Stop blaming the C.I.A. — the bleeding heart of progressive politics.

this is october of 2021.
we've just been through a period of very public hand wringing regret recrimination shallow analysis of what went wrong with the united states of america in terms of the defeat in afghanistan and this came shortly after a long period of parallel introspection as to what had gone wrong in the american culture of policing i say culture of policing advisedly because there was no sincere interest in looking at say the constitutional principles that define policing the legal principles or nor even the actual training and education of policing this was largely you know reflected upon as a cultural issue that somehow americans ought to be kind and good and loving towards one another but a series of scandals in terms of police brutality and to some extent police corruption police incompetence revealed the extent to which culturally america has a problem with policing now i'm insinuating that the problem is not merely cultural at all and i see in terms of the recrimination and reflection on the failure in afghanistan and now just this last week the recrimination and reflection on the apparent failure of the cia explain a little more what i mean by that i see this eagerness on the part of the american public to leap to a sort of cultural framing of the problem rather than facing up to the extent to which uh the problems you're encountering whether you think of them in terms of policing in terms of the military in terms of a unique institution like the cia the central intelligence instead of facing up to the extent to which those problems are the result of particular people who made particular decisions at particular moments in time and indeed particular laws particular principles set down in writing which can include the constitution can include law in that most obvious sense but sometimes it's in a somewhat more slippery form such as a presidential directive some written instructions um some written mandate or definition especially for institutions like the cia for how the cia is is supposed to operate now the questions we're dealing with here i think the majority of my audience frankly is non-american i think it is worth wondering to what extent are these problems profoundly similar in england in australia in the netherlands in belgium in france in germany part of the pattern i see playing out is a very deep seated assumption that we can understand political progress by looking at the leading edge of technology and that by focusing on you know optimistically the extent to which the leading edge of technology is potentially or actually transforming our society we can then infer from this a tremendous transformation throughout all other aspects of our society right so what do i mean well for anyone who is my age but even more so if you were 10 years older than me 20 years old to me 30 years old to me it's very easy to see how much the world has changed technologically since your own childhood it's very easy to be optimistic about the extent to which culture and politics might be presumed to change to either have already changed or to be in the process of now profoundly uh changing because of uh that that kind of leading-edge progress the work done by doctors in hospitals the work done by um a family doctor not in a hospital in a doctor's office or making house calls how much has it changed really in 50 years it's very easy to be optimistic and have this technology centered view of medicine and of the role of government in medicine and the role of the patients in medicine like you know the actual sick people it's very easy to look at and think oh well you know um we've discovered mri scanning we know of these advanced computer forms of you know scanning images that show us with this tremendous precision exactly where the cancer is in your body and you can make a kind of false inference from this that therefore the role and responsibility of the doctor has has changed or that it is changing or it's about to change you know in relation to the patient in relation to illness in relation to the role of government in providing money and certain kinds of legal strictures that define you know medical institutions providing this this kind of care for the public the vast majority of what doctors do what they need to do what they actually do in medicine it hasn't changed technologically and it's not going to change what really matters for doctors and nurses today is the same as what mattered 50 years ago right and you can discuss this culturally you can't express the underlying issues culture you can say well what you really need is a culture that produces caring patient people who deal with the same problem again and again and again like depending on which doctor you're talking to where you can say look you know what what do 90 of your cases boil down to you know the vast majority of doctors whether they're in an emergency room in a hospital or they're you know a doctor in a small town where they provide all medical services for that small town they are going to be able to list off just a few conditions that they get again and again and again they work within a very small remit and then if you look at what it is they're doing again kind of five days a week what's their normal beat and you ask them well how much has medicine changed in this field in the last 50 years you may be surprised to find you know that it hasn't changed at all now on the other hand of course okay so if we're talking about this culturally medicine has changed tremendously right culturally right who are doctors what kind of education do they have what kind of ethical and moral outlook on the world that's changed tremendously all right i think we're going through a period of time in the united states of america throughout the english-speaking world i.e even australia and england and i think throughout western europe where we're quite reluctant to look at these problems whether it's something as seemingly anodyne as the problem of the reform of healthcare like how to improve the way medicine is practiced um questions of how to reform education you know or you know topics that are a little bit more menacing in their implications like why did western imperialism fail in afghanistan because by the way it wasn't just the failure of the american military practically every you know your western european ally of the united states of america got some blood on their hands got some mud in their boots with this uh this failed project in uh in afghanistan you know the italians were there so on and so forth of course