Episode Summary:
In Episode 56 of Revolution Now! (1 hr 40 min), Peter Joseph explores the links between market economics and the drive toward imperialism, conflict and international war. Also discussed is the importance of overriding “Hedonic Adaptation” in pursuit of post-scarcity, as associated to the Integral Project. The program concludes with a 45 minute interview with investigative journalist and filmmaker Abby Martin in regard to the ongoing genocide and ethnic cleansing in Gaza, Palestine.

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Transcript:
Good afternoon, good evening, good morning everybody.

This is Peter Joseph and welcome to Revolution Now, episode 56.

Today’s episode is divided into two parts.

Part one, the socioeconomic roots of military conflict, something timely and worth investigating since the world at large continues to be on the brink of ever-expanding global conflict and any illusions that we as a civilization have been growing more peaceful over time.

As an overall trend, are firmly shattered by the patterns we are seeing now, especially as the environmental crisis expands and couples with an increased strain on capitalism’s inherent need for economic growth, factors of influence that will push arms races and agitation to a new level coupled with dangerously advancing technological warfare capacity.

We live in a society that contains a rapidly mutating virus that seeks to inject itself and absorb anything and everything it can.

The evolution of market economics or capitalism is that of an expanding disease, not only growing to destroy its host as it mutates in that growth, it reaches deeper levels of the invasion from the move from Main Street to Wall Street to the rise of financialization, which I’ve talked about a great deal before, where the world trades money itself from stocks to Bitcoin and cryptocurrency.

The sickness grows in new forms every day.

It also grows in the kind of cultural permutation, as social media and advertising seek to blur the lines between commercial reality and the natural world, expanding in the interest to monopolize, and in effect colonize your very mind and sense of who you are.

And the prevalence of mass military conflict is yet just another outcome of this toxic growth and expansion phenomenon using mass death in effect for both profits and as a kind of ritual sacrifice, if you will, to keep the machine going.

So today we’re going to home in on what I believe is the core system level causality of historical and modern warfare.

Asking, “to what degree can we directly link the scarcity-based competitive practice of market trade, capitalism, to the causality of military conflict, and this drive for domination.”

What are the mechanistic linkages, aside from this broad understanding of growth and competition?

What does empirical history show that validate such links?

Can we build a model that accounts for the system function, if you will, that manifests perpetual, violent, global conflict.

Now, for the second part of the program, to continue this subject of war, I’m honored to have on investigative journalist and dear friend Abby Martin.

She’s perhaps best known today for her show Empire Files and we’ll be talking about the live stream genocide and ethnic cleansing occurring in Gaza, along with her new film project.

There is much to be said about the United States Empire and its crimes, but the colonial project of Israel’s mass murdering of the indigenous population of Gaza stands as the most egregious of the modern era.

A truly defining event for humanity, in fact, for if we as a collective global society can watch and tolerate this genocide and theft with about 20 months of straight slaughter, I shuttered to think about not only how spiritually dead and abhorrent this culture we share truly is, undeserving of the title human, frankly, but what’s next after this overt massive crime?

What is it going to be a precedent for?

The actions of Nazi Germany were condemned rapidly by the international community once the reality of the Holocaust was realized.

The genocide and ethnic cleansing of Gaza is happening in total transparency right before our eyes on the global stage in real time and nothing is stopping it at this point.

It is being tolerated and assisted to this day by a range of international powers.

And it appears the murderous rampage is not going to stop until Israel has totality of Palestine, no matter the cost in lives and destruction.

Now before we begin, since the last podcast, I have gotten a number of inquiries on the parallel economy project I introduced called Integral.

For those that may be new, Integral is a project to forage the means to peacefully and legally get off the grid of market capitalism, embracing not only modern technology and design to facilitate new means of production, distribution and labor allocation, with the focus on post-scarcity of course, but also a reinvigoration of community, and quite importantly, sustainable minimalism.

I spent a good deal of time again on the general structure in the last podcast, but I don’t think I emphasized the post-scarcity minimalism inherent to the project as much and the need to end what we can call “hedonic adaptation,” which has perverted global culture in concert with the increased need for consumption and infinite growth.

As I talk about in my new film, which I’m desperate to get done and release it with the package, all these other simultaneous projects, partly why it’s delayed –

There’s no such thing as a post-scarcity culture if they are trained to be materially dissatisfied.

A post-scarcity society can’t exist if the culture is trained to want more and more variation and change.

This also coincides with the myth of social progress itself as presented, and market liberal economic propaganda of humans having “infinite wants.”

You ever hear an economist talk about “infinite wants” – run.

A culture with infinite wants is a culture with a death wish.

The fact is material advancement without a direct benefit to earthly sustainability and public health is not advancement.

It is regression, defining the entirety of what we have done to ourselves, specifically since the Industrial Revolution.

In the post-scarcity community at large with the rise of increased efficiency, such as the use of labor automation, it’s often argued that the key to post-scarcity abundance is applied economic efficiency, right?

Including that it wasn’t until X number of years ago that this potential was possible.

This is also something Buckminster Fuller put forward rather vaguely in his work Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth.

And while the recognition of advancing efficiency is important to understand in terms of its labor saving and increased productive capacity –

it’s really the true evolution of wealth, in fact, as I’ve said before – the conclusion that we had to pass a certain point is misguided.

It’s a half truth.

While economic efficiency allows us to get ahead of things in terms of abundance potential, the very idea of abundance is still a culturally relative concept, which means the core question becomes, “what standard of living at any given point in time can be supported by the economic efficiency able to generate that required abundance threshold.”

Hope that makes sense.

The goal being highly reduced labor requirements and access to abundant material needs, without trade or any variation of such.

Low labor needs, high material access for essentially free or moving toward, as Jeremy Rifkin would say, zero marginal cost.

This means a very different sense of material progress itself, favoring relative minimalism to move past that threshold.

Put another way.

If you were born in the early 19th century and offered a material standard of living of an upper-class person for that time without needing to work for a living due to automation applied, I ask you, would you take the opportunity to be free from your servitude with time for friends, family, personal interests?

Of course, you would, since you would have no experience or consciousness of the material state of the future 21st century right now.

But what if I said to you, “Okay, here we are in the 21st century with vast production capacity and all that, so much so that if we applied our modern technology to recreate the standard of living of the 19th century upper class, we could certainly do it without question, allowing for that older standard of living to exist in post-scarcity.

Now, would you take that option then, without the computers, gadgets, and so on?

And keep in mind, this is an exercise about material life.

It’s not about the dark cultures back then.

It’s about abstraction.

I think most would have to pause on that idea due to their conditioning as we have adapted to the modern era already.

In the same way, a person 100 years from today, assuming humanity still exists, would likely see the standard of living of today as primitive compared to the future, 100 years from now.

See the problem.

If material advancement and standard of living is relative, how can we settle on a target post-scarcity condition?

While we all want to see, and we’ll see, ongoing progress in areas of medicine and things directly related to human health, well-being, the rising standard of living game we have been playing is a farce, driven entirely by sociality.

Do you need a smartphone?

Well, today you do.

You can’t operate easily in modern society without one due to the adapting ecosystem that expects you to have it everywhere you go.

Hence, from a material perspective, the same state of normality exists, whether it is 500 years ago or 500 years from now, making material progress an adaptive matter of degree.

And hence, pointless on that material level when it comes to any conception of post-scarcity.

I know that’s hard for many to accept, thinking about going back to say a time without electricity.

But if you didn’t know of the future potential, it does not affect your state of mind.

In the same way, hypothetically, very hypothetically, no one today expects to teleport themselves to other places instantly without the slow drudgery of using a car or an airplane, right?

You can’t be in want or in need of something you are not aware of.

Hedonic adaptation.

And hedonic adaptation is a mechanism for humanity’s destruction, a cultural consequence.

We have generated due to the very mechanisms of economic growth demanded by the capitalist system once again, which as we’ll talk about more so in the next section, happens in many different ways, including through the process of war expansion rooted in capitalism.

The fact is the ethic of meaningful and sustainable life should always, always move toward relative minimalism.

Which by the way, reflects what all sociological and psychological studies have shown us about human happiness.

Happiness is not a material consequence, after a certain point of basic attainment at least.

It is a consequence of sociality and human connection, and personal autonomy, freedom to realize yourself.

At the core of Integral is to build a more simple and free way of living using collaborative functions and minimalism to bring us back in harmony with nature and each other.

Shutting down the hedonic adaptation, realizing that yes, developmental progress will always continue with the advancement of science and technology.

But we have to focus that development in a very particular way.

And I think the very nature of the new collaborative architecture as described before, not rooted in competition and economic growth, will naturally lead to a new kind of thinking and sense of relationship.

And sorry to run that into the ground.

I know people are still expecting this white paper.

I’ve had to sideline a lot of things.

I’m really drowning right now in so many projects, as usual.

But I intend to get that out there as soon as possible.

I know I promised it before this current podcast, but it’s just not ready yet.

Okay, let’s move on to the subject of war and the causality rooted in market economics.

French philosopher Jean Jaurès once stated, “Capitalism carries war within itself, like the cloud carries the storm,” implying that war is not an accident, but a structural outcome of the system.

And to decide if this is true, we need to examine the structure of the economy to see if the dynamics of it can be inferred as such, showing causality, while seeking out empirical examples that validate such inferences, then exploring contrary arguments, of course, to see if they hold true.

