men and women from the press want to talk about
you want this recorded?
sure anything
...anarchism is bomb-throwing Mayhem? What is it that attracts you to anarchism?
Anarchism has nothing to do with
bomb-throwing mayhem
it's uh...
anarchism is a
point-of-view which...first of all it covers a lot of things; political,...
rhetoric,... is not the
clearest..., is not a mile of clarity
and anarchism has covered quite a lot of
ground but the mainstream of it
has just been the basic
principle which i think come straight
out of classical liberalism
and enlightment
any form of authority and domination
 has a burden of proof to bear
It has to demonstrate that it's legitimate
no matter what it is whether it's inside
a family or 
global economy
If it is a form of authority and domination and coercion
it has to show that is legitimate
It's a heavy burden to bear
if it shows that it's legitimate, ok!
If not, it'll be dismantled, that's anarchism
It's the task of those who have the authority to demonstrate that
So for example, suppose I am taking a walk
with my granddaughter
Suppose I am taking a walk with my
granddaughter and she...
runs out in the street, and I grab her and
pull her back
Well, that's authority
and it's my task to demonstrate that it's legitimate
and i think in this case
if anybody challenge me i could make an
argument saying that it's legitimate
authority
but the burden of proof is always on those are exercise it
that's true if it's men and women
Parents and children
owners and
and people they rent
the state
people who serve it
the IMF and
people follow his orders, wherever it is
So, there's no general definition of what
legitimate authority is it's the task of
those who exercise authority to demonstrate their legitimacy. They're the
ones of the burden of proof
than if they can't meet that burden
by explaining what they do it is legitimate, they have no right to 
exercise the authority
and whatever institution
any institution within which they exercise it,      it is illegitimate unless they
show otherwise
and the anarchists are just people who believe that, and try to do something about it
I don't mean that every minute of the day everybody has to be saying;
look this is my legitimate authority, but they have to be prepared to meet challenge
Suppose it's a formally democratic state
Well,...
in principle that challenges met
by interchange among the population
which recognizes the authority of the
of actions in the public arena
through
constant
interaction debate
struggle and so on. In theory, that's what
happens
if it is a democratic state
to the extent that that doesn't happen
it's not a democratic state and that is
illegitimate
uh... when you move to other systems
authority, like say, private corporations
or fascist states or
other forms of totalitarianism,
there's no question of legitimacy could
have none
....
....
It's not their responsibility to meet the
challenge, it's the responsibility of
people can make the challenge
so it's the responsibility of, say women
to challenge
a
framework in which they are supposed to
wash the dishes
put the children to sleep
that sort of thing
And it's the responsibility of men
in a patriot traditional patriarchy
family answer that challenge
It would be nice if you could
if the challenge could be raised by those in
positions of authority, that's pretty rare
Usually, when you're in a position of
authority, you kind of internalize the values
that say is right and just
and the reason is because I think
most people are decent human
beings
and it's very hard to tell you to in the mirror and say i'm a bastard
Soo usually what you do is look in
the mirror and say I'm a nice guy
 and I do these things because it's right in just
and that's pretty standard
I mean, everybody knows that from their own experience, that's what people
are like
and therefore the responsibility of
raising the challenges is typically
in the hands of those who
recognize that they have a subordinate status. It's very hard to recognize that
I mean, people lived now ....
is a millennia
without recognizing that they are being
subordinated and systems power.
It's true for the women for example
slaves
you know, in most slave societies
were accepted by the slaves as legitimate and in fact, necessary
and the same is true of ... for example;
people have jobs today in our society
almost without exception they consider
it
legitimate for them to be in a position
where they have to rent themselves in
order to survive
it's certainly not obvious
and in fact if you go back a century ago
it was considered  outlandish
by ordinary people
by working people
I'm not talking about Marxists and socialists or anybody like that but
say
Mill hands and lower massachusetts who
never heard of socialism
who regarded it as a form of slavery
and were complaining that
they had not fought the civil war to
replaced chattel slavery by wage salvery
and therefore those who work in the
mills should own them
because that's the republican rights
that we want in the american revolutions
and so on and so forth
So, it's not obvious but, by now, I think, enough
indoctrination and propaganda and so on,
 has taken place of people do
regard that form of subordination to
external authority as legitimate
whether they should is another question
but the fact is they do
just as
for most of history women have accepted
a subordinate role as correct
and proper and so on
and slaves did, and people living in say a
feudal societies, in a feudal society people
had a place
some kind of rule
and quite typically the societies were stable because people regarded this
structures as legitimate
the same is true of religious structures and
throughout human life there is a
whole variety of systems of authority and
oppression, domination and so on, which are
usually accepted as legitimate by the
people subordinated to them
when they don't; you have struggles and
revolutions and sometimes changes
sometimes brutality and so on
that's...