the british and the canadians everyone threw in their lot with the american uh war of it there's a tremendous reluctance to examine and evaluate these things in terms of the decisions made by particular people in positions of executive authority now i ask you if you have been reading the new york times as i have i've been reading it on paper um terrible newspaper don't subscribe don't pay for it terrible newspaper i really don't recommend it but if you've been reading the new york times you might stop and ask yourself is there any other war in the history of the world that was remembered this way that was reflected on and analyzed this way where we look back at the events that happened without ever once saying there was this battle fought at this time with this general in charge or this commander in charge and these were the decisions he made i'd like to say he or she but i think i think they're all male still to this day but anyway these decisions that he or she made and where you're looking at the war battle by battle executive decision by executive decision right and then looking at the outcomes that's the way we talk about the history of the napoleonic wars right that's the way we talk about world war one and world war ii right it is a history of executive decisions made by political leaders people like presidents and prime ministers and sometimes people like army generals sometimes people like dictators that's the way we teach and study and reflect on war and when people ask well where did this go wrong you know why did why did this side lose either the war as a whole or this battle or this chapter of the war right we look at particular decisions made by particular people and then i think if you go deeper the next step is in plain english to look at education now i don't mean education in some kind of philosophically sophisticated sense that's difficult to explain but even in reading about the history of the napoleonic wars like why did napoleon win why was the what was the advantage napoleon's army had over other european armies and so on a lot of it is gets into immediately a discussion of education you get into a discussion of the particular uh military colleges that produce napoleon himself the type of education that produced men working in artillery in the french military the type of training that the french had at that time how that's different from just one generation earlier in the french military the question of the moderate modernization and democratization of the french military how that contrasted to earlier generations in france how that contrasted to their close rivals like the prussians that's prussian with a p but also how it contrasted to the russians within our and the and the british even the discussions of like the british navy at the time what was the advantage the british navy had of were the navies very quickly once you move past the level of executive decisions made by people in in positions of power army generals presidents prime ministers sometimes dictators queen queens and kings then you get into the discussion of of education how education formed the competence and incompetence of the men fighting the war how education formed the competence and incompetence of doctors and nurses medical staff right you see where i'm going with this in looking back at the year 2020 seems so long ago we have to look at how education formed the competence and incompetence of the police right created the culture of unspeakable brutality corruption and and frankly just plain bumbling incompetence that the whole of the united states of america and the whole of the world was led to reflect on and by the way again i have to emphasize this didn't just happen in america um i follow french politics the same questions were unfolding in france france had its own cases of police brutality at least one of those cases was caught on on videotape maybe maybe one or two they mostly didn't have have the same kind of lurid videotape evidence but france it during exactly the same year it was actually engaging into a similar kind of set of reflections on uh the competence and culture of policing in their country my suggestion to you here is that this kind of peculiar technological optimism a belief in a kind of progress that is partly unreal and partly real but irrelevant has led us away from a sincere engagement with one executive decisions made by particular people the particular people will be responsible for right in the writing of history and then two a really sincere in-depth engagement with these these questions of education you know now i defy you okay the the new york times is many many pages long every every issue that comes out i i'm not reading this newspaper from cover to cover uh i i basically have been listening to kind of every major news podcast not just from the new york times but from many other sources i've been listening to a great deal of political radio while i'm in the gym doing my 200 push-ups you know um in all of the news coverage and political analysis that i've heard about the question of why did the united states lose the war in afghanistan i have never once heard the type of very simple factual analysis that you would presume by default to be offered whether we're talking about napoleon world war one or world war ii i don't think i've heard army generals named would say oh yeah at this battle this was the decision made by this army general and this was the decision made by george w bush and this was the decision made by barack obama i don't think people are even aware of this i don't think they're doing it as an intentional form of propaganda right but the war is talked about as if it's an entirely organic cultural phenomenon unfolding as if it's like the popularity of yoga classes in california right that there was no central hierarchy or chain of command that made the decisions right that shaped the course of the war and then i say the the next step beyond this so there's this really strange refusal to i mean you know it cannot possibly be that the new york times wants to glorify george w bush it can't be that's not their bias here i mean i don't think the new york times is even interested in glorifying the legacy of barack obama i don't you know it's it's very strange the way we've come to perceive politics and the way in which we've become willingly blind to politics to the political history unfolding in our own times that's that's what i see as the big issue here right and and then i say the next step beyond talking about particular decisions whether those are executive orders from the president prime ministers of