Let’s start with the core argument as replete in common “socialist” literature.

Here is a notable proposition you will find.

“Capitalism must find new territories, even if forcibly dissolving economies that resist integration into global capitalism, leading to colonial-type conquest and economic imperialism.”

First of all, what is capital exactly?

And why is it described as if it has a life of itself?

Isn’t capital just the means to produce something such as a capital good like means of production machinery or investment of money to get something done in a company, a neutral tool?

No, capital is not a neutral element of the system in the same way the market economy as a whole is not neutral itself.

As if its outcomes are a collective act of mass human engagement and could be changed by altering that engagement without any consideration of the structure.

It is a game by which business players find financial success in a largely fixed strategy and in a procedural way and if they do not follow that path, they will fail to survive.

Put another way.

The logic of what capital is to do is dictated by the competitive trade feedback process by which businesses must adapt if they expect to survive without exception.

Let’s walk through it.

In market economics we find the cybernetic reality of recursion, an important word.

Recursive means that the same logic of action exists at each nested level of a system where subsystems operate in the same basic strategic way, “as above so below” as the old saying goes.

In nature we see this in fractal self-similarity everywhere.

For example, a basic observational form of recursion can be seen in structures as the simple branching pattern of a tree, unfolding in the same way, whether large or small- that vein structure.

All living organisms reproduce themselves at the cellular level through recursive processes, its universal, look into it.

And in system science, observing layers of recursion gives great insight into the total function of a given system, showing how subsystems move toward higher system level goals, such as your physical body, lots of parts, working as one unit toward your viability in totality, your survival.

Stafford Beer, whom I like to talk about, of course, made this property an integral part of his classic “viable system model,” which he installed or attempted to in Chile with Project Cybersyn, as this property of recursion is what binds the system’s parts, creating feedback coherence both laterally and vertically in a complex organization.

So with that in mind, now consider the following.

If it is assumed that large national powers, the powers and entities that initiate violent conflict, are led in totality or in part by the need to expand capitalist markets into new territories, as per our prior quote, not by force of greed, but by force of needed institutional survival-

We should then find this kind of behavior and shared internal logic repeated at smaller scales, right?

Recursively.

Subsystem business behavior should contain the same logic.

So do we?

Of course we do.

Consider a small local grocery store.

They begin with a simple goal to make enough profit to sustain themselves and their business.

Now as an aside, if we lived in an “Integral” type economy, community effort would democratically build out this grocery store, optimizing it through feedback in a dynamic collaborative effort to increase true economic efficiency.

Lowering true costs in order to serve the local community with no need for another grocery store to open up as a competitor as it would be pointless and wasteful, which is effectively what all competition is.

This seemingly centralized approach is in fact decentralized by force of the way it is maintained and adapted, which is in effect a democratic community engagement.

Not hard to do as I described in my last podcast and it will be in more detail in the paper I promise to deliver.

The drive of innovation and adaptation has hence built into the community business administration, naturally leading to adaptive dynamics and ongoing optimization without again the need for competitive influence.

But that aside obviously the market is not designed to do that. So what happens instead?

Other parallel businesses open and try to provide some kind of differential benefit almost always in the form of lower prices and some kind of perceived better convenience.

And the endless battle begins and never stops.

Larger chains arise, embracing cost-cutting benefits of increased scale coupled with an ecosystem of forever increasing costs around them.

For as we know inflation is not just a monetary outcome as far as fiat currency is concerned, it’s also a competitive system outcome.

As supply chains, rents, and electricity, etc.

all behave the same way, seeking to increase profits inch by inch strategically, and it always goes up.

Inflation is no doubt a more complex subject than many realize; many intersecting factors, It’s beyond the scope of what I want to cover today.

Yet we can observe that inflation is in the long-term universally constant in all countries.

And if you are a business trying to cover basic growing existence costs, intermarket competition aside, you have to constantly expand your profitability to keep up with inflation-driven costs, which no doubt motivate capital accumulation and expansion as well.

And so what does a business do to remain competitive and in balance with itself given all of this?

They do something like open up another store.

Or some other form of expansive growth to utilize any leverage of scale in particular to stay in the game.

It’s not about greed.

It’s about survival of the organization.

And that has nothing to do with how rich the company is.

Activists need to drop the notion of greed as a motivation that you see plastered on signs out there, as it really is a secondary attribute.

Morality has nothing to do with the structural requirements of the market.

In fact, a truly moral person, jokingly, of course, would have to kill themselves in this society as everything we do by force of the system is corrupt and unethical by default.

Just the nature of the game being played, like the old Gordan Gecko quote from Wall Street where he’s asked “how much is enough Gordan?” and he says “it’s not a question of enough, pal.

It’s a zero-sum game.

Somebody wins, somebody loses.”

That is the mindset that is created because the success of business is more about the perpetual battle, not about how much money is made, which is relative.

Now, to step farther back, the overall equation in the drive for expansion and dominance combines the need for ever expanding market share due to those competitive pressures balancing maximized output sale prices, of course, (maximizing sales profit) with input cost efficiency such as through the use of automation or outsourcing to some poor country with the basic goal always moving toward monopoly that is the encapsulation of what agents do always and all this is compounded as well by shareholder expectations if the company is publicly traded.

Just another force of pressure on top of it all, more of a modern phenomenon.

And there is no business on Earth that can function any other way due to the overall competitive ecosystem.

Even though you will find some minimal examples that show or appear to show nonconformity, like some single person running a very small freelance graphic design business – solo.

Those dynamics will be more latent, but the tendency is still under the surface when things reach a certain competitive scale.

Just consider any medium to large scale business in society and review its history.

Barnes and Noble Bookstores, or later Amazon, using the power of production scale and the inherent economizing that creates in terms of cost efficiency, resulting in pushing out smaller stores, forcing them to sell their operation to emerging monopolies and so forth.

Or the businesses will have to scramble to expand and viciously increase their own profit maximizing efficiency, somehow, to try and remain competitive, you can throw a dart and find endless empirical examples, Walmart-type superstores, fast food chains, cell phone companies, and everything else.

Businesses must expand.

People can talk about preferences and brand loyalty and all that, but those factors are always secondary to the primary motivation of a consumer, which is saving money, right?

Which is tied to economies of scale that expand by force of competitive function.

The same competitive function, by the way, that forever keeps wages low and executive profits high.

What Stokely Carmichael termed “internal colonialism.” Highlighting a more extreme version of the basic exploitative practices, positing post-construction in the US that black communities existed in essentially colonies within the nation, subject to control and exploitation by a white-dominated capitalist system.

Now, as I have always said, from abject slavery to institutional or structural racism, and while race ties in with the phenomenon historically, the true driver is class, and owners versus workers.

It’s obvious.

Racial bigotry and oppression has many causes, but the primary one relates to business.

Classism is the mother of racism, and subjugated peoples within capitalism are without debate, the working class becomes subservient to their masters; the ownership class- tightly linked with the coercion of government by systemic default.

That is not a Marxist perspective.

That is a structural relationship of obvious, clear-cut antagonism.

And one has much more power than the other.

It doesn’t matter how big your house is or how much money you have in the bank, you are still a slave in a coercive system to those in the upper hierarchy that yield all the control in their ability to hire you or not.

I make that point as an aside because as so many see it, people are trained to feel as if they’re a part of a team when they’re employed in some business, sharing the fruits of it in some abstraction.

Yet the fruits are so differential and the power is so slanted, the idea high morality and ethics could be a valid state in such a condition and all this talk of freedom and capitalism becomes absurd on its face.

It’s a farce.

Literally nothing in the totality of celebrated Western philosophy; I say celebrate it because there’s certainly lots of dark Western philosophy; It doesn’t have to be Western, as you see lots of moral philosophies throughout the world – Sees the act of human exploitation as a positive.

I don’t know anywhere that says, “Hey, let’s exploit people and abuse them.”

And that’s a celebrated notion of human engagement.

That is the antithesis of civil and human rights.

And yet in all this drive for equality, democracy and equity, which is literally the driving force of the entire rights evolution, once again, for thousands of years now, this trading game has remained almost immune.

A colonial slave system that has output so much propaganda, civilization as a whole, has actually adopted it as normal.

Okay, back on point. Let’s now expand the logic further.

How do we go from this expanding business battlefield where the highest level of game board success is essentially monopoly to nation-initiated violent warfare.

Well, first, let’s remember the false narratives.

The persuasion of war has always been through obfuscation of public perception; always about civilization versus barbarians; the moral projection of freeing some peoples for this or that, bringing democracy of course, which is one of the more modern ones and so forth.

The truth is, and this even includes highly religious wars of even the Middle Ages, there is almost always an economic-related motivation.

This could range from the attainment of labor power, of getting slaves through conflict and conquest, such as we saw in Rome and Greece, or of course resource acquisition and market related benefits for one party over the other.

Anyone who tells you that the history of colonialism, the coercive dominance of one region for the sake of extraction, labor, as ubiquitous in history, leading up to the neo-colonialism we have today, which is simply just a more entrenched and sometimes non-violent version, at least it depends on how you define violence – such as coercive forces of the World Bank and IMF and the overall neoliberal global order –

anyone who tells you that these patterns are not representative of pure capitalism is either dishonest or wildly ignorant.

And we will get to those rebuttals in a moment.

The mechanisms could not be more transparent.

Colonialism, in all forms, historical and modern, are the most textbook example of the need for capital accumulation and market expansion.