as far as I understand it anarchists are people who take this 
seriously
Well, the Spanish revolution in 1936 was an unusual event in that
a fairly large scale
anarchist
revolution did take place
in a fairly
modern society and that sort of halfway
between
the industrial world and the third world
so sectors of it were highly industrialized like Catalonia
others were peasant societies,
like Aragon
countryside
and it was a very large scale
and it varied 
lot of complexity, and all sorts of complicated
things go on and popular movement, but it was
quite substantial in scale
and it had strong libertarian elements
it was interesting to see
that the entire world was mobilized against it instantly
The...
communists, the fascists and the liberal
democracies
instantly combined to crush
that revolution, that they were not gonna allow,
and in fact they went after it right away
and smashed it
 and then they
got to the secondary question of
fighting what we call the civil war in
Spain
The war between the fascists and the republicans, that's the one
that in history is called the war
but there was another
war, namely this one, and that's not so unusual
If you take a look at
what you'll study in history in civil
wars
with two sides, they usually have three sides
at least
sometimes more
there's usually the two sides that get into the history books
 and then there's a big mass of the population who hates both of them
usually the majority of the day
So if you take the American revolution
 which was
pretty much a civil war, in fact
the proportion of
people fighting on the two sides
local people, I don't mean foreigners
it was not so different from what we call a civil war
it was a civil war
between
where here are called
loyalists and
revolutionaries
but a good bit of the population didn't wanna remain with neither of them
in fact, after the revolution
it was necessary to suppress
 radical farmers
who were taking seriously the rhetoric
and revolutionary pamphlets 
and they have to be taught that this stuff is not
to be taken seriously
we're not going to have a
social change and there isn't going to
be that kind of freedom and liberty that
you guys thought you were fighting for
and they're to be repressed
and it wasn't so mild either
there wasn't a mass murder in pol pot
On the other hand, part of the reason why
there wasn't mass murder after the
American revolution is because a huge part of
the population just fled
in terror
that's not something usually studied in history books but
the proportion of
colonists
who fled
the libertarian
colonies
probably higher the number of
people who fled Vietnam
after 1975, in proportion
it was estimated roughly 4% of the
population
and they were fleeing in terror, I mean,
they were boat people you know fleeing
from Boston in the middle of the winter,
going off to nova Scotia and dying in
the snow to get away from his maniacs who 
had taken over
There's literature on that but that you have to
search a little try and it's usually not
taught in high school history courses
...but
that of course doesn't even count. Two other segments of
the population who were scared out of their wits
one was to blacks
the slave population
who knew what was in store for them if the 
colonists won the revolution
wasns't very pretty, and it wasn't
The other was the indigenous population
who mostly supported the British
for a very good reasons
They knew what these guys were gonna to do
to them
and but not even counting them
just looking at 
the white
colonists population it was
anda few people studied that the estimate
roughly 
4% of the population fleeing mostly to canada
sometimes...bit to canada,...
if you go to Nova Scotia right now
you'll find towns
which have signs on them saying it
settled by
people who fled
from the American revolution, in 1780
That's right!
That's right!