various countries or or generals you know to then go beyond that and look seriously at who were the soldiers who were the fighting men doing this and in what way did their education prepare them or fail to prepare them for the ultimately cultural struggle of trying to transform afghanistan from being the most backward the most fundamentalist country throughout the muslim world into being a modern cosmopolitan democracy right i mean it's a huge challenge i watched a documentary recently uh maybe two two weeks ago now some of that i watched a documentary recently that i had seen uh maybe seven years or ten years earlier about the war in afghanistan and you know the makers of this documentary they didn't they of course they didn't know how the war was going to end i think doug murray's made in 2011. some of that they didn't they didn't see where this was going necessarily and as with a lot of american sentimentality it's showing the the soldiers in what the filmmakers think of as a flattering light it shows them paddling around with each other and it shows the kind of insouciance uh i'm saying this in like a fresh society the the the kind of reckless silliness of youth you know as these soldiers are paling around on the base and so on and while i was watching this this particular documentary i'm noticing the patches on their the arms of the uniform i'm thinking these guys they can't be special forces this can't be you know the u.s ranger corps us army ranger corps they can't be like i'm noticing the badges and they're all wearing badges of like super elite special forces units they're not general infantry and apart from the documentary footage they're having one-on-one interviews these guys and at the end after watching the documentary i looked it up and to my amazement these were not normal soldiers in the general infantry these were super elite special forces guys and you look at that so like us army ranger core that is i know this because i looked it up that is a 61 day special training program and it's hard to get into you have to compete to get into this training program okay what do you think they learned in those 61 days to my knowledge that elite training program it's a hundred percent about the physical skills of how to use a rifle in a gunfight and they pride themselves they claim us army rangers if you've got that badge you are one of the greatest most skilled most highly trained people in the world for um you know for for face-to-face rifle to rifle gun fighting for that particular type of combat that you're you're the best in the world well okay so these people were highly trained i mean everybody who was deployed in this particular documentary in this particular valley where the these particular battles were unfolding everyone was highly educated everyone was highly trained but we can recognize at the same time that the education they've received was irrelevant totally irrelevant to the real challenge of transforming afghanistan from being america's greatest enemy to america's ally transforming afghanistan from being culturally you know the home of the taliban to being a 21st century cosmopolitan modern democracy the obviously the most the most obvious thing is they lack the language ability they lack any ability to speak any local language these people obviously they lack the cultural sophistication strategic sophistication the the public relations element this document most of the documentaries show that it shows the commanding officer sitting down and talking to um senior leaders in the village or villages plural guys who are basically senior taliban representatives you know you know them handing out candy to people after they've just massacred innocent women and children and stuff and doing the kind of public relations and you can see you know these guys they kind of have an attitude towards politics like they're a high school gym coach like they're they're encouraging football players on a team like that's the way they talk it's like dude you you really have no idea what's what's going on here you have no idea that you're you're making things worse when you you imagine you're making things better you're making it worse for your own soldiers for the americans you're making it worse for the local people and you're exacerbating this conflict instead of actually uh resolving it and you know what was the world's easiest war to win became an unwinnable war how to two factors through particular decisions made by particular people and positions of authority basically the president of the united states and a very small number of people who were selected by the president of the united states and worked very closely with president united states and made some decisions normally being okayed by the president but you know we're basically talking about decisions made by a very small number of people at a very elite level those decisions were wrong they were the wrong decisions and what everyone should be saying i mean including the new york times what everyone should be doing is really examining those decisions the strategic decisions and really examining the legal and ultimately constitutional structure of authority of how it is that wars are managed the way they are in the united states of america which is it's ridiculous of course the way the american empire operates you know the role of congress the role of the senate and the role of the executive office of the president and then how that relates to the joint chiefs of staff and military there are there are many many ways in which you can offer a kind of systemic analysis of what's wrong and why why in this sense the united states lost the war afghanistan i i have not seen one column inch of the new york times i've not seen any article in any newspaper i have not heard one podcast one radio broadcast or one television broadcast looking at it this way right there's a really strange fatalism to the way politics is viewed in our times and the same fatalism is demonstrated when people are examining what's wrong with the healthcare system and what's wrong with with policing right and then beyond that right there is no willingness to really look at education and the way in which education is producing confidence and incompetence i just want to say sorry i do see your comments coming in in the audience guys um if we started from a blank sheet of paper and we were asking ourselves okay what kind of people do we need if we're going to conquer afghanistan and profoundly culturally transform the place get the local people on our side transform it from being a taliban dominated society in which the vast