Now, capital accumulation, for those who do not know that term, refers to the process of increasing the stock of capital goods, like machinery, equipment, and infrastructure, to boost economic growth for the company and holistically, coupled with reinvesting profits in a reinforcing feedback that goes on and on.

The more successful a company becomes.

As French Colonel Secretary, State Albert Sirat stated in 1923 regarding African resource exploitation:
“What is the use of painting the truth? At the start, colonization was not an act of civilization, nor was it a desire to civilize. It was an act of force motivated by interests. An episode in the vital competition, which from man to man, from group to group, has gone on ever increasing.

The people who set out to seize colonies in distant lands were thinking primarily of themselves, and were working for their own profits and conquering for their own power. The origin of colonization is nothing else than enterprise of individual interests, a one-sided and egotistical imposition of the strong upon the weak.”

From the British East India Company to the Dutch East India Company, to the Hudson Bay Company, to the Royal Niger Company, to De Beers Consolidated Mines, to Abercongo Company, to United Fruit Company, to the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company known today as BP, to the more broad IMF World Bank / Structural Adjustment Lenders and the use of debt to manipulate for vested commercial interests. It goes on and on and on and on.

And each of these commercial entity examples bind to government as the military tool of force to get the jobs done for their benefit, and for the larger order relational downstream benefit that moves in government.

Now considering capital accumulation and market expansion as a competitive necessity, we can then expand that logic into three areas, I think, when it comes to how war and conquering benefit aa given elite.

(1) Acquisition of cheap resources and labor in order to strengthen strategic production capacity, (2) the need for people to buy more things, the problem of ever increasing surplus.

This forcesees any part of the planet as a domination zone in order to replace local industries such as countries that dare to be “socialistic” or choose the nationalized industries or send over subsidized crops.

And then the (3) military industrial complex, which long predated Eisenhower’s warning. The war economy is a massive driver of trade, deeply benefiting commercial interests like energy companies and weapons manufacturers, as I will talk about more so in a moment.

You combine these three forces and the competitive necessity to acquire new resources and new cheap labor; the necessity to dominate external markets and the vast multi-trillion dollar a year profits of the military industrial complex.

And you have not only the incentive for perpetual warfare but the structural necessity for it.

Those three aspects as far as I’m concerned are the core model, if you will, to frame this entire drive or gravitation.

And ask yourself returning to the microcosm: if you start a small company and through your shrewdness put another company out of business, bankrupting it perhaps leading to health consequences for the owners and employees, perhaps a loss of needed medical treatment, and people are harmed, maybe even suffer and die.

Someone has cancer, they can’t get treated… which essentially is what happens very routinely as this battle for business competition occurs.

How is that systemic act of competitive disregard any different in basic principle from the abject warfare we see on the global stage?

While putting a gun to someone’s head and pulling the trigger is violence for sure, willful, selfish disregard of others in the business game competition arena employs the same basic indifference.

An ethical reality the world seriously needs to wake up to as systemic or structural violence is just as deadly as direct violence.

Again, society loves to ignore this in the lack of causality-sensibility people have been trained to not understand.

Okay, now for the other perspective, the capitalist apologists who see it a totally different way.

Firstly, I’d like to remind everybody, if you know free market analysis, it’s almost universally rooted in abstraction, detached from any systemic reality, from general equilibrium theory to notions of the rational economic actor.

Simplistic assumptions have prevailed as truth, and that’s why the narratives and propaganda work on the average person, keeping them mostly loyal to the structure.

And a good example of this is called the “liberal peace thesis,” okay?

Liberal peace thesis, concluding that ‘the expansion of market trade and capitalist interdependence between nations reduces the likelihood of war by making conflict economically irrational.

Common proponents of this idea and their arguments are and include 18th century philosopher Immanuel KAnt, who argued in “Perpetual Peace,” that commerce, along with governance and international institutions, regulation, forms the foundation of lasting peace, vaguely enough.

Norman Angell, who’s 1909 worked “the great illusion,” claimed that economic interdependence in Europe made war futile.

Though this was later disproven quickly by World War I and World War II and beyond that followed his prediction.

In the modern era, political scientists like Erik Gartzke advanced the “capitalist peace thesis,” contending that open financial systems and economic development are the strongest deterrence to war.

Then we have Richard Rosecrance, who similarly argued in “the rise of the trading state” that states increasingly opt for economic integration over militarized conquest.

Really?

And then we have one more of these journalist Thomas Friedman, who popularized his comedic “golden arches theory,” suggesting countries with shared capitalist consumer culture are unlikely to go to war, amusingly saying, and of course tongue-in-cheek, but it’s still stupid – that if two countries have a McDonald’s, they’re not going to fight.

A silly reductive idea that has been disproven countless times since publication, needless to assume.

So anyway, what is under the hood of these vague ideas that a trade-based society is inherently not a precondition for competition and conflict, but one for peace and collaboration.

Well, the basic shared premise is this:

If you bridge trade between nations, it creates a mutual dependency, which as the argument goes, not only reduces the propensity for war, it illuminates a cost-benefit analysis that says more money can be made by peaceful trading than the benefits of any costly military conflict.

It is the rational economic actor notion, for those that are familiar once again, applied essentially to government as a whole, or industry as a whole, or whatever.

First, and rightfully cartoonishly, let’s get out of the way that empirical examples of these ideas being violated are constant.

When colonial powers invade and fight down a country for the classic purpose of a land theft, labor exploitation, or resource theft, do you think that process was preceded by some open, failed effort to spark free trade instead?

Was it just a missed option?

Did the trade agreements between Nazi Germany and a vast range of domestic American companies before and even during World War II stop America’s entry into that war?

What about the Russia-Ukraine war?

Ukraine has maintained deep free trade agreements in effect since 1994, only to be disrupted in 2016, Two years after Russia took Crimea when Ukraine decided to open up trade relations more so with the EU, something of course Russia did not like – which speaks to the truth of what free trade agreements are.

They are always elitist and restrictive, coming from a larger order competitive angle.

The WTO is not about open market self-regulated free trade, which gives this idea that it is just a nation opening its doors, allowing the commerce to flow, dropping things like tariffs or whatever. And the world unfolds in this unified global free trade, utopia run by market dynamics.

No, market dynamics are always a supplemental force, or I should say: market dynamics generate the disturbance of competitive interference. It is inherent or endogenous.

Trade agreements between nations are exclusionary, elitist, and biased, built with a competitive, region-specific benefit.

Consider the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA.

Market fundamentalists hailed it as a triumph of deregulated trade that would benefit all yet a devastated Mexico, particularly the subsistence farming.

Cheap subsidized American corn, for example, flooded the Mexican market, displacing millions of small farmers who could no longer compete.

Many of those displaced became part of the undocumented migrant labor force moving towards the United States.

That same labor force now being politically vilified today.

It’s all antagonism. This is not peacekeeping. This isn’t collaboration.

Even the modern origins of global trade reveal this bias.

When the general agreement on tariffs and trade, GATT, evolved into the World Trade Organization 1995, folks assumed it was a neutral referee that had entered the arena to help support vibrant free trade.

But the WTO has repeatedly served the interests of dominant economies.

It enforces rules that restrict the development tools once used by now-rich countries, such as tariffs, subsidies, and industrial policy, ensuring that poorer nations remain in subordinate positions in the global value chain.

That is, in essence, not free trade, it’s economic warfare. And please don’t be one of those people as I touched upon prior that says, ah, “but it’s all a mess. We don’t want this!”

This is the libertarian argument.

“We want true free trade!” Well, good luck with that.

Because again, the endogenous competitive element is there in its function to override those ideals of a completely self-regulated market, which by the way, wouldn’t work anyway as I touched upon numerous times in prior podcasts, because market externalities would flow and it would be one of the most destructive things you can do. So it’s all a disaster.

Did existing hydrocarbon trade between the US and Iraq stop the US’s criminal invasion? Iraq had previously nationalized its oil industry and moved to trade in euros instead of dollars.

This act of monetary sovereignty deeply challenged US petrol dollar hegemony. And if the policy was to support the decisions of market traders, then why would the US object to that?

Well, obviously it hurts US interests. So, we invade and correct those things.

Hence, the only trade induced liberal peace thesis reality is not mutual benefit between parties or nations, as the old baseless libertarian argument goes.

Mutual benefit between parties – that’s assumed to be what all trades manifest.

Rather, it’s about trade subservience of one party over another, just as you would expect. And it goes on and on, pointing to the single truth, free trade is a mythical narrative, a rhetorical tool used to obscure the very real dynamics of coercion, strategic exclusion, and elite business, and by extension, imperial control. Every other narrative is baseless propaganda.

Once again, I invoke that term recursive.

The entire neoliberal global order is a recursive manifestation of everything else that happens below, from the mom-and-pop store to the megacorporation to the trade agreements between heterogeneous conglomerates, to the institution of imperial violent warfare dominance – it’s all the same recursive logic.

And finally, going back to the liberal piece thesis, the idea that the incentive to see war as more costly than trade as a kind of traditional cost-benefit analysis, right? -as if the spending of trillions of dollars on, say, the Iraq War should have been digested as an irrational posture since the US was clearly not going to recover all the money spent, which is absolutely true – this once again and speaks to the myopic, reductive economic ignorance and wishful ideological thinking of much of what you read in free market libertarian theory.

Completely baseless, why?