They argued that Canada ought to
have a right for anything that was
nationalized from canadian citizens to
be restored in Canada, that would a good part of the UE
eastern US
Let me ask a question about the
role of the United States in world
affairs
in your opinion, how much is by design, and how much is
simply by happenstance and
as an example we're just talking...
we have on the one hand this incredible
technical apparatus of the United States
supporting Nicaraguan contras with
air supply....and then we have at the same time high school
 isolate kids wandering around the
jungle shooting off their guns every once
in a while
and so, I am wondering
is the United States in fact
to be seen as the unlimited hand guiding world affairs, or is it just 
an instigator, and then things take off the way they do
you can ask the same question about a
really...I mean, take the best
run totalitarian state of modern history: Germany
very efficient state
really modern, super modern, very
totalitarian
how much was planned or how much just
happened?
it's kind of a mixture
Iff you take a corporation which is a
successful corporation, say General electric
is a totalitarian institution, that is
.... as any to humans devised
with very tight managerial control, and you know anybody enters
subordinated to guide abouve
kicks the guy down below in the face and
so on and so forth
but if you ask the same
question. An awful lot that happens is
just
people working around the edges
not doing as they were told
doing at some other way and so on and so
forth i don't really think there's any
answers to these questions
From the best run totalitarian institutions like saying GE in
nazi germany
down to much more flexible complex structures
there's a mixture
So I vote for example the guys who were
training
In fact, the United States was not able to train the
contra forces directly because it's too
much public opposition here
so is done indirectly
the US set up a very complex
international terror network
remember this is
a big powerful country, is not like Libya
if libya wants to carry out terrorism
they hire a couple of
Carlos or somebody
when the United States wants to carry
out international terrorism at higher
terrorism stakes
You know, big guys
so the
running organizing the mercenary forces
around
nicaragua was 
 first put in the hands of Argentina neo-nazis
and then when they sort of lost power
 it was Taiwanese and Israelis and British
and so on and so forth. The same guys
who train the narco traffickers and
Colombians and so on
It was funded by Saudi
Arabia, there's a huge international
terror network of a kind
beyond anything in the world of ever
seen
and that meant there was no really
direct control
like whoever it was sitting in Washington, William Casey or somebody was
not
determining what
Argentina neo-nazis and Israeli torturers and
Taiwanese murderers and so on 
teaching these guys to do
uh... nor was it
training certainly not
no telling the british secret service's,
others who are part of the show
So it's a complicated network
For example, the guys that you were
interviewing
who knows how they got into it
could have been some long complex story
could've been local rivalries
Maybe two people in town hated each other
so they went different ways,
that can happen
so it follows questions to that
if you have on the one hand a totalitarian
control or corporate
super-structure and on the other hand these
things going on around the edges, what
lessons does that have for us
who are trying to make change, what can we
learn from that in use in order to make a change?
Well, it depends, the question of how you
change things has no answer either
because it depends on the circumstances and your goals
what tactic is it right to achieve this particular goal and so on
there is no formula.
if you're dealing with an autocracy
and you want to make it
less brutal and more benevolent
one kind of
set of tactics is appropriate, like you plead
you plead with the king not to
kill too many people because
isn't good or something.
On the other hand if you're trying to get rid of the autocracy then
very different
options are available
if you're worried about say...just take here
people are worried about corporations
investing in...
I think there is a meeting
within the next couple days
so that's pleading with the autocracy
to be a little more benevolent
not to be quite so brutal
It's like pleading with the king not to kill so many people
but is still going to be a autocracy
maybe it won't do the most brutal thing
so, it'll do
other brutal things
or hire somebody to do this brutal thing
which maybe is...
I am not saying is a bad thing to do,
it's good to plead with
autocrats to be more benevolent
on the other hand if you're trying to
eliminate the
structure
authority and power, you pursue
possibly a different path
I don't think
....
 it's never obvious what's the right course or what's the right tactic
These are hard decisions
and like, should you be involved in civil
disobedience?
there is no answer to that
My own personal
history
I've done both things
I don't know if it was right decision
every case
probably wasn't, but you can't have to judge
what the
circumstances are on
what you wanna achievement and so on, very often say close friends
of mine, very close friend of mine,
I sharply disagreed with their tactics
so take civil disobedience
I mean, people last years
People who aimed
missiles
There are people I admire a lot, and they are
 good friends, I think they're dead
wrong
I think that they're harming
their own cause
but that's a matter of assessing
consequences of actions
which is not so simple, there's no formula for it
is not a secret
This follows with the next question...
I'm just preoccupied with
the problem with the authorities, did ever ask why the cooking coup...Klaus Barbie
in bolovia, they were...
what do you think they would say...
of course they won't be asked I suppose
what was caused by them doing it in Bolivia
how did they get there?
