Abby Martin "Drone Strikes Create Terrorists" | Joe Rogan

But do you ever feel that it's almost like you're absorbing too much because you are looking at all the problems of all the people, seven plus billion around the world and all these different horrific injustices? I try to focus on what I can do and what I can do is challenge my own government. And as an American citizen living in this society, I think that the US Empire and the Pentagon is the source of a lot of problems around the world. I look at the world as complex. You have to understand the issues that are going on, especially with foreign policy in terms of the colonized and colonizers, the oppressed and oppressors, and the US's role as well as other previous empires' role in shaping the world as it is today. And a lot of the problems that have arisen are because directly US foreign policy, whether it be the global war on terrorism, whether it be terrorism in general. Drone strikes basically cause terrorism. Whether it be the environmental crises, the Pentagon is actually the largest polluter in the world, more than 140 countries. That's essentially every country in the world almost. A bigger polluter than the top four chemical companies combined. So it all kind of stems back from this notion that the US is the world's largest empire that's ever existed, and it needs to be stopped to save humanity. And so as an American citizen, I look at all of the problems and I understand that there is a very common root, and I can do something about this common root. And if you're looking at domestic problems, the lack of healthcare, the lack of education, I mean, Martin Luther King called it decades ago. He says a nation that spends more and more on military spending is facing social death. I probably butchered his quote, but that's essentially the spiritual death, I think is what he said. And that's exactly what's happening is when we're squandering all of our money bolstering up this huge global empire, we're not taking care of our people at home, our brothers and sisters at home. My empathy extends as an internationalist all around the world. I feel for my brothers and sisters in Palestine, Yemen, everywhere. But I can only do what I can do based on what my government is doing. And it's doing a lot. It's doing a lot of horrible things. And it's time for us to really acknowledge what those horrible things are because we need to reinvigorate an anti-war movement in this country. And when you're saying that drone strikes create terrorism, what you're really saying is that, well, what people, if they don't understand, drone strikes primarily kill civilians. Right, 98%. Overwhelming. Yeah. It's a really crazy number. And it's this very strange, sanitized way of handling an issue where if you had a person and you had some Rambo character, you send them overseas, you said, hey, I want you to go get this ISIS terrorist and in the process kill everybody the fuck that you see. Everybody that's in front of them, that person would be a war criminal. If you had a guy and he knew that some ISIS guy was in an apartment building, so he just started gunning down men, women, and children in that apartment building until he got to the terrorist, that guy would go to jail. But if you do it with a remote control and you launch hellfire missiles out of a drone and it blows up the apartment building and kills all these innocent people but also gets the terrorist, it's mission accomplished. And it's crazy. It's crazy that we're signing off on that. Right. What gives us the right to kill people? It's a thing because we're not there where there's this weird sort of a, just a, there's a bridge that we're allowed to cross into this really sickening act. It's a very, when you have anything that's ineffective to the point where most of the people it kills are good people or at least are innocent people, we should say. That's crazy. I mean, this is not saying that there's not terrorism. Right. It's not saying there's not horrible people in the ISIS. There is, absolutely. Look, I'm a pro-military person. I think we need military. And I think just like the same, I need, we need cops. But to deny that cops sometimes are bad is fucking crazy. To not deny that sometimes when you allow the military industrial complex to do things like have drones that launch missiles into wedding parties because you think one of the people might be a terrorist and are often incorrect, often to the tune of 90 plus percent. Yeah. It's crazy. The last 10 years, you look at some of these terrorists who have conducted terrorist acts, you look at actually what their intention was, and a lot of them, the vast majority, literally cite US foreign policy. Revenge. US foreign policy. I mean, every time you kill 98 percent innocent people, whoever survives, if you lost your whole family in that, you have an incredible amount of motivation to get back at whoever did it. Right. And that whoever did it is the United States. We need to stop normalizing this. And, you know, militarily speaking, Trump actually, you know, it's not just Trump. I mean, this is a bipartisan effort throughout the entire Congress. If there's one thing Congress can agree upon, it's to make nonviolent BDS efforts against Israel legal and also to just keep ramping up the military and egging on whoever's sitting in the Oval Office to be more militaristic. And that's exactly what's happened with Trump in a bizarre way. I mean, Congress approved like a near trillion dollar defense budget. And the increase alone in the last year was basically Russia's entire military budget, more than Russia's entire military budget. That's how much this shit's ramping up. And then you have the space force. I mean, it's just like, how far is