Because it doesn’t matter what is spent on the war, as war spending is an instant, mostly internal but also external, by a systemic unfolding, economic growth creator, which is in and of itself a benefit for industry and the economy.

It’s not some investment that you seek a measured return on. It is the military industrial complex reaping mass profits along with the downstream war economy of job creation and beyond.

When you hear about the trillions spent on the Iraq war, one intuitively says, “What a waste of money!” Waste for who exactly?

Waste because it could have gone into healthcare or education or infrastructure or true social needs? Sure. But that’s not the proper framing, not to mention it would never happen anyway, as we do not live in a true democracy where public interest reflects state spending at all.

The endless stream of fiat money sovereign governments create out of thin air has as its first priority the pursuit of economic and by extension military superiority, but whatever means necessary and the benefactor of that almost infinite money is the war economy, which also serves the interest of needed economic growth and once again job creation.

Remember, it doesn’t matter what the market economy sells or buys in any specifics.

It only matters that it does so constantly. The shadow incentive I have talked about in the past, people say things like, “Look at the extreme costs of helping all the maimed and injured veterans. If we didn’t have war, we could have saved all that money once again and applied it to something else.”

Wrong angle.

The entire medical establishment bases its survival on a constant influx of sick and injured people. And that’s what it needs, deep down. It wants more harm and destruction as a matter of business system inputs.

And the classic example of all of this is how World War II was massively influential in bringing the US out of the Great Depression. People will argue the nuances of this outcome, but the broad strokes are very clear.

Federal purchases of ships, tanks, aircraft, and bases vaulted from 2% of GNP in 1939 to roughly 40% by 1944, the biggest fiscal expansion in US history. 12 million men entered the armed forces and another 10 million civilians shifted into defense plants: Employment dropped from 15% in 1940 to less than 2% in 1944.

This surge had huge downstream effects for long-term consumer benefits as well, because the war served as this giant machine of stimulus. And just like we see stimulus in the economy today, its effects are felt for many years.

Another example is how Vladimir Putin and key sectors of Russian industry have deeply benefited from the wartime economy sparked by the invasion of Ukraine. Despite Western sanctions intended to isolate Russia’s economy, the war has catalyzed a significant expansion of its industrial base, particularly in defense, energy and raw materials.

Military production is surged with weapons manufacturers operating around the clock to meet domestic demand and expand exports to other nations and so forth. Unemployment in Russia has dropped to record lows hovering around 3 percent.

Likewise high global energy prices, partly a result of the war itself, have pumped billions into Russian coffers. Russia’s economy has become more self-reliant, in fact, with states spending on defense now representing over 6% of GDP, surpassing Soviet-era levels.

In fact, hence the war has created a self-reinforcing stimulus for the Russian state, bolstering both political control and industrial output, much like the United States experienced during World War II and of course through many of its wars.

Now, I’m not saying that’s the root cause of the Russian-Ukraine war, which is still indeed, I would argue, fundamentally, economic. And I’d like to talk about this a little more so in the next podcast, but it proves the point.

The liberal piece thesis of cost benefit analysis as a deterrent for war in trading societies is garbage because the fact is it is trade itself that is the true source or the foundational and most rooted source of the global conflicts we see, particularly coming from imperial gestures.

Now, one more thing to address as a brief aside before we move on with my chat with Abby Martin. As noted before, global conflicts always have a moral narrative, always, generally related to external groups and their assumed ideology on one level or another, group versus group.

Nazi, Zionist, Hamas, Al-Qaeda, communism, whatever.

The reality of such individual identities and beliefs is not important here. It is the group blame tendency itself I want to address.

Find any historical conflict, and you’re going to find such group versus group narratives and legions of people that believe these intergroup dynamics are the root cause when they are not.

They can’t be. First of all, no person or group is born with any worldview.

They have to be influenced.

And the reason I bring up this tangent is those binary group dynamics, the group xenophobia and outgroup, enemy group distinction is, with of course some exceptions, such as extreme religious perspectives – rooted in a multi-generational economic unfolding that has transposed the stress of market-based economic survival and the inherent conflict to it, to groups of people that are seen as representative of that economic antagonism, symbolically personified.

In other words, the intergroup basis of conflict can ultimately be found in an economic source, although obscured by force of this transposition, which of course isn’t that hard to understand when you think about it.

Let’s put it more crudely. It’s like the pop culture US narrative of Mexicans taking American jobs with a broader bias that emerges over time on a more general level. Xenophobia.

Just look at the draconian, fascistic ICE raids happening in Los Angeles as I recorded this program. Little more needs to be said.

The public has been trained to think immigrants are a foundational threat, largely rooted in economic paranoia, long-term or short-term, without a doubt, compounded by peripheral propaganda that reinforces the xenophobia such as the media calling them criminals, rapists, gang members, and so on.

The negative associations pile on to amplify the prior economic root.

Another good example of this happened in Martin Luther King’s time during the post-reconstruction era where poor white America realized they would need to start sharing paying jobs with the once enslaved black community.

Something MLK talked about a lot, which was far more of a driver of white versus black racism that we see today than slavery’s echoes were or any principles of scientific racism or whatever other excuses that were conjured.

In a speech from March, 1965, he states in regard to the origins of Jim Crow segregation that it was rooted in an economic ploy, and he’s right.

I quote, “Racial segregation was really a political strategy to keep the southern masses divided and southern labor the cheapest in the land. If the poor white plantation or mill worker became dissatisfied with his low wages, the owner would merely threaten to fire him and hire former Negro slaves and pay him even less.”

He called it a “psychological bird” that fed whites a sense of racial superiority in place of a living wage.

In other words, competition over jobs after emancipation was weaponized to pit poor whites particularly but really all whites against the blacks, entrenching racism while keeping wages down for the benefit, of course, of the ownership class.

Never about white supremacy in and of itself in this case, as white supremacy is largely an outcome of economic pressures and related propaganda, using group division as a tool for labor exploitation, once again – by the ownership class.

Those in economic power that are playing the basic game of capitalism, rooted foundationally in labor exploitation itself, a core causality to the still rampant pattern of racism we see today in the United States and beyond.

And it’s important to understand capitalism is at the root of the ever-emerging group hatred we see everywhere today, including the justifications for International Warfare.

Or just conflict overall when you think about it.

It supplies the core precondition for external dehumanization that gets people to join the military and the public to wave their flags and hold up the status quo.

Something to keep in mind, it’s a very important point, as the imperial machine largely depends on these false narratives, driven once again, and hence my core point, by economic competition and the pattern of dominance and all of the long-term sociological effects that have occurred systemically.

And this concludes part one of our program, and now on to Abby Martin.

PART II:

Peter:
And to continue this conversation on the blight of empire and endless global war, particularly with respect to Gaza, I’m honored to welcome to the show my dear friend all around Super Heroine, Abby Martin.

Hey Abby.

Abby:
Hi Peter, amazing to be on.

Thank you so much.

Peter:
And I want to go ahead and start by saying you’ve relentlessly and reliably, incredibly and very effectively been a communicator on the subject of the US Empire from your investigative journalism that’s gone for years to your wonderful films and just a quick brief introduction:

How does you end up where you are now?

Abby:
You know, it really started with Iraq and 9/11, Peter. And your films actually solidified my awakening and radicalization. And I find it kind of sad that that word radicalization has become a negative connotation because for me it was radicalizing my entire being.

Everthing I thought I knew was obviously turned upside down, especially just kind of… just blissful ignorance living in suburbia.

I mean, as a white American from an upper middle-class family and then kind of just being awakened to the fact that my government would maliciously lie to invade, occupy another country; would lie about a terrorist attack to manufacture consent for horrific policies that subjugate and oppress tens of millions of people around the world.

So a confluence of so many things, when I was a freshman in college, that juxtaposed with the fact that I was at an institution, San Diego State –  you know, San Diego has five military bases.

It’s the biggest, you know, most entrenched, militaristic kind of city in the country, surprisingly.

So, so all of that together, I just felt like I was alone. I was totally atomized and isolated in my views. And I just started agitating and organizing against the Iraq War.

Of course, through that, Peter, I think the journey is a long one, and it took me a little bit to realize that the media was complicit, that the Democratic Party was complicit. So, it started off as “Bush was evil incarnate.” It turned into, “Oh my God, Nancy Pelosi, why are you doing this?”

To: Oh my God, the media institution is part of the state apparatus! It’s all part of the same system of oppression and control. It’s simply an extension and appendage of the state, and it’s activated whenever they do need to dumb us down and manufacture consent for this horrific foreign policy.

So, akin to and true to what Martin Luther King said, that the more we spend on our military, we’re approaching spiritual death and Peter nothing domestically can be uncoupled with the 1.5 trillion in real spending that we are spending on death and destruction under our global capitalist and imperialist model.

Peter:
Yeah, it really is an incredible machine that has continued to slosh along, and the media, which we’ll talk about a bit more in a moment, it’s sort of confluence of values, right?

It’s such a unique intersection of forces, ’cause if it wasn’t for the media in all of these situations, the public might start to deviate in its thought process.

And you would think that in the United States with the specter of free independent media, you would see a little bit more power in that regard.

And that certainly speaks to what we’ve been in watching Palestine and Gaza.

And speaking of that, let’s jump into that a little bit.

You know, I think it was like a couple months after October 7th last year, I was on your show Empire Files.

And since that time, many, many months later, well over a year later, the relentless campaign of destruction and horror is only accelerated with impunity.