I'll tell you!
We know the story in that case
because it's where it came out during the
trial and in fact the American authorities
who were responsible spoke about it.
Klaus Barbie is the 
you know, the Butcher of Lyon"
one big nazi killer
was one of the many Nazi war criminals,
by no means the major one
he was one of my minor Nazi war
criminals who was picked up
by the united states as it
took over in the United States and Britain
as they
did what we call moderating Europe
their first task was to destroy the
anti-fascist resistence
and to restore the traditional order
traditional conservative order,
which meant fascist collaborators and nazis
and so on, which is in fact what happened
and it happened all over the world
this is sort of chapter one of
post-World War II history. If they were
such a thing as a history course if you
could kind of imagine that -pretty hard to imagine
but if there were such a thing, and it studied postwar history
 first month or two would be
on the first chapter which is this:
It was done...had to be done differently in different countries
like in Greece it required
big counterinsurgency war, in which 
50.000 people were killed
all sort of horrible things
in France was done a little differently
In France one of the ways 
was done, the main task was to break up the labor movement
inside that's where the
heroin, that's where the post-war drug
record begins
in order to break up the fascist -I'll get round Barbie in a second- but the 
fascist kind of run a tight ship,
they really weren't totalitarian
so they weren't of any use for the mafia
they got rid of them
they didn't want competitors
so the fascist pretty well cleaned up the mafia
and the drug record...
they don't like that kind of stuff
When the American forces came in, they reconstructed the
mafia
First, in Sicily
they just needed guys to run the place, and they were the 
obvious ones
but the
main, the one that turned out most important
in many respects ,was the course against mafia
which have been eliminated by the
Italian fascists
but
as the United States had the
break-up the
French labor movement and the resistance
You have to do things like break strikes, for example,
and beat up workers and so on. Well, you know 
who do you get to do that sort of thing?
Local thugs
Where do you get the local thugs? They've got a network built mafia
Of course they don't do it for nothing
you have to pay them off
and the payoff was allowing them to
reestablish the drug racket
the heroin racket and that's the thing, the
French connection
France was sort of the center of the
early postwar international drug trade, which was just a sideshow of the
CIA and other efforts to break up the 
resistance movement and so on,
In France and then it sort of goes on around the world, but
where's Barbie come into this?
Barbie had a role in France and Germany
As a German
operating in France, he was operating against the resistence
 his job was to go after resistance guys and capture them and kill them
Well, the United States had the same task, when it took over
it had to be left on the same people -somebody's tape recorder just went off
the United States, had to
get rid of them, and kill them, the same anti-fascist resistance people
and
it just made sense to turn to the experts
Actually, I'm quoting now;
"I'm after the barbie..."
-I'm quoting from barbies' superior
on American...I think was a Coronel
high rank American officer, an
intelligence was the guy who ran 
Barbie, under the American intelligence
After Barbie was picked up
and brought to trial
This guy who's name i think was
cold..
k-o-b,  if I'm not mistaken, i've written about it, I could find them
He wrote a letter to the New York Times in which he said
"I don't understand what this fuss is about Barbie"
I mean Barbie was going after the French  resistance working for the Nazis
and we were going after the same guys,
French resistance, and obviously we turn
to the people who knew how to do it
so we turned to Barbie
and we recruited him
and he was doing the same job for us
pretty logical!
that was small potatoes, there were much bigger ones than that
he was he was not a major criminal,
he wasn't like my Heart Gallon
whom put in charge of 
 western intelligence
who was one of the leading war criminals, he was the guy who run the
nazi
operations in the Eastern Europe and know what 
that means
and that was the worst
So he was put in charge of German
intelligence and in charge of 
counterinsurgency, you know,
operations in Eastern Europe
and that was the big Galen network,
was the major central European
intelligence network, and there were
plenty of others
they've had to be appointed in France
when it was pretty hard to keep Barbie
going
so they got them out
there was a thing called "the rat line"
 which operated with the help of the Vatican
and a lot of
fascist priests in Croatia,
the American intelligence and so on,
there's
pretty solid scholarship in the subjet
and they got a lot of these guys
out
One of the places they sent to was South America
So plenty of them were around
Like if you go to Brazil you find Nazi groups
 still singing horse vessel
like anything
Barbie happened to go to Bolivia
when he got the Bolivia he sort of
picked up the old
trade, and he ended up
with the cocaine racket, and that's how he got involved in the coup
Well, do they know that he was involved
in the military coup in 1980
Who knows?