this going to go? The society is collapsing. If you looked at the argument against this, you would say, we need this in order to keep people safe here. That would be the argument against it. My question would be, what are we, what threat is there? ISIS. When has ISIS ever done anything here other than, I mean, there was like a truck. I mean, come on. We already know the statistics on terrorism in this country. And they're very low, right? I mean, you're basically more likely to die from like furniture falling on you. Or a shore apartment. Yeah. Yeah. And the whole ISIS thing, I mean, as we know, ISIS arose out of US foreign policy, the failed state in Libya, the Iraq war that's still criminally ongoing. I mean, Trump announced this indefinite extension of the criminal occupation of Iraq. It's just crazy how normalized this is. Far longer than Vietnam, we're in Afghanistan, fatalities that aren't all time high. All of these things are a direct result of US foreign policy. And look at the refugee crisis. Look at immigration. The Honduras coup. All of this shit's connected. And that's what we need to start, like expanding our consciousness and our empathy worldwide to understand all of these things are linked and the struggle is all linked. And our world is shrinking really rapidly. What candidate speaks in this way? Like what candidate do you think understands and recognizes all these things that you're talking about? I mean, Mike Ravel is the only one who's like, we need to end the US empire. Bernie and Tulsi. Who's Mike Ravel? Mike Ravel was, he was the guy who basically read the Pentagon papers into record. He's a good guy. He's a white-haired president. Yeah, he has like this online campaign that's really awesome. But I mean, Tulsi's speaking a lot about regime change wars, which is extremely important, but she still believes in drone strikes. She basically has a little bit of Obama's foreign policy that I don't agree with that fundamental understanding. Does she believe in limited drone strikes? Like maybe if there's an ISIS camp somewhere. I mean, I can't believe that she believes in some sort of just broad brush use of it. I haven't looked into the nuances of that, but I do think that no one is saying what I want them to about US empire, about scaling back the US empire and stopping all of the civil society movements, because it's not just about invasions anymore. It's about usurping the democratic processes of all of these countries, like what we've done in Venezuela, what we're doing all around the world to try to foment unrest. All of this needs to be stopped. Do you foresee a time where our dependence on foreign oil is radically reduced to the point where it doesn't justify these regime change wars and our dependence on these resources that these people have? I mean, this is almost every conflict in the world, you can boil down to the acquisition of resources. Right. And also the protection of capital. And that's like what a lot of it is now is actually just capital interests needing to expand and grow and continuing to up and increase the profit structure of these corporations. And that's exactly why we've seen imperialism kind of go out of control in the way that it has. I don't know. I mean, I thought that we were more independent oil wise. I don't think it's good. It doesn't frat the things in those times. I think that climate change, yeah, I think that climate hasn't stopped. You know, it hasn't stopped the imperialist misadventures of the US government. So I think there just needs to be a really big shift in consciousness and people to stop thinking that it's our right and that we have, you know, the right and the duty to do this around the world. It doesn't give us the right. We don't have it. It's not right, man. It's really not. And we need to really reinvigorate the masses here because, again, society is collapsing. That's pretty fucking obvious. Well, if it's not obvious, what is obvious is that we're not evolving. Right. In terms of if we're still involved in drone strikes that kill 98% of people, if we're still involved in regime change wars, we're still involved in these unnecessary military actions against Iran. It's these things that people are freaking out about. This is all the same kind of shit that people have been fighting against forever that we don't want our brothers and sisters and husbands and wives to die for nonsense. We don't want them to die for some people that live in these air conditioned rooms that are making billions of dollars that are profiting off of the actions of these noble people who think that they're doing it to protect America. I mean, this is the narrative that they're being served. This is what they're being told. When they're going to these places, they're not going to those places to act as evil as the boots of some empire. They're going over there because they think they're protecting freedom. They think they're protecting their family and their loved ones back home. That's why they're doing it. We're still doing that. We're not evolving. That's what's so scary about the Iran thing because the people who are surrounding Iran and being directed to go out there, they're the ones who are going to be the sacrificial lands for these defense contractors. And I don't think that you can argue anymore that this is for freedom. I mean, how can you? What threat does Iran pose to the United States? It's a tough sell. It's a tough sell. I don't understand what threat they serve either. And what benefit would it be for them to start some shit with us? And that is the craziest idea ever. It's like a nine year old kid trying to pick a fight with Mike Tyson. It's fucking crazy. It doesn't make any sense. What are you trying to do? Trying to