majority of people if they are not taliban supporters they are supporters of a traditional fundamentalist form of islam that's about 80 percent as extreme as the taliban because i recognize not everyone in afghanistan supported the taliban but the quote-unquote moderate muslims in afghanistan they were they were still more extreme than say the average muslim in iran you know like really iran is not it was never as extremely muslim as afghanistan it's a tough it's tough contrast to offer but you know before september 11 2001 you know the form of islam prevalent in afghanistan was so fundamentalist and so extreme that saudi arabia seemed liberal by contrast iran seemed liberal by contrast obviously places like malaysia and indonesia okay that's your that's your starting point what kind of training would you need to provide people with what kind of education what kind of person is going to do that job well and here's my point here's the leg motif for this video here's the point we'll come back to again again all right don't tell me in reply that it won't be a problem because now we've got drone strikes don't tell me that it won't be a problem because we've got satellite data don't tell me that we won't repeat what happened in the vietnam war because we've got unmanned aerial vehicles i.e drone bombing and satellite data and the internet and infrared technology people don't want to face up to the extent to which war hasn't changed in 50 years right people don't want to face up the extent to which medicine hasn't changed in 50 years and obviously i'm not trivializing the technological breakthroughs having mri scans just the use of computer imaging like you know real breakthroughs that have happened in in medical science technology you know it's great it's great but actually most of the time for most things that really matter the question is what kind of people are you training to be doctors and what are their attitudes and what is the overall legal and cultural framework or structure in which they practice medicine right like it makes a huge difference if you have people whose attitude is that they have more than one hundred thousand dollars of debt from going to university to become a medical doctor and they've got to make money as fast as possible to pay off that debt and they want to be rich like if you live in a culture where people go into debt to become medical doctors and then regard the profession of medicine as a way to become rich as quickly as possible right if that's your culture okay you have problems that cannot be solved through new technology through a better computer system for x-rays or mri imaging right it cannot be solved through the development of better vitamin pills better a better pill to help with malaria i mean there are there are you know there's scientific progress happening in in various fields right the real fundamental problem you're dealing with all the time you know remains the same okay you know think about the challenge the us army was facing in afghanistan and let's really think about the ways in which that challenge hasn't changed since napoleon it hasn't changed since world war one it hasn't changed since world war ii and then let's think about just how poorly prepared the soldiers and the people and even the executives of the united states of america were at all levels how it was that the easiest war to win in the history of the world became an unwinnable war for the united states of america and it wasn't just the united states of america italy france canada england everyone else jumped on the bandwagon right and all of them thinkingly or unthinkingly reproduce the defects of the american strategic approach to afghanistan so we got a big problem here guys we've got a problem that runs deep and in my opinion it is the same fundamental problem that makes it impossible for us to reform medicine health care makes it impossible for us to reform policing right this is the same problem that we see in the impossibility of reforming the military then what i'm going to go on to talk about here is specifically talking about the cia elite level international intelligence just reading your comments so atlanta richard asks or i assume i interpret his name as richard in atlanta quote when will the west take accountability responsibility and consequence from the machinations of what we call democracy and its failure to be held to a democratic standard um anyone here old enough to remember the year 2000 there is a documentary that is called unprecedented the 2000 presidential election i'm just going to shout this out so you guys can find it documentary film so i saw that such a long time ago as many many girlfriends ago uh for me when i saw that film it was quite boring because i already knew all of the political facts rehearsed in it uh or whatever rehearsed may not be the best word but all the political facts uh discussed and analyzed and presented and i was already really familiar with them but my girlfriend who was sitting next to me was just shocked she was just astonished watching this i was really i was like yeah didn't you know that what what even what even doing that why aren't you you know why wouldn't you already know this stuff um so it was quite an quite interesting memory for me watching that but you know so you're asking the question um why is there so little interest in democracies holding themselves to democratic standards it's not just america sorry and my point here in alluding to this film what happened when the president united states was elected by a fraudulent election it was a tampered with fraudulent illegitimate elections specifically in the state of florida it wasn't the whole country coast to coast but specifically in the state of florida right that there was jiggery pokery in that election it was an illegitimate election the president says what happened nothing nothing happened now look you know france the yellow vest movement that is a really sincere really important pro-democracy movement within a within a democracy you know taiwan has a bunch of interesting examples including what's called the sunflower movement and it went on to other forms um sunflower movement student movement in in taiwan there are some little indications that some people in democracies are interested in in democracy not enough i mean it's it's really you know obviously the whole world should be in the grip of a massive yellow vest movement and to use the taiwanese example a massive sunflower movement um you know until we have real democracy but the vast majority of people don't care and from my perspective for someone in my