As of now, the total deaths on paper are about 54,000 with statistical projections that are three to four times higher at a minimum.

Injured is at 121,000, which I’m sure is also low. And we’re not talking about cuts and bruises here.

We’re talking about lost arms and legs; quality of life destroyed; mostly children. Hospitals, building into this ultimate genocide without a doubt have been strategically targeted with 94% damaged or destroyed according to the WHO, which again, there’s a conservativeness there.

And even those that are still deemed operational have virtually no resources because of the embargo.

And as far as the infrastructure, I guess they say about 40% of the buildings remain in Gaza…

Abby:
I don’t know where they are. I haven’t seen them!

Peter:

And even if they’re there, the entire infrastructure is destroyed. Electricity is gutted, the water is polluted, if running at all. It’s a near total blackout with the exception of the gas generators that are probably delegated mostly to the few hospitals that do remain in some operation.

And then to build into this framework of the obvious ethnic cleansing and genocide, the journalists: There’s hundreds of journalists that have been killed, which I’m sure is sensitive to you as a journalist yourself, most of them Palestinian, but there’s also these massive blackouts of any media that’s attempted to report the truth, which is rare enough in and of itself.

So, the stats just go on and on, revealing the true nature of what Israel is doing.

And as we both know, has been planning to do all along, not in some stumbling thing; it’s a periodic farce that they’re like, “Oh, Well, here’s this new ceasefire.” The ICC has literally an arrest warrant for Netanyahu.

But yet, where are the arms embargo? Where are the actual sanctions against Israel?

Like, where is the international community? Not to mention, going back to media once again, which is completely in concert with this incredible double standard and bias: where is the media simultaneously?

What can we say about this incredible impunity that Israel continues to have after 600 plus days.

Abby:
I think you just laid out the situation, the kind of apocalyptic reality that we are all watching, because I can only compare this to the Holocaust because of the industrialized nature of the slaughter and the scale and scope of it.

And of course, the genocidal intent that’s laid bare, this is all documented, but what’s so fascinating and disturbing is that addition of that high technology that we can all watch, like tuning into Germany in 1935 and you can just see a window into that.

There’s nothing that Black Mirror or any dystopian sci-fi horror movie would show that is worse than what we are actually living through, Peter.

We already know that Gaza was uninhabitable, deemed so by the UN because of a lack of potable water alone.

back in 2018, they were saying 2020 gods would be completely uninhabitable.

You cannot live somewhere with poison water.

That was already most of the illnesses and bacterial infections and everything was because of the infected water because Israel continuously would bomb the only water desalination plant in the Gaza Strip.

So right now, I mean, 19 months into this, it’s incomprehensible. Peter, we have talked about this like, ’til we’re blue in the face because I feel like for me, I lean on you as someone who can understand like human psychology and how this happened, not just how we poison ourselves and how capitalism is reigned supreme.

No, how humanity can collectively witness, bear witness to this and turn the other cheek and turn away.

And for me, and I know that you started off, you know, making the Zeitgeist trilogy, it’s like “if people just knew,” that was my entire life’s mission and goal.

“If people just knew the information, if they just knew that they were being lied to, surely everything would change.

People would become activated and mobilized.

And that’s all you can do is put the information out there and hope that people can use it to their best ability.”

That’s not true.

I don’t believe that anymore, Peter.

I think the system global capitalism, it is dumbed us down to such an extent that I don’t I don’t even think that people even know what the capacity is to be human, to have empathy.

And I know it’s a rat race and I know that 60% of Americans don’t even have a penny in savings.

I get that. But there’s something innately wrong.

Peter:

There were periods of time where humans didn’t really behave like this. It took the infrastructure; the structure and the incentives that go along with it and everything else that we’ve created.

I would argue through the development of market capitalism as you pointed out as well.

Trying not to sound over simplistic when we talk that way, because there’s lots of intersecting factors and they build upon themselves, the disease rises, and eventually even the root causality starts to become lost.

And the sickness starts to take on an increasing life of its own.

But we do know that if you condition people a certain way, as all major political, hegemonic, you know, figures have proselytized throughout the years, you just have to tell people something over and over again.

You just have to put them in a condition, essentially of fear when it comes to war, and these things seem to unfold like clockwork.

And groupism too. That’s the worst to me.

Like, for example, you’re going back to Palestine. If I see one more headline that’s talking about the jubilation of this family that got their hostage back in Israel and it’s on front page, you know, New York Times.

Like seriously? Yeah, great. But what about the families that have been wiped out every single day?!

Abby:

I mean, the whole thing is so perplexingly bizarre, Peter.

And I remember asking you when all this started, I said, surely, you know, and I don’t even know, I think it was pre-genocide, but I always lean on you for your opinion and you were just like, ‘Abby, people will get conditioned to utter degradation.’

Like the acclimation to degradation will continue.

And the conditioning and the group think. Just because people are economically down, doesn’t mean that you’re just going to be automatically awakened of the structures of oppression.

No, it’s actually more likely that you will get captured into these easier brackets.

The right-wing rhetoric capturing people talking about legacy media, or fake news. I mean, because the right-wing is actually trying to capture that audience, unlike the Democratic Party, it’s working.

They understand the disaffected, young, white youth that are looking for some sort of political answers or orientation. And of course, hate JD Vance you want, but they are talking about poor people in Appalachia.

I’ve never even heard any Democratic Party official literally saying the word poor people. They actually ignore that poor people exist or homelessness. It’s only like an aside as an annoyance.

But back to Palestine, I mean, back to the media, Peter, what was really fascinating at this point, I don’t think anyone can claim ignorance per se, but there is a really fascinating poll that came out through Pew.

I think back a year ago, I think it was April of 2024, that showed that half of Americans didn’t know if more Israelis had died than Palestinians in the entire conflict.

Whose fault is that?

Peter:

Yeah.

Abby:

And what would have happened if the media didn’t bury the lead, didn’t make painfully constructed haikus to absolve Israel of their crimes; basically telling their journalists, delineated, and then that you can’t say “occupation.”

You can’t say “ethnic cleansing.” You can’t say the word “genocide.” You can’t say the word “Palestine” at the New York Times.

So literally working to absolve Israel in real time as they document these crimes.

If it weren’t for the Palestinian journalists, I shudder to think what people would even be saying about what we’re witnessing, Peter.

And the Palestinian journalists…they’ve sacrificed themselves because putting on that press jacket every day, they knew that they were making themselves a target.

I have never seen such brazen slaughter. I have never seen such genocidal bloodlust on display with the complete gas lighting of the entire political and media establishment.

It is schizophrenic. It is crazy.

I mean, the shooting of those two Israeli embassy workers, the shock and horror, you everyone was so up in arms about the fact that, “Oh my God, how are people actually taking to violence?”

It’s like, “Are you kidding?”

First of all, we have been so desensitized that every day I log on and I see a baby shredded apart. What the hell do you think that does to people?

So yeah, what’s surprising to me is that things like this don’t happen every day, Peter.

Peter:

I completely agree. Going back to the poor gentleman that set himself on fire, you see that internalization and people just can’t handle it.

It’s like the most normal people are the sickest and those that really feel the sensitivity – that snap – are considered the crazy ones.

And obviously no one condones violence, but the double standard is just so outrageous.

And the way that, for example, the ultimate excuse of Hamas – you know, “baby eating Hamas,” and Hamas is the one lying about everything… I don’t understand how people don’t recognize as the most fundamental history of all of this.

Hamas didn’t come out of nowhere. Hamas, I think, originated around 1987.

They were a response (and they were even funded by Israel in countering to the Palestinian Authority, but that’s another subject).

And so they come in, they’re elected, because if you’re a Palestinian, you’re living in an open-air prison, these decades and decades, the NAKBA 1948 unfolding.

And what? People just expect there not to be some kind of rebellion of the people in the prison on the coastline? It is shocking to see the lack of, again – the double standard – but also lack of realism when it comes to when people think about violence in this so-called terrorist threat against Israel. It’s not a terrorist threat against Israel. It’s far more complicated than that.

It’s literally a rebellion of oppressed people. And I don’t understand how that conversation can’t be put forward. And again, we go back to the media, every single president, it’s just the standard rote.

You know, he’s like, oh, “Hamas is evil.” Oh, “we can’t recognize Hamas.”

The lobbying by Israel has created this incredible, incredible narrative. And to this day it’s pervasive and the ultimate excuse. Going back to what I said earlier, I just can’t believe it resorts back to that.

If I hear one more person say “the war against Israel and Hamas!”

First of all, it’s not a war!

When’s the last time somebody in Israel actually got killed – with the 50 to 100 people being slaughtered in Gaza every day, you can just see the numbers.

Where’s the war?

So anyway…

Abby:

A war against an army with ragtag weaponry that has no air force, no airport.

It’s unrelenting, Peter. It’s unbelievable. Like you were saying, you’ve had such great things to say about this. The rapidity and succession of war crimes. The fact that we lived through the Iraq war, it was such a horrifying crime. Such a grievous crime.

A million Iraqis dead. Haditha Massacre; all these things that happen; Abu Ghraib. It seems like that is happening daily. I don’t know what that means. I don’t know what kind of new world we are entering into.

I understand the conditions that got us here, but it still terrifies me that that, the war crimes to this extent, daily, have been normalized and actually like are now setting a precedent like this is okay. This is fine.

We will continue to protect you.