get killed? I mean, inevitably we're trying to get to the global confrontation with China and Russia, I guess. I mean, that's, it's scary to think that we only have a couple independent states left to knock down to be under complete subjugation from the US military and global capitalism. It's pretty nuts. Well, not only that, even if we do move into some sort of a situation where we're in control, then we're a bigger target. And with the amount of nuclear weapons that are possessed by these countries that were, I mean, just what North Korea has, just this one small fucked up country could ruin life on earth. Just this one country. And forget about Russia, we could literally annihilate each other. Right. That's a possibility. Right. I mean, if someone chose to launch an attack, if they decided that they have the justification to launch an attack, then all of a sudden we're in a real war. Like a fucking war war where people are invading us. Shits get knocked down, buildings and bombs blow up. I mean, over what? This can't be avoided? This is the only way? The only way is missiles and bombs? Like you said, we're not evolving or devolving. I mean, it's unbelievable. We have the capacity to provide for everyone. We have the capacity to cooperate, to innovate. And we're stuck. We're stuck dehumanizing the other. We're stuck with this mass conditioning to basically perpetuate these injustices. And it's really a shame. I mean, we have all the information at our fingertips, but we still keep reverting back to what's the myths, the myths that underpin our society. These conversations I have with you are so depressing. Because I always leave going, what the... Fuck. What can be done? What can we do? Where does it end? Where does it go? These are the big questions. And then also what we discussed before, it's impossible for anyone to really have a deep, nuanced understanding of all these different issues. Right. Right. I mean, I think focusing on what you can do, we can only do what we can do. Right. And you have to understand that you can't get debilitated or disillusioned with the influx of information or just the complete, the heaviness of it all. You just have to do what you can do. You're doing what you can do. You have me on to help spread awareness about these issues. And that's what you can do. It's my annual freakout. And you're about to get... The Abby Martin freakout. You're about to get spammed with a lot of Hasbro. I really don't have my real email. It's okay. But that's what we can do, Joe. And you just have to live your life and provide for your kids and love what you have. And... But also just understand your place and just extend the empathy that you can and just... Yeah. I mean, it's hard because I don't have the answer. All I know is what's needed. And what's needed is we need a movement of the masses. It's not going to come from the top down. It's going to come from a grassroots mobilized effort to try to change these policies. That's the only way things have ever changed in the past. And I absolutely have hope and optimism that we're going to change things and that we're going to correct this horrible path that we're on. Do you think that the 2020 elections can have a real significant impact of any of this? Do you think that whoever gets into office can really have an effect on the kind of policies that we're talking about with the kind of influence of the military industrial complex, of all these lobbyists, of Wall Street, of all these like monstrous machines that this pure, good old fashioned democracy can actually step in and turn this ship away from the rocks? Bernie, I really do think that he's one of our last chances, not because I think that he's going to completely do some revolutionary upheaval from the top down, as we know Congress is stacked with a lot of terrible people who will block a lot of these efforts. But I think that he's going to mobilize the masses and reinvigorate the labor movement and reinvigorate unions and help workers understand that they need to fight for these rights that have been eviscerated over the last hundred years. One thing that does inspire me as well is seeing people like Ilhan Omar. She is incredible. She's a Somali refugee. She advocates BDS against Israel and she does not fucking back down. I love that woman. What an incredible woman. She got viciously attacked for retweeting one of my episodes from Empire Files. And I think it just shows how scared people are of her and her ideas. And you saw how hard everyone came down on her for just saying that Israel has an influential lobby in DC. Yeah. Well, she's also wearing religious garbs and people are scared of that right away, the hijab. And then there was something, some hit piece on her yesterday. They're saying they think she married a brother. Oh, that's ridiculous. Yeah. They think to get into this country that she had a religious marriage, but then she had another, yeah, she's the only one in Congress other than Tlaib and of course AOC and some other very few people. But she's out there every day speaking against the military industrial complex, speaking against the wars. I think as a refugee, she understands the effects of US policy. And I'm really excited that she has a voice in there. But again, I don't think that the hope is going to come from within Congress and the system is way too far gone with the electoral college and the gerrymandering and the voter rights that have been rescinded. It's a lot and it's an uphill battle, but that's why someone like Bernie, I think will turn to the people and say, I can't do this alone. You have to come out and get my back and we have to have millions of people in the streets demanding these things. That's the only way it's going to work.