalist. He's running for the president of the United States. Is it going to be like, I don't really want to think about the Americans as Americans and as me as an American person who needs to be worried about this as a nation, because that's nationalism and I'm not like any person, like, it doesn't mean you have to be belligerent, you know, whatever, imperialist, like, jingoism. Now, the right is, some, there is a strain of, like, in thinking of the common understandings or the public understandings of right-wing ideologies, I think that there's a difference between what the broad public thinks

and then the thinking of the people at the very top. So these kind of America first people that were like, we don't learn it foreign aid. I mean, like, for us, we'd be like, well, come on, it's not, the foreign, like, don't you even, like, it's, on the one hand, it's kind of crappy for the U.S. to be like, we need to give money to less money to foreign countries. On the other hand, the foreign aid, quote unquote,

is always used to, like, in debt and screw over other countries and make them more prone to being screwed. And the only reason that these right-wing people in the general public don't understand it is because the people that package these things aren't allowed to say that. So I'm sure that there are policymakers in the U.S. who are similarly right-wing, if not more so, than the public, who are, like, thinking, oh, come on, why don't complain about the aid? Don't you understand? We're not trying to help these people. We're trying to screw them, right? But then the public, the right, the lumping right, or whatever you would call it, like, no foreign aid, America first.

okay uh and so this is this is a kind of like jingoism that's not really exactly what i'm talking about the nationalism of that we're seeing a decline in which isn't i don't make this my main thing i just sort of pointed it out is that the the people that are like the globalization or globalists used to refer it didn't used to be an alex jones term they used to talk about david rockefeller trilateral commission people who were like commercially minded and kind of thought of nation states is like inconvenient and annoying. Those are like the original globalists. It gets abused by the right. I don't think they this. I don't think they always use it as the code for Jew, even though people say that, try to say that. I think sometimes they might.

I think it's more or less a stand in for something because they can't critique capitalism. So they have to otherwise make it, they have to mystify it and other it in some sort of way. And so it's like globalists. And they're putting chemicals in the water makes gay. They want to, you know, vaccinate us with dangerous vaccines and so on. And it's like they do, they get that people do want to control them and take away their freedom. They're not wrong about that. But they don't, they can't understand why because they don't really, they don't have in their mind any kind of foundational skepticism or critique of capitalism. So if that's, I hope that kind of tries to explain to what I'm saying.

I don't mean to be a cheerleader for nationalism in the generic sense. I think in a way it's a more, it's both simpler and more complex than what it, the way it's often talked about. Sometimes in very complicated ways by Marxists who could go on about it, but in a sense, it's going to be with this for a while. And it's, you know, it doesn't mean it has to be Curtis LeMay or something like that. Internationalism is one way a nationalism can express itself in a healthy way and hopefully peacefully. So, you know, that's as much as I can say right here with that going on too long. Now, before Brett hops in with the final question, I just want to plug two more episodes. It seems like it's like my main thing that I do here is plug past episodes that we've had.

But we do have two episodes that are related to one thing that Aaron talked about, which is U.S. foreign aid and how that's often conditional or is used as a form of influence. We have two episodes that touch on this more or less directly. One is called Ownership of Development, China and Africa and Afriqam with Africana Studies Professor Takia Harper Shipman. So the listeners, check that one out if you're interested specifically in ownership of development and foreign aid in Africa and how that's used as a coercive measure there. And then we also have an episode on USAID with Amanda Yi of Radio Free Amanda.

So again, both of those are kind of directly related to something that Aaron hit in passing. but I know that some listeners who maybe are newer listeners and haven't heard those past episodes might be interested in hearing more about that specific topic. And if you are, we do have those two past episodes that are kind of more or less devoted to that topic in their entirety. But Brett, go ahead with the final question. Yeah, absolutely. So I just wanted to say great point, Aaron, about the, when you lack a critique of capital, the conspiracy theory sort of fill the vacuum. And it is like, it is a reaction to something that's real, but they can't quite put their finger on it because this critique of capital is just not really available to right-wing

thought in general, whether it's globalists, liberal elites, commies, or Jews, they all just stand in for something that is not fully grasped and understood. And of course, by doing that, whether they know that they're doing this or not, it provides cover for the actual people who actually have all the money and power in the world. And often this globalist or Jewish conspiracy theory also scapegoats marginalized communities like they're the puppets of the Jewish or globalist masters and it's the Jews that are

opening our borders or the globalists who are open our borders and letting these hordes of people from the global south come in so it's packed with plenty of reaction and terrible shit but I think that's a crucial point. But we want to be respectful of your time as always and so I want to ask this last question which is really a summation

of your final chapter because when you go over the history of this sort of stuff it can leave one feeling bewildered, small, unable to do anything about it. And all the confusion in the American public just adds to that level of despair. As we enter the period of climate chaos, it's even scarier and more intense. But there's some optimism at the end of your book that I really found interesting, useful, and hopeful. So can you kind of just summarize for us how you end the book and what might be the way out of the situation that we're currently in?