That much detail we don't know
and probably nobody was paying that much attention to Bolivia
at the time. Bolivia was a big issue around 1950
but that's because there was big
working-class movement miners and
left-wing government and in fact
around 1950 the CIA recognized Bolivia and Guatemala as two
major problems in Latin America
Big issue then! But by the 60's, and it
kind of been settled, put in order
We don't have documents yet from the
1980's but my guess is that
nobody's paying much attention to when
the Barbie coup who took place, so in a way
this is the kind of thing that sort of happens
and it happens as a 
not on predictable consequence of
other actions that are taken where
nobody cares much one way or the other.
On the other hand of Barbie's story is very
revealing if you check it out
because of its relationships to much bigger things that we're going on like
what I mentioned,
Prohibition cut down the use of alcohol
and alcohol is very destructive, I mean is much worse than drugs
-What do you think of legalization of drugs?
I think it's
I don't think there is an obvious answer
Criminalization of behavior
is very dubious kind of
project, to my opinion
and if you look at the history of
criminalization of behavior which is
what prohibition is
it's uh...
i think invariably
class linked
like i said last night, it's every case I know is linked to
control
classes of people you don't like them,
not us
Marijuana's extremely dramatic case, if you look at the ups and
downs of it
In the case of alcohol or say
tobacco...Probably the most lethal 
substance is sugar
that causes more deaths than maybe
all the others put together
so ok, I could give an argument for
criminalization of sugar
and that means all the sugar substitutes
because they really are
very harmful, a lot of people die from them
On the other hand I think is a good idea
What about the...
criminalization of other substances?
Well, 
in my...
I think that these are things that you have to
be cautious about, and experiment with
So for example, in the case
of marijuana
I think there's a reasonably good case for drug decriminalization
One reason is that has no .... like none of these things are
good for you,  I'm sure this stuff whatever
it is, is not good for you
in fact,
a old friend of mine who died recently and was
a Nobel prize winning biologist
was the head of the
Cancer center in MIT
one of his favorite lines was that when people kept finding things
that are carcerogenic, that's because they looked at it
in fact is life that is carcerogenic
tomatoes are gonna turn out to be carcerogenic
and so on.
So anything is...
things have varying degrees of...
they're bearing effects that...
of the things with varying effects marijuana is not 
at the high end
in fact, I don't think there has ever been an overdose recorded
the figures of  the
five or ten years ago, is like sixty
million users and no overdoses
that's not to bad a record
It's certainly not good for you, beyond some limited use
but the same is true of everything
it's true of coffee,
tobacco, meat
It's true of
vegetables if you eat too much of them,
 anything!
so uh...
probably in the case of marijuana
there's a fairly good argument for
decriminalization
 with regard to other drugs, 
my own view is that the right approach
is probably the one that the British
took
back around 1800
when drinking was becoming
a big thing
the tax system was modified
in such a way that
things like beer were much
cheaper
than things like say whiskey
okay, that's a reasonable incentive system
because it moves people over to
drinking things that are
less likely to be harmful in big
quantities then more likely to be
harmful in big quantities
and I think
things like that
are possible but
overwhelmingly the right answers is education
I mean i think that's just obvious,
I mean the reason why the use of tobacco,
tobacco is a very striking case in the
United States
I suspect that not many of your friend smoke
It's extremely rare these days to find....