Peter:

As we talked about in the last conversation, that’s my biggest long-term fear, is the desensitization as the destruction of the environment continues. As we’ll talk about later with respect to your new film, you’re going to have this movement toward civilization, as it were, the wealthier nations, particularly in the West.

And if you have that type of mentality against this third party, this xenophobia, and you have seen this violence happen against supposed adversaries of the “white” Israel.

You’re looking at a very unique way of getting people to get comfortable with larger order war crimes or essentially human rights violations coming from the West as these forces continue because the migration crisis hasn’t even started as the rest of the world suffers from what we’ve done to it through pollution and of course, periodic war and destruction. And of course, the internal disputes that are fostered because of all the other shenanigans of post-colonial reality.

And this is not going to change. So that’s the most frightening thing to me, in the broad scheme.

We are conditioning people to be really cold and rough-minded and adversarial.

And if we can look the other way on Gaza, what can we look the other way on when it comes to building camps outside the United States; on the borders of United States when it comes to the “evil immigrants” and the “gangs” and all the crap that we’ve developed in the same spirit of that enemy against civilization. So this it’s absolutely frightening trajectory.

Abby:

Well yeah it’s been said many times that Gaza’s a test not only for us from the powerful and the rich and the imperialist to say this is what we are willing to do to maintain global supremacy in our hegemony in the Middle East but it’s also a test of our humanity.

It’s a mirror. Who are you if you’re not moved by Gaza? What are you?

And that’s the question that we should all ask ourselves because what I’ve realized is that we live among; it’s not just those in power…It’s, you know, people in power are human beings, just like the people that surround us. And it’s just kind of a lot to take in that we kind of have to take stock of our communities in general.

Because it’s beyond just who doesn’t care, it’s a fascist mentality that’s taken root that I never saw the reveling of suffering before, and that’s something that I am greatly disturbed by.

But there’s something else that’s really fascinating about just Israel in general. I was talking to my friend Abu Bakr who narrowly escaped the genocide, and he asked me, he just said, “Abby, why did it take 75 years for people to realize what Israel was?”

And I don’t have a good answer for that because for me it’s the most obvious thing in the world.

It’s a slow colonization. It’s an ethnic cleansing that’s like a slow motion genocide for 75 years.

As you mentioned, the Nakba, the 1967 war, the constant eating away at what should have been the future Palestinian state.

And Gaza. Jerusalem, I mean, all of it is just so obviously laid bare, but because of the propaganda, it really shows you the nature of the propaganda to twist reality on its head.

And people could just lose all common sense, all critical thinking skills, all of their mental faculties go out the window when it comes to this situation. It becomes complicated.

It becomes super confusing. And people can’t have moral clarity on it when it is the most crystal clear thing in the world.

Peter:

It’s textbook as we’ve seen repeating throughout literally thousands of years, too.

Abby:
Right, it’s like Christopher Columbus going to native people’s heads putting a gun to their head: “get out!” Textbook ethnic cleansing.

Peter:
And there’s one other factor to this because of how powerful the lobby has been – and the “cultural lobby,” I’d call it that.

I’ve known people that are of some Jewish relationship or have some family in Israel and they absolutely agree that this is a horror, but they’re terrified to say anything because they’re in networks, business networks, or other kinds of social networks that they know will come down and crush them if they actually say something.

And that’s fairly new. That’s a new thing.

And speaking to the groupism and just this bizarre power that the Israeli lobby in general has- but there’s also the cultural lobby.

I mean, the way they, obviously, take the universities: they slap an anti-Semitic label on any pro-Palestinian protest.

And of course the lunatic executive branch is trying to use that for whatever they possibly can in their defunding of Harvard and all of this insanity.

But it builds into that strange cultural apprehension. And that is something relatively new.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen that in historical literature.

Abby:

Oh no, they’ve really honed in on the propaganda where now; it’s coupling everything together; it’s really fascinating because they’re using anti-Semitism and the charge of it but I think it’s just a stepping stone to anti-Americanism in general.

Like this is the easiest in-road to conflate everything with terrorism; sympathizing, you know, anyone who’s pro-Palestinian, they wanna immediately make that the benchmark, but they want to move the goalpost to make it if you criticize US foreign policy at all, that’s a threat.

And so you’ve seen it’s kind of couched under, “it’s a threat to US foreign policy” if you criticize Israel. So that synonymous nature of anti-Semitism is like a bit of conflation with support for terrorism.

But I do think that this is going to be much more far-reaching and much more widespread.

And this is the easiest in-road that they have. And to your point, a lot of people are confused with the tail wagging the dog thing because they look at the lobby and they say, how in the hell is this single issue lobby, which is the biggest, most powerful single issue lobby on the hill, how does it have so much undue influence in the fact that it’s gone and lobbied state legislatures, under the guise of anti-Semitism, to actually undermine our First Amendment.

How is that possible?

Because we’ve been boldened it.

The US has emboldened and subsidized this lobby to such a ridiculous degree that this is what has come back around.

I always tell people, I always go back to that Marco Rubio clip where the Parkland kids are debating him and they’re like “stop taking money from the NRA.”

And he’s just like, “you think that the NRA pays me to be pro-gun?”

He’s like, “no, they buy into my agenda, man.”

And so all these people who are like, “stop taking money from APAC.”
All of the people in Congress are already Zionists.

So like, you don’t get to that position unless you believe; unless you’re true believer in empire, in capitalism, and in Zionism. It’s all part of the same project.

But it’s just fascinating, it’s just fascinating because I don’t think it starts and stops there, but unfortunately, it’s just bred a lot of anti-Semitism because of just how ridiculous this has become.

Peter:

It’s like part of these general psychological games, which I want to talk about here as well, in a more tangible sense, such as the ceasefire proposals, which I know that there’s some being entertained right now.

I know two have been implemented, both of course utterly violated by Israel in the truth of the matter, even though you’ll see splitting of hairs throughout as they try to continue this anti-Hamas narrative.

But what I find most amazing is given the admissions of Israel and the Trump administration, stating outright that the assault is not going to end until “Hamas is destroyed,” once again as if you can destroy terrorism;  these are all abstractions, as if you can destroy resistance in the case of Gaza.

And of course, coupled with the blatant, now publicly admitted, even though it was all in the archives, plan to annex the entire Gaza region, and of course will lead to the West Bank as well.

So then, you know, we see this headlong, we see the shit in the media. What’s the true point of the ceasefire then? Window dressing? What are they just gonna give people a little bit more sustenance, maybe? And so they can endure the final stages of their ethnic cleansing and genocide? Is it just being polite?

You see my point though, the absurdity.

Abby:

I mean, at the very beginning, the fact that that ceasefire was the goal – it was like the lowest possible thing that to call for: stop killing.

It was like, first of all, you’re conflating both sides, which I disagreed with ’cause it’s like, I don’t want Palestinians to stop firing, they’re the ones who are being genocide-ed.

Peter:
Yes.

Abby:
But also, they have the legal right to resist, (vs) their occupiers, but that’s what they wanted.

They wanted a cessation to the massacres that were unrelenting.

Peter:

Oh, absolutely.

Abby:

And so, and after God, after all over a year, Peter, the most basic call wasn’t even honored.

I mean, it was ignored. It was ridiculed. It was just horrifying to watch a year of just unending slaughter of kids of babies, and they couldn’t even stop.

And so, yeah, to have that finally happen in January with Trump and then the news of Biden coming out -and not even once did he even try to say the word ceasefire to Netanyahu and that they knew they could just go and go and go.

The fact that they had the most virulent unabashed Zionist, proud Zionist, ardent Zionist ever: Biden was the worst possible person to be in office when this all happened because we know how he felt. He was fully gloves off whatever Israel wanted to do.

It was just so unbelievable to have it all solidified after the fact to say: Biden really just gave them the green light to do whatever they wanted. We know that he bypassed Congress 100 times to get them arms and secret deals.

But how do you explain, I mean, the constant doling out of the ceasefire negotiations, we know from the beginning, as you mentioned, I mean, it was, I think October 9th, 2023 that Hamas said – I think it was really clear at that point, Israel was going to go full genocidal and Hamas said “We will give you all the hostages if you do not invade.” They initially were like “here, don’t invade the Gaza Strip and we will hand over all the hostages.”

That was the initial deal that Hamas offered. Of course, you don’t hear anything about that.

That was reported in the times of Israel. So, over the course of the next year, it was just Hamas trying to do whatever they could.

They barely had any leverage at all because I think they quickly realized that this wasn’t going to be the same game as it was 10 years prior when they were able to exchange a thousand Palestinian hostages for that one Israeli soldier. The Hannibal directive was employed and I think they knew, “Oh God, they are willing to kill all these hostages. And we have no leverage at all.

So, it’s been really sad actually to watch Israel just have carte blanche to commit genocide while saying it, Peter, while the Western media lies to us and Western politicians continue to placate us about the nonsense fantasy about a two-state solution as we all witness Gaza be eradicated before our eyes.

It is sick. And so to just constantly tease the ceasefire, ceasefire and Hamas is just, we’ll do whatever you want, here, okay, okay, here. We’ll give you the American soldier. Yeah, he’s a hostage too. He’s not a POW for some reason, here. We’ll give you him.

They’ve tried to do everything in good faith. We all know Israel’s the one who lies. They’ve never upheld any ceasefire resolution. We’ve seen Israel invade Lebanon. We’ve seen them bomb Syria. We’ve seen everything happen and then the media still paints it as Hamas is dissolving the ceasefire.