Well, I think part of what the bigger picture of this book is, as you talk about, is it capitalism or is a conspiracy, you know, nobody ever summed this up better than Michael Parenti, who has a couple of lectures on this. One of them that are relevant here. One of them is the JFK assassination in the gang, exposing the gangster state, something like that. Like his explanation of that, I think, would, it would really be illuminating for people to hear. Also, conspiracy in class. It's not in either or. Okay, there is class power. is enormously important, but what it allows you to, who has the ability to conspire?

Who has the ability to make secret plans, do illegal things, commit crimes, and get away with it and make sure nobody ever exposes it, and that if people do try to expose it, they're the ones that will be destroyed, their reputations will be destroyed for exposing their crimes. That is, that's conspiratorial. The U.S. Empire itself, the Council on Ford relations, just planning it all out, and some of that is still classified during World War II. I mean, that was conspiratorially in and of itself. So the U.S. Empire was hatched in a conspiratorial way. The creation of the CIA, conspiratorially, they put in a little clause saying like,

eh, we'll occasionally do some things from time to time related to national security, as the National Security Council assigns. That's all they say, essentially. And from that, they use that as the ability to carry out covert operations, which are, by definition, conspiracies. They're, like, secretly plotted, they're illegal, and they're doing bad things. so these are like these are not this isn't an either or thing i think that like to understand the nature of class will help you to understand a lot of these elite conspiracies and then

strange events in u.s. history that have historical impact and then and vice versa maybe understanding some of these events can help you to understand the class structure of the united states it has for me for example like studying the kennedy assassination the end of the day the guy would be dead anyway today most likely i mean it's not like i knew personally or whatever but if you look at like the power brought to bear by these different institutions, it can teach you something about the way our system works. So that I think is important to note in the bigger sense of like, how do you study this without being full on Alex Jones or David Ike or something like that?

Or do you want to go in the other direction and be like Noam Tomsky and be like, there's no conspiracy, it's all structure. It's all some non-bulance theory or stochastic theory and like it's like the tectonic plates move. I don't think it's like that. But there are structural things that are important. And this is where I think the hope does come in in terms of the bigger span of history because all of these conspiratorial things and other and not conspiratorial things that the U.S. empires try to do to rule the world.

They're all falling apart. And when I write at the end of the book, it's more or less, I think, been born out by subsequent events in a sense. And so the optimism, as grim as it is. And I, too, there's some sort of personality of, like, if you just are drawn to these things, and like enjoy them in a weird way. I'd sort of do, but I see why people become overwhelmed thinking of this. But the optimistic news, although it also comes with some peril, is that the structs, the cyclical things that we see in like the Chinese dynastic cycle

or just the simple observation that all empires eventually fall, this applies to the United States as well, and we're seeing it happen now. And so, you know, I, in this election, I take a lot of shit because I'm backing RFK Jr. And I sort of understand because he, like his father and uncle, take some positions that I totally oppose. But I think that if he's going to wind down the empire and at least not nuke us for a while,

this will let other things unfold that could be really beneficial and important. For example, I don't want to get into that. So I'm not going to go on too much more about that. But the bigger point is that these other countries coming together, it doesn't matter. To me, the U.S. left seems ineffectual, mostly except in generating like tweets and occasionally doing small-scale things. And I wish them luck on all of this. But it's not going to be the U.S. left.

I don't believe that really has much of a role in bringing down the U.S. Empire. They've acted as aggressively and belligerently as they can right up to the edge of risking nuclear war. and they're still losing. I mean, this is, this is amazing. Everything after the end of the Cold War, if you look at it, early on in the Cold War, China and Russia, or sorry, early on in the 90s, starting at the end of the mid-90s, China and Russia say, we should have a multipolar world. Okay. I believe that the U.S. response by that is the war on terror, that they basically were like, well, we're going to go right into Azerbaijan, Chechnya, we're just going to get right up in there. And in Soviet near abroad, we're going to encircle you. And, you you're never going to be able to form any sort of critical mass that could override U.S. hegemony. Brzezinski writes that book commissioned by the Council on Foreign Relations, the Grand Chess Board, laying it all out.