generation what happened in the year 2000 it's not 21 years ago oh and really it's before that so really it's more like 22 years ago because the period leading up to the election is part of the history that's what i mean here um [Music] that really shows you know how little people care about democracy in western democratic countries that's it's a huge problem and um i don't think it's getting better i think it's getting worse uh over those over those 20 years and i would say this also sorry i keep alluding to what you see in the newspapers um what you hear on radio and in podcasts i do i listen to the horrible podcast made by the new york times it's all garbage i despise the new york times um do you see in those newspapers or here on those podcasts anyone saying wow what the french have happening with the illa vest movement that's what we need here we need people demanding direct democracy now you know apart from the fact that i don't there's no uh broad public interest there's also no interest coming from kind of career authors reporters and intellectuals right there's no interest from from elsewhere and the uh sort of amongst the political cognoscenti the supposed leaders of opinion so someone also comments um quote i believe at least half of your audience are americans know really the strength of this channel is in europe so kind of i have to thank my audience for putting up with the extent to which i talk about american and canadian politics and i'm going to be honest with you i think the reason why this channel is more successful in europe than in america is because europeans have a higher level of education you know why do so many swedish people watch this channel you know swedish people and german people and swiss people and stuff you know english is not easy for them like i have people watching this with english as their second language and you know sadly if you've spent some time in america i think you would know very very few americans are at a level of education such that they can appreciate the nihilistic discussions of religion politics history ethics that are found on this channel so you know despite the fact that the vast majority of my videos about politics are talking about uniquely political material uh no this channel is not successful and it's not popular in the united states america which obviously shows most of all just in the total number of viewers i have remaining so low even during periods of time when i devoted myself to studying you know i read and reviewed bernie sanders own book while bernie sanders was debating with joe biden and that was the biggest story in the world so there's there's very very little uh intellectual depth to be swam in in the american audience and that's also why by the way my own hopes for changing the future of the united states of america they tend towards wanting to do a project like making my own james bond movie making my own batman movie making my own star wars movie and by the way i don't mean literally a movie starring james bond my point is that in terms of changing american culture and american politics i really look to the possibility of engaging with pop culture with doing something creative that communicates the ethical and political point i want to make indirectly i very much doubt i would actually make a movie starring the character james bond but you know what i mean the point is if you can take your message and express it in an action film if you can take your philosophy frankly and make it meaningful to an audience in that kind of artistic and indirect way you know that's the way i think to to influence the future the united states of america and that's the future of democracy in the western world and there's a real need for it i mean you tell me whether you think of fiction or non-fiction is there any movie you can go out and watch right now that's going to give you a really meaningful set of reflections on what went wrong in afghanistan there should be ten you know at the end at the end of the vietnam war there was a an avalanche of filmmaking both fiction and non-fiction right where you know uh i don't think there's anything mainstream and i think if you if you look around at what's available in terms of small independent filmmaking you're looking at little crumbs there's really nothing terribly impressive in terms of cultural production and by the way you know i do think um i do think you know it's meaningful to have a response to what happened in afghanistan that is as symbolic and as indirect as you know star wars you know what i mean like i'm not saying everything has to be a direct ham-fisted commentary and by the way uh george rr martin the author of game of thrones the author of he said his his career very much started as writing science fiction responses to the war in vietnam and i i feel even now as an old man he's still wrestling with what went wrong in the vietnam war you know what what the significance of that that period of politics is for his own life and for the united states of america yes so june vogue comments this is interesting here quote this reminds me of the conversations we're having now in the united kingdom about how exactly and how well the police are vetted after a police officer has murdered a citizen heart examined on his on on this issue now a second um [Music] you know in canada and the united states we are burdened with a very simple concept that england has not embraced yet and that is equal protection under the law and equal benefit that that's such a simple principle but it's very very difficult to live up to you know and england doesn't have that yet i mean england doesn't have any written constitution right there is no standard that anyone in the police otherwise are held to the united kingdom i did read about i was interested in police brutality police corruption police incompetence in england and frankly it's terrifying i mean this is you know uh this is one of the scariest countries to live in the world in terms of the relation between irresponsible authority and the white boy um but to quote a punk band you might have heard of called the sex pistols england is dreaming so we have several people in the audience writing in to say they were too young to remember the year 2000 well i encourage you guys brendan and june bug take the time to watch that documentary that that'll probably mean a lot to you and i think you will have childhood memories linked to what happened in the year 2000 um but you know suddenly it'll start to make sense and you'll realize the enormous significance of just of public indifference to that issue i mean there's