It’s like, what is Israel doing to every single one of its neighbors?

Peter:
Yeah, I know.

Abby:

Bombing, occupying, pursuing the Greater Israel Project, but it just still, we’re lied to like children.

And so now it’s just so sad, this latest round of quote unquote ceasefire negotiations where you have Steve Witkoff, Trump’s Middle East advisor trying to go over there and negotiate with Hamas and then Israel tries to tarnish the deal as they always have.

They are very angry because Netanyahu has said over and over again: It’s not even about the hostages. It’s not even about Hamas. It’s about Palestinians. It’s about taking back Gaza.

They want to pretend like it’s about Hamas because they know it’s an impossible goal. They know that they can never actually take out Hamas because Hamas has said repeatedly: “we will relinquish control.”

“We’re not going to surrender and lay down our arms”. That would be insane and that would be suicide.

And if they did that, what’s to say that Israel wouldn’t come in and just genocide everyone? They are the only ones standing in between mass graves and the Israeli soldiers right now. Are resistance groups like Hamas and Islamic Jihad and DFLP.

So it is absolutely insane, but they have said multiple times. “We don’t want to control the Gaza Strip anymore.” We have had no choice because of the conditions that we’ve been put in for the last 15 years, this medieval siege, the fact that you have an Israeli puppet, Mahmoud Abbas controlling the West Bank.

None of this is fair and free. “We can’t have fair and partial elections with this kind of stifling military control in peding our self-determination.” And so they’ve said multiple times, “we don’t even really want to be the government. We are willing to step aside.”

So all of this is gone by the wayside, Peter. No one entertains this at all. It’s just constantly dehumanization of Palestinians. And then for some reason it’s turned into such a dehumanization of Hamas that they’ve openly said they’re going to go after all Hamas civilian infrastructure.

As we know, I mean, that’s water workers, that’s people who pick up the garbage, that’s the mailman, I mean, that’s pretty much everyone in Gaza who had any sort of civilian job.

Peter:

Yeah, it’s carte blanche. Anything that they can pin to anything that’s related to the H word is now on the chopping block. And of course, they didn’t matter though, as you pointed out earlier. It doesn’t matter what Hamas does.

It’s all a ploy.

And I wish of all the things that people could understand about this – because that is probably the largest propaganda driver. If I see one more person on social media say, well, “why won’t Hamas just release the hostages?!”

Like, Jesus, how can you not recognize?

Abby:

It’s like – just stop hitting yourself.

What do you mean release the hostages? Do you really think they would stop doing this?

Peter:

That’s the point.

It’s like an incredible too, because they’ve even stated it. It’s as if the news media even, whatever, CNN — can’t they just report on what’s being stated in the bowels of Israel?

It’s been stated over and over again that this will be a literal ethnic cleansing.

And speaking of this, there’s another game if we want to call it in probably a terrible distinction of the word, but this Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, that’s just arisen, which I guess is what appears to be as an attempt to override UN true aid functions and bring in this US-backed, CIA led or former CIA agent, but we all know that no one ever leaves the agency:

Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. They’re pulling people down south now.

What is your view of this strategy? Because obviously, it’s not about aid. It’s about something else.

Abby:

Yes, and for as long as the genocide has been ongoing, they have constantly corralled Palestinians into these so-called humanitarian corridors and quote unquote safe zones, which are really just killing zones and more death traps.

And what this is just a new ploy because as we know since the re-initiation of the genocide after the initial ceasefire, they have cut off all water, all aid, everything was cut off in a complete and total siege of Gaza, not one ounce of baby formula.

We know that dozens and dozens of civilians have died through starvation, dehydration, curable illnesses, obviously, that could have been solved through just basic medication.

So, this has been a horrific situation. The world has been watching a million children starve to death- images of the Holocaust. So, Netanyahu basically said in a press release, as you mentioned, they say all of this plainly.

This wasn’t just some leaked internal phone call like Victoria Nuland, this was literally Netanyahu giving a press release saying:
 “Look, I have Republican senators coming to me saying, we support Israel with all our hearts.

‘Here’s the thing, Netanyahu. We can’t just stand by and have photos of like starving babies come out and still give you everything you want. So can you at least just pretend like you’re dealing with the starvation thing?’”  

And so Netanyahu is saying all this like on camera. He’s like, “look, they’re coming to me being like, we want to do whatever you want to do, but we can’t in good conscience tell our constituents like we let babies starve. So can you at least just pretend that there’s some sort of aid scheme?”

He said this.

And so, to solve the problem, Peter, he got this CIA cut-out with also ties to Mossad; former Blackwater folks who have an Arabic accent, you know: They’re coming straight from killing people in Iraq, probably, coming just straight to this distribution center.

What it is, everyone can see the photos. It is literally just again worse than like factory farming lines of cattle, corralling Palestinians in the blazing sun, no food, no water. I mean, these people are waiting for hours on end in tiny, single-file lines and literally like throwing them scraps of food.

There’s no baby formula. There is no medicine. It’s scraps of food. Like dogs, like dogs.

And what they’re doing is biometric surveillance technology to “minority report” everyone’s face to say, “Oh, are you affiliated with Hamas? Okay, if you’re not, here’s a scrap, a morsel of food.”

And then the people who are running; there are stampedes; they’ve killed 30 people already trying to get food.

This is sick, it is so beyond sick every day, I wonder how can it get more disturbing. And so this is what we’re watching now, Peter.

Peter:
Yeah, it’s mind blowing.

And the fact that this kind of thing is actually being condemned by major institutions, like the UN and whatnot. I mean, shit, Israel has more war crime accusations and documentation than literally probably anything we’ve seen in the past 100 years, if you were to compare the charges.

And yet, again, no sanctions, nothing. And even this kind of ruse that they’re putting forward – the outcry is there.

Abby:
That’s what’s so curious about it.

And I forgot to actually say that this whole scheme, this aid scheme is actually designed to lure, trap, and then kill the Palestinians who they deem like politically unsavory. So, all of this is tricking Palestinians into basically just kill boxes for these menial food scraps.

It is sick and sadistic beyond recognition and so reprehensible, Peter.

But to your point about the sanctions, I mean, after the ICJ ruling, it was amazing to see on a global stage because Israel’s been experiencing and enjoying impunity for its entire colonial existence. I mean, they are like a colony; an apartheid colony.

And so it was incredible to at least see that kind of historical watershed moment being like finally a global institution that we all herald as like this beacon of whatever human rights- is finally calling them out on a global stage saying they’re committing genocide.

That was amazing.

And then we just saw what happened afterward. It was like Netanyahu was able to fly all over the world. You have world leaders condemning Israel, giving the obligatory disapproval of starving babies and mass murdering humans daily, but then there’s nothing done.

There’s just rhetoric. We saw even Spain was still delivering arms shipments, like transferring actual products to help facilitate the genocide.

You see the UK. Look at under Starmer. I mean, this is the Labour Party guy who is sending spy planes daily from Cyprus to gather intel into Gaza. All of these people are war criminals who are complicit in the genocide.

It’s so far beyond just, oh, they’re not sanctioning. They are all actively doing this. The only thing that I can think of is the US has that much control. We don’t want to face it. We don’t want to really face that we are under like a global military dictatorship under one state.

But we are. And I think that this has really proven that.

The amount of terror and fear that the United States empire has put into the rest of the world has resulted in this, Peter, an apocalypse that no one can do anything about because they are terrified of what the US is going to do to them.

And it’s a sick, pathetic display, isn’t it?

Peter:
Really brings it all to the surface. Even US software companies helping with the artificial intelligence that they’re using, basically indiscriminately bomb, but they hide behind the artificial intelligence and whatnot.

And going back what you said about that, that new humanitarian fund, just before I forget, there’s some analysts think that they’re corralling everybody to southern Gaza, of course, to annex initially northern Gaza.

And then once everyone’s barricaded in southern Gaza, those that they don’t kill, they’ll finally be able to cart off to some other poor nation that for whatever reason will accept them, under once again the pressure of the bullying United States, which, by the way, do you think that’s something that we can expect to see actual movement of Palestinians outside relatively soon?

Abby:

Well, that was part of this whole aid distribution scheme was Netanyahu’s calling Trump’s plan revolutionary, the plan for Libya to actually be forced to take a million people in this force transfer, which is so sick as just a commentary, isn’t it, after getting completely destroyed?

Peter:

As if Libya has the resources, that’s just a complete humanitarian nightmare by extension as we could all expect. Jesus Christ.

Abby:

I mean, the thing is, I think that they’re trying to kill as many as they can, and then once it becomes so untenable, I mean, you see kind of a shift rhetorically, not with obviously anything tangible, but rhetorically, people are really throwing Netanyahu into the us because they really want to preserve their military garrison.

And so, all of these Western leaders are like, we’re willing to throw Netanyahu to the wolves, potentially even to the Hague ultimately if we can wash our hands of Gaza, rehabilitate our apartheid colony and just move forward. And I think they’re just buying enough time to do that.

Peter:

Interesting.

Yeah, I could see that, especially with all the criminal accusations against Netanyahu.

It’s almost like he’s prepared for the fall one way or another, which would be both satisfying, of course, the scapegoatism would be a disaster in the way you describe it, as if you just shift leaders and suddenly everything is fine.

And that’s same with George W. Bush and Iraq and everything else.

That’s one of the standards.