Eurasia, this is where we got to win. But they fail. They fail with 9-11, the 9-11 wars, you know, which 9-11 perfectly magically comes along to give them exactly what they wanted to do, their crazy illegal criminal plans that they had just waiting to be launched. But those wars go badly. Arab Spring Wars resumed that whole regime. regime change operation, you know, agenda. And those fail too. I mean, Libya, they destroy

Libya, but that's kind of a pirate victory. And in Syria, they're defeated. And so they have to just occupy illegally part of Syria up to the present day and steal all their oil. So it's all, and I think Ukraine partly because they were furious and worried about Russia disrupting their plans for things like Syria. So they staged that coup in May Don. And eventually they provoke Russians to a war and I'm more of the mind now that they wanted Russia to start that war on purpose because when you look back at like these Russian peace deals that they put out in the time before then it's just really obvious so everything they've tried to do since winning the Cold War quote unquote has all failed and they're losing and the dollar countries are

every day you hear new stories about deals about countries you know getting into the dollar ditching the dollar for bilateral trade. I mean, this is really historic because the control of that Rompel-Stiltskin dollar, which they established in the 70s, that is the reason why you had Reagan and everything after this enormous amount of power that gave the U.S. The U.S. became like Rompel-Stiltskin, could build as many aircraft carriers and everything else. It could wreck the whole economy and just create trillions of dollars because they control the whole money system, you know, in 08 and 09.

I mean, the power of these people, but it's, It doesn't matter. It's all, I think it's all falling apart, which makes this a risky moment because what are they going to try to do to hold on to power? Because it's all that power that has allowed them to get away with so many crimes, to amass so much wealth. And as they, they have a lot to lose. So we can think like, well, they don't really benefit from blowing up the world. But actually, the people at the top, there may be some of them with their hands on the machinery of national security and the nuclear apparatus, who actually, it is kind of existential to hold on to the empire for them, perhaps, because their crimes are, and the crimes of

state are horrific. And once they start getting exposed, you know, I mean, there's all sorts of networks and other things like the Epstein thing, was obviously connected to intelligence. So many things, even in recent years, that would just be shocking, I think. And if the empire falls, it was exposure. And so this, but the empire is going to fall. So what's going to have happen. I don't really know, but it's, I think looking at the dark side of the regime, we understand what they're capable of. And maybe if people are armed that way, it could be useful, I would hope. But the bright side is that the U.S. is going to go the way of all empires. Yeah, I think that that's a fascinating note. To end on, again, listeners, our guest was Aaron Good.

The book is American Exception. Empire and the Deep State should definitely try to pick that up and read it. Aaron, how can the listeners find you and more of your work if they're interested and keeping track of what you're up to. Well, I'm at American Exception on Patreon, the podcast, and I'm launching a couple additional ventures soon, but I can't announce. I'm not announcing them until the end of the month. So there'll be some more announcements coming before too long, but anyone who wants to follow my work, subscribe to the American Exception podcast on Patreon. I have interviews with a whole lot of people, a series with Peterdale Scott, And we talk about the U.S. Empire and the deep politics of U.S. imperialism.

So that's where people can find me. I mean, you can follow me on Twitter if you spend time on Twitter, which you're probably better off the last time you spend on Twitter. But I am on Twitter, too, at Aaron underscore good underscore. Excellent. Of course, highly recommend the listeners to do that. Brett, how can the listeners find you and your other excellent podcasts? You can find everything I do at Revolutionary Left Radio.com. Naturally, I recommend the listeners do that as well.

And Adnan, how can the listeners find you and your other excellent podcast? Well, they can keep track of me on Twitter also at Adnan A. Hussein, H-U-S-A-I-N, and check out the M-H-L-L-I-S about Middle East, Islam of World, Muslim Diasporic Affairs. Absolutely. As for me, listeners, you can find me on Twitter at Huck-1995, H-U-C-K-1995, the book that Salvatore Engel de Morrow and I co-translated, Domenical, Sordos, Stalin, History and Critique of a Black Legend is now available in paperback, hardcover,

and freely available PDF. So even if you don't have the financial means to buy the print edition, you can get the free PDF because we care most about getting this workout in front of people and making it accessible to as many people as possible. As for guerrilla history, you can help support the show. Keep us up and running by going to patreon.com forward slash guerrilla history. Again, Gorilla is spelled G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A history. And you can also follow the show on Twitter to keep track of what we're up to individually and collectively by following at Gorilla underscore pod.

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