the issue itself and then there's public indifference to it and again let's be clear this isn't just the united states of america this matters in france it matters in england it matters german matters you know it matters in all the connected political cultures around the world and all those people recognize george w bush as the legitimately elected leader of the president united states when he was not you know it wouldn't have taken a whole hell of a lot of backbone for tony blair to stand up and say no i do not recognize this man as the legitimately elected president united states he could have morally you know could have engaged in a moral grand standing that way and say look america has a broken system of elections and until you guys fix it and you also have a corrupt supreme court that was part of the drama of what happened no but yeah this was in response to a question talking about democracies holding themselves to a standard democracy and thus democracies holding one another uh to a standard of democracy yeah we got a lot of swiss people in the audience he alluded to that briefly before and i i think you know i think this reflects that the swiss have a high level of education and thus there are swiss people i mean you know english is not really anyone's first language in switzerland but i have a significant swiss audience nevertheless and i do not i do not have much of an audience in atlanta georgia in case you haven't heard uh so on and so forth alexa what's the time in zurich prime time in zurich it's a good time for me to be broadcasting from a swiss perspective also um okay so let's talk about the cia let's talk about uh intelligence it's really saddening to me i guess you could say intelligence and the cia it has never been my special area of study but it intersects with and overlaps with each and every area of study i have been engaged with the cia is an important part of the history of haiti it's an important part of the history of the sudan it's an important part of the history of cambodia laos vietnam you know but pretty much anything and everything i study the currently unfolding conflict still in um syria you know almost everything i have ever studied in politics you have to deal with the question of what is the cia attempting to do and then what do they actually end up doing and what did what did different presidents united states direct the cia to do and then maybe how did the cia interpret that and carry it out because the cia has some they're given some liberty to show some initiative and take things in one one direction or another um [Music] we're living through a month when i mean this this month right now october 2021 the new york times is engaging in public hand wringing they're wringing their hands over the question of whether or not the cia has lost its edge has lost its capacity um whenever i read these articles or hear these podcasts or these news broadcasts on the radio i hear a lot of radio via the internet as alluded to so it's a radio program but repackaged as a podcast whenever i hear these sources it's really shocking and saddening for me to see that i know much more about the cia what it is and what it isn't than the people who are paid professional journalists uh who are supposed to be doing this job you know um that is very saddening for me now i'm already accustomed to listening to the news about cambodia and feeling that i know and understand much more about cambodia than the the journalists who are presenting this you know in english uh you know i listen to the news about thailand about taiwan like there are many places of the world and many kind of categories of political reporting where i've had to become resigned to the fact that if i listen to this i'm going to be kind of heavily sighing and complaining oh god these people don't know what they're talking about or if i'm reading an article in the new york times these people don't know what they're writing about but yes it is especially saddening it is especially demoralizing to see american journalists writing in english who know and understand so much less about the cia about the central intelligence agency than i do their past present and future importance he'll just pause again now to look at your comments guys yeah junebug comments that it's so annoying when people make a lot of noise in a protest and then forget about it like it's nothing a short time later well this is the end of the year 2021. how many of the issues of 2020 does anyone care about anymore do you it's not so long ago you can remember defund the police you know et cetera et cetera you can remember these extreme demands for political reform political change but even going back just one year earlier than that it seemed like everyone in the united states of america wanted to reform the health care system and one to form the university system i mean it's a long time ago now 2018 2019 remember when what everyone wanted to deal with was student debt tuition the cost of health care right like and uh all of these things have disappeared things that influ that that impact people's lives very directly and personally and things that are far away whether that's afghanistan or what have you um so yeah the fleeting and shallow nature of what little political engagement exists is also it's kind of dire warning about the state and future of democracy and look i can say the same about veganism i can say the same about ecology you can say the same about global warming uh from one month to the next kind of thing um these things come and go none of them as fashions even endure as long as blue jeans and it's very sad to think that for these people they care less about democracy than they do about the latest style in blue jeans alexa what's the time in colorado someone's eating their lunch in colorado while watching this live good for you um so we're going through a brief period of time when the mainstream press is criticizing and cross-examining the cia why why why for getting killed what could be more surreal or bizarre than that that the cause for concern the cause for political controversy is that a memo went out from the cia a memorandum saying that a lot of their informants are being killed now again the fundamental problem here is a false model of progress based on technological innovation based on an examination of the leading edge of technology and presuming that that makes other parts of the political cultural and educational infrastructure obsolete and it doesn't it's irrelevant okay oh well now we have email now we have satellites now we have surveillance cameras now we have all these