Abby:

Well, they’re pretending that he’s an aberration just like Trump. We know that Trump is the perfect outgrowth of our societies exactly the same way as Netanyahu. You look at polling that was just done from the University of Pennsylvania. It’s absolutely terrifying. The genocidal mania that’s taken hold of Israeli society is unfixable internally.

It’s something that requires boycott, divestment sanctions from the outside because there’s no hope from within a society that are gone.

Peter:
I can’t believe any human being, regardless of their belief structure, could fall victim.

But then again, you look at Nazi Germany.

Abby:
Fear

Peter:

Yeah, absolutely. And of course the groupism

Abby:
And they genuinely think Palestinians want to kill them. I mean, I never believed in evil before.

I think that there’s definitely capacity for the lack of empathy and like the banality of evil thing.

But, but look, there is something to be said about that psychological manipulation of Israeli society from cradle to grave. There’s something there that you have to be terrified existentially.

Like I know Israelis don’t even travel into the West Bank. They never even interact with Palestinians.

I’ve talked to several Israeli Jews who are like, “we don’t talk to Palestinian. We talked them when they’re serving us food. Like we don’t integrate with these people.”

And that’s yeah, so it’s completely isolated and segregated 100%.

Peter:

When I was there even many, many years ago, I couldn’t believe the segregation, the checkpoints as you are very familiar with.

So this pattern is just long and enduring and just like Nazi Germany, you couldn’t have that type of behavior without the passivity and ultimately the favor of the general population in the majority.

And I want to shift gears a little bit because I think it falls in with your new project Earth’s greatest enemy. I know you’ve produced this film; it’s been a couple years in the making, is that right? I mean, it’s been a while.

Abby:

Almost five.

Peter:

Yeah, can’t wait to see it.

I think there’s some theatrical things happening which we can talk about too.

There’s such an important large-scale process of influence that’s happening on this planet and as we touched upon earlier the environmental crisis and climate crisis all of these things are just fuel for all of the other levels of aggression, war, insanity and that’s what we can expect.

Do you talk about this in that film at all?

Abby:

Oh, just the fossil fuel infrastructure capitalism maintenance and how it all started and is maintained.

I mean look – the point and the reason that all this is happening is, as you know, I mean, the economic structure and the primary protector and enforcer of that structure is the US military.

And so it absolutely is unpacked because you cannot just look at the symptoms. I mean, you have to go to the root. And so it’s a tough conversation to have because you have to keep unpacking how we got here and people don’t want to face that.

I barely even hear people talk about the reality of climate change today. And I think that’s because it’s really hard to face. It’s really hard to face our reality. I’m the type of person – I need to look at things wide-eyed and clear-eyed. I need to see exactly what we’re up against.

It’s not necessarily demoralizing. To me, it’s enlightening and empowering because then I know what needs to be said and done.

I don’t want to look at anything with rose-colored glasses. And so this film, it’s a tough watch, but I think it’s a necessary one. I’m sure it’ll have a very positive influence.

Going back to climate change in terms of this kind of narrative structure and the propaganda, just like all the nonsense with how people in the West, excuse me, view Hamas and Israel and the whole dispute, climate change is another completely saturated subject with huge disinformation going back many, many decades in favor of course- the fossil fuel industry.

And by extension, as I’m sure you touch upon: the military industrial complex at large. There’s a huge interconnection between the hydrocarbon industry and the way these institutions have to function.

And to lose that actually would be a game changer if we actually moved to renewables and things of that nature, particularly making countries self-sustainable through renewable means.

So there’s this interesting web to that. And I think that’s a really important subject. So if you wouldn’t mind for the audience, it’s kind of run down what this film without giving it away.

No spoilers. Run down what this film essentially outlines and the fundamental argument that you put forward.

Abby:

Yeah, so I want to touch upon the oil, the fossil fuel infrastructure and the maintenance of that and why there’s so many bases around the world to prop that system up, Peter.

But just the main thesis and premise of the film is tackling that gargantuan fact that probably your audience has heard piecemeal, which is the US military is the largest institutional polluter on the planet, the Pentagon.

And so I first heard that kind of milling around about seven years ago in a couple academic journals and studies and it would be like a headline here and there the US military is a larger polluter than 140 countries.

Sounds crazy, right?

And then you realize that the US military is that big of a polluter because of its oil purchases just on paper, just the purchases. See, they don’t calculate anything with emissions. That’s all under the guise of national security.

So all of these global climate treaties, the COP, you know, we’re at what, COP29 now, for the last 29 years ever since Kyoto, the US military has basically exempted itself and all other countries have followed suit.

So no emissions from the US military are counted at any of these global climate treaty totals.

And so we actually have no idea what we’re talking about when we talk about net zero by 2050, this and that. And of course, the whole COP thing is a farce.

Anyway, there’s more fossil fuel lobbyists there than any other country’s delegation. But when I found that out, we went into this film just wanting to calculate that. We wanted to quantify how many emissions are we talking about just from the Pentagon. And of course, the Pentagon’s not a force in isolation. You have to bring in NATO.

And NATO becomes another political beast because of this whole demand to buy a US weaponry. It’s unbelievable. Another kind of farce and front for US military power to pretend like there’s some sort of global cooperation with the empire and it’s not just completely engineering everything itself.

So we went into that just wanting to unpack that. But every stone we turned over became another topic. Peter, as you know, I mean, your Interreflections, it’s a beast and you have this idea.

But when you don’t have the beginning and the end, you realize every topic is another documentary. And so what this film turned into was basically the totality of military pollution.

So it became something so much bigger than just emissions. We’re talking about military toxic dumping, just the arsenal alone. I mean, having such an outrageous amount of military equipment that dwarfs every other nation combined, just the chemicals that are used to clean the engines and the arsenal is creating so much toxic waste and dumping and pollution of water supplies, the PFAS contamination, the VOCs.

I mean, it just goes on and on and on. Then you look at the sacrifice zones. Every single base is a dumping ground, is a sacrifice zone for the indigenous people, and the veterans who live on it.

And so the film tells these stories, it kind of tells 20 different topics within the giant umbrella of proving the fact that the US military is indeed Earth’s greatest enemy for a myriad of reasons. It’s not just what I talked about. It’s obviously the effects of war, which are totally unquantifiable.

I mean, look at Gaza alone, the blowing up of all of that concrete, the rebuilding, the toxic fallout of the munitions. A lot of people just talk about depleted uranium, but actually the most highly toxic carcinogen is just from bullets. And there’s estimations that every person who died in Iraq, like 140,000 bullets were used.

So, we’re talking about generational impacts that are beyond comprehension that are going to be millennia of poison fallout from all of the war and the death and destruction that’s caused.

I mean, ecocide was brought up because of our behavior in Vietnam. So this film is a one-stop shop. Similarly to Gaza Fights for Freedom, I wanted to make an unapologetic film that proves my thesis that can be used as an educational tool to solidify all of these seemingly disparate struggles around the world, whether it’s immigration or the economy here or you know Gaza.

All of these things have one common cause, Peter, and that’s capitalism and by extension imperialism.

Peter:
We’re fueling literally this violent machine through one of the most unsustainable practices built into a war economy.

And of course as you just touched upon it builds back into this growth ethic and all the sicknesses of the incentives and the requirements of essentially market capitalism is just spiraling.

I don’t know, Abby! Should I (laughing) grab my noose or my shotgun now?

Abby:

There’s a beautiful thing about it and that’s the love and the people that you meet and like you Peter, I love you or my brother and the thing is I wouldn’t know you if I wasn’t actively engaged in this whole movement and that’s kind of a beautiful thing.

I wouldn’t know my husband, I wouldn’t have my family. And so when you choose to be involved, when you choose to be engaged, there’s something that actually is opened up and that’s the essence of our humanity. And it’s the driving force of what makes us human beings, Peter. That’s what this really is.

And so there’s something that’s kind of, I’m just, it just feels very raw, ’cause, it’s very emotional and intense, all of this, but about traveling around to Gwam, Malaska and Okinawa and seeing the activists for decades. No fanfare, no headlines. They’re not on Twitter. They’re not on TikTok.

They are there day in and day out, trying to put their bodies in front of the gears to just slow down construction from this new marine base. They haven’t given up. So why the hell should I?

Peter:

Absolutely.

Beautiful souls like yourself in this general community; were basically trying to remind people of what humanity actually is.

The core of our sensibility, I think, gravitates towards a very loving and peaceful nature. It’s just generations of extreme, corrupt social system behavior and group identification, all this neuroses, and we have to break out of that.

So we’re all agents of evolution, as I would use the old Bill Hicks term, right? So I commend you very much, Abby. I really appreciate you coming on.

It’s always an honor. I’ll have you back on very soon.

And I cannot wait to see the film, please, rattle off anything people can go to, to see more of your work with Empire Files and where they can see your new film when I think you’re going on tour with it, aren’t you?

Abby:

I am, yeah, I’d love your opinion on it, Peter.

So you can tell me if it’s good or not.

Earthsgreatestenemy.com Check it out.

We’re going on a big film tour later this year. I’d love to see all of you there.

And Peter, I’d love to come visit you and check it out. Thank you so much. Such an honor seriously for you to have me on your my hero and inspirations so it’s wonderful to talk to you.

Peter:

The heroine-hero relationship is always mutual. We’re all doing our best but thank you I appreciate that very much Abby. Well good luck on your travels and we’ll talk very soon.