I haven't seen a student
at MIT
come into my office wanting to smoke for
twenty years
it's just not
done among wealthy educated people
anymore
it's still true among
older people who didn't shake that
habit, and
very common among young people who are
poor
so you go to working-class
section of town and go to local
fast food place
and every kid has two cigarettes in their hands
on the other hand you go to the
upscale restaurant and it's not very
likely
It became very sharply class based just on the base of
education
and the same has been true of other things, like take say red meat, there's no
criminalization of red meat
but consumption has gone way down
simply because of 
education
you know, people learning about the
effects of it
and I think that's true of everything
Take say the lottery,
I don't know if
Wisconsin has a state lottery ,a lot of states do
The lottery is a highly regressive tax
I don't know the figures here but I'm
sure the same as everywhere. In Massachusetts has been pretty well studied
 It's a very highly regressive tax, you take the towns in Massachusetts and
you ask
how much money people spend in the state
lottery
it's predictable by level of education
and income
the lower the education and income the more
the more they spend in the lottery
In the town where I live, nobody
would waste the scent on the lottery
it's like giving your money away
that's what the state lotteries is
poor and uneducated people do it
you go to a town where the average
per-capita income is maybe ten thousand
dollars
they may be spending a couple thousand dollars per family on the lottery
so what it amounts to is a
highly regressive tax
that's why it's pushed so hard
like this kind of advertising, I don't know here,
but Massachusetts is very heavily
advertised
and all kinds of wonderful gifts, you are gonna get Five Million Dollars and this and that
The other thing...
and the reason is because it's a terrific way to soak the poor
should we make it illegal?
Well, I don't think it should be legal to advertise it frankly anymore, and I
think you should allow ads for cocaine
up on television
but i don't think you should criminalize it either
what I think you ought do is exactly what's done in every
sector of educated people, get people
immediately to understand that you're throwing
your money out, if you wanna throw
your money away, throw it in the ocean
 and when people understand that they aren't gonna be into lottery
anymore than there is in the town where
I live, thay couldn't sell a lottery ticket there
if they tried
and...
 and I think the same is true of
every...
of every form of
way you are harming yourself
whether it's driving fast
or wearing seat-belts or
free to jump off a mountain holding a rope, that kind of stuff
anything! I mean
if there are people who want to experienced danger
okay they'll be allowed to do it
 on the other hand 
it should be a rational decision
something that people
are in a position to make a reasonable
decision about and that requires
understanding and education in the
recognition of the consequences and so
on and so forth on. That's the answer to drugs
I think the answer is 
it's overwhelmenly true
It is also true, as Alex program pointed
out in that column that alcohol use did
decline during probation
but uh...
you could uh...
you could get
consumption of the
milk to decline by criminalizing it
-Last!
Mercury's
Mercury news you know
There was actually a pretty good story to my surprise in the Columbia
journalism review by Peter Cornblue
it's clear
The guy really exposed something
I mean there were parts of the story that didn't hold out
and there are places that were exaggerated
and so on, but yes the basic point was correct
Furthermore was not that new
a lot of these things have been exposed by
Robert Parry and Bryan Barger
back around 1985. Actually I wrote about them in 1985 using
their stuff
It's not
like is a big news story
I mean, I Iove the details
but the basic picture was very old and it's been suppressed by the press all the time
When it broke in the
Mercury news
Actually it broke through the internet
They have a 
sometime in an internet outlet
and people picked it up, and you know,
nobody reads the center of the newpapers
And it was picked up through the internet
and became a thing
and the big press backed off, didn't like it 
and they waited a couple of months. They found a way after the story
They went after the Mercury news
and they went after the fact that like
the footnotes were wrong or you
know, it didn't have enough
witnesses for this
or they attacked it on things it didn't say 
kind of in the sea business
You attack it for things people didn't say at all
the biggest assault, and the point was to try to suppress the main story which was
pretty much suppressed
And the big story is essentially the one that
Bob Kerrey picked up.
around 1995 and he was a well-known reporter at the time, I think
he's working for Newsweek
and they kind of throw him out, they didn't want that story 
and they still don't want the story, in fact
that story is the end peace
or a recent peace
of the one I was telling about the heroin
connection and France
the trail of drugs
follows the CIA very closely
and it's not because the CIA likes drugs
it's because is for a very good reasons
the same reasons as in France
if you're involved in illegal
clandestine operations
you have to have a lot of money and it
has to be untraceable
and you have to have thugs
and you gotta get rid of them somewhere
You put together the need for untraceable money with
thugs
add it up and it equals the drug rep
so if you take the trail of
clandestine activities, you follow it!
you get a trail of drugs by following it
It goes from France to
the Golden Triangle and the operations and
that region began
Afghanistan
you know
contrast,
it's just a pretty close trail
for pretty obvious reason
other intelligence agencies is the same