high-tech innovations guess who's joining me hey babe i'm in the middle of live streaming yeah in case you hadn't guessed okay um [Music] naturally there's a kind of optimism linked to this that people think they'll change the world that people think conventional um intelligence work uh conventional espionage is obsolete or can be neglected or can be forgotten about and just as i've said before that the most important thing in healthcare is not the leading edge of new scientific developments you know what goes on in a laboratory or some new piece of high-tech equipment that's come out but rather the question is the actual skill set the quality of the people not just in terms of their competence and education in that sense but the quality of people ethically and in terms of their motivation who are every day delivering babies every day um conducting pap smears every day inspecting x-rays every day giving people advice that they should quit smoking eat a vegan diet eat a healthier diet you know and again and again and again like you know if you're a medical doctor the united states of america what matters more these kinds of technological innovations or having the skill set to really deal with the obesity epidemic or the skill set to really deal with the drug addiction epidemic right it's not high tech it's low tech it deals with you know ethical problems and problems of personal motivation to a much greater extent than what's what's happening in the leading edge okay what is intelligence work what does it mean to be an asset or an informant for the cia okay think about a hotel where there's one guy on the janitorial staff nobody really likes and nobody ever talks to and everybody knows that he's an alcoholic so sometimes he disappears for a few weeks at a time and nobody knows why and nobody asks and if somebody is hired new to staff say hey wait what happened to that guy why didn't he show up for work today people say oh yeah that guy don't worry about the boss as some kind of favor to him or something the boss keeps this old alcoholic around he gives him a job here as a janitor but when he doesn't show up for work we just don't even bother complaining you know that guy's a that guy's a no hoper that guy nobody pays attention to has the key for every single room in the hotel and sometimes there are important guests who stay in that hotel politically important strategically important and sometimes he uses his key to go into that room and very carefully remove every document in their briefcase and photograph them all and then put them back into the briefcase in the same order and sometimes he takes a very small electronic listing device and inserts it into that person's briefcase so that when they go to their meeting there's a device recording the conversation sending it back to the cia one way or the other okay it's a thankless humble task and you know what that guy nobody pays attention to maybe once in a while he poisons somebody maybe once the while he kills somebody and nobody ever knows that is what it is to be an intelligence asset to be an informant what is going to motivate this guy and how are you going to reward this guy you think it's money where do you think the hotel is that i'm describing to you right now where this humble person is doing this humble work and by the way most likely the owner of the hotel is to some extent in on it to make this possible you know like maybe not maybe you've maybe you've given the hotel owner a fake story maybe you've just bribed the hotel owner you've taken them aside you don't let them know it's intelligent say look this is my uncle charlie he's an alcoholic we're trying to get i know he's no good but look can we pay you to can you keep him on staff even though sometimes he disappears on a drinking bench and by the way my point is here when this guy disappears he's not going on a drinking bench he's doing other kinds of operations that take him away for whatever he's disappearing and reappearing for other reasons what if the hotel i'm describing to you is in communist china what if it's in iran sooner or later this guy gets caught sooner or later he is tortured and then killed that's the future he can look forward to as an intelligence asset for the cia what are you going to pay him what are you going to pay him to do that job and how was he ever even going to spend the money all right he's got to live that life he's got to keep up that cover story and you might say oh well he could own a mansion somewhere else and have his wife and kids think no no he can't i mean the vast majority of people doing this guy really really you can't you know think about the life he's got to lead whether it goes on for five years 10 years 15 years 20 right and we've just had this kind of strange admission from the cia that they have a problem because their people are getting killed all right if you own a mansion there's a paper trail if you have a wife and kid somewhere else who are being well taken care of who are living in luxury while you're living in poverty as a janitor part-time janitor at a hotel there's paper trail all right there's there are signs for all this kind of thing all right that's that's the kind of person the cia needs now i have read and i have heard interviews with a great variety of people who are assets for the cia at different levels you know in different capacities and for different lengths of time there are no interviews with the guys who died with the guys who disappeared right the untold side of the story is this body count that's spread out all over the world and you know how much do you think technology has changed this in 50 years they had little miniature cameras 50 years ago they had little miniature listening devices it was a little bit different you know what i mean but when you were at that level you know that level of budget when you have a multi-million dollar budget even 50 years ago you'd be surprised just how good the surveillance equipment was i mean it's become cheaper it's become optimized and so on and so forth i know but still the mechanics you're talking about here right and you're talking about people who have to have an ethical commitment to not switch sides to not go over to working to the chinese and handing you false intelligence go or whatever the enemy state is whether the chinese the russians the iranians whatever right you need people who are really sincerely committed to working for you and for this cause and i'm not even saying even if it kills them they have to be doing it with the awareness that sooner or later eventually it's going to kill them so we're talking about a country in 2021 that is not capable of facing up to the kind of profound educational failure behind the failure of their health care system hospitals doctors nurses etc right the profound educational failure behind the incompetence of their police police services law and order the whole legal system the court system the lawyers everything else right we're not capable of even thinking this way about the failure in afghanistan and you know obviously it's not just afghanistan i think if you look at the failure in iraq it's a somewhat different failure but you know we've several failures connected to and overlapping with afghanistan that we can we can hitch to this same wagon and as i've said again again parallel to this there's a refusal to think kind of honestly and clearly about executive decisions because it just leads to what concludes whose fault is this what exactly did george w bush decide what exactly does the constitution say you know where exactly did this go wrong we don't want to look at you know police departments and what they do not just their training of police officers but the actual you know principle when do you choke someone if you're a police officer we don't want to look at that oh yeah that decision was made by one man this guy on this date at this he he signed the order for when the police should use chokeholds that's what it comes down to and you know sorry it might be the state governor it might be the mayor it might be you know it might be a the captain of the police the chief of police whether it's the sheriff depending on where you are but particular people made particular decisions that particular consequence we don't think that way of a politics at all so now when we move into the category of black ops of things that are genuinely secret how much worse are these same problems right how much less capable are we of mentating you know like just visualizing and thinking through the kind of competence we were supposed to be developing how and why it is we fell short of it right how incapable are we of just even conceptualizing the problem let alone moving toward a solution so what do i actually hear from the new york times you know oh these are oh oh well you know um i feel like the problem is that um the united states is falling behind from the leading edge of spycraft they use the word spycraft like 50 times right they want to talk about this as if it's the cellphone industry like oh you know china is moving ahead in 5g cell phone technology is it 5g we're at now okay 4g 5g i don't know you know oh oh is is america falling behind in in cell phones is china taking the lead in cell phones they're talking in the same way that on a deep unexamined level is technological about china racing ahead in spycraft about iran racing ahead in spycraft right they don't want to look at it educationally they don't want to look at it at an executive level executive decisions being made like an actual plan or a law or a resolution or constitution whatever right and they also don't want to look at it culturally so i went to class one day at the university of victoria and it was a special class for trying to arrange um an internship so it wasn't the usual university class and right at that time i had been looking at getting a job in intelligence myself so i could go on a long digression about this so that it is actually an interesting digression i used to i used to bitterly joke about this there was a time when i went around and talked to like maybe five different university professors like this if you did this like on seinfeld it would seem hilarious like living through it you're like is my life a situation comedy i sat down with five different professors five very different guys all men and said look you know this was what i wanted to do with my career but now that the university has proven that it's broken i can't do that like what do you think i should do with my my education in criminal and all five of them told me to work for the cia and like you're sitting there like you know is it me like is it something about me is it is it is it my swag is it my steez your response like this guy like this and they knew me they were not strangers these professors each of them had some level of knowledge of an appreciation they'd worked with me for some time wasn't wasn't right at the beginning like you know is it me or do they say this to [ __ ] everybody you know what i mean is this like their normal go-to oh you should work for the cia right and i just i just put in a footnote some of them just immediately said cia for me but some of them said more broadly and you know they said look you should look at working for the canadian military intelligence you should look at this intelligent where they talk through several different careers in intelligence and spy craft shall we say uh with the cia just being one of them on the spectrum but some of them just said oh see i asked you to do with your career um it was about that time this was fresh in my mind this kind of surreal experience and like guys i wasn't enrolled in espionage that wasn't my major in university you know what i mean it's not what i signed up for guys this is what these professors are telling me that's what a guy with my skill set should go into i know well i mean uh now that i think about it so yeah it was it was a very strange and saddening time in my life and you guys know i went through signing up to fight signing up to join the army and fight against isis and i i did i did look at signing up for several different armies so i go to this one special class connected to getting an internship and there is a girl there from iran i'm sorry i'm saying girl i should say young woman i got she was wearing the full black smock you know the full flowing gown of being a orthodox muslim so i couldn't see much of her and her voice was so immature that that's why i think of her as a girl not a woman just her way of speaking now i i don't know her age she was you know i can't i can't describe her aside from the fact that she's wearing this this smock of being an orthodox muslim i don't know what she looks like i don't know anything about her you know i don't know how old she is you know but she sounded very immature it's possible she's 25 but is a really immature 25 and it's possible she's 18. you know i don't know anyway i've been going through this and she started talking and joking openly kind of in front of everyone in the classroom she wasn't speaking to me like i'm a close personal friend or something she started talking about the fact that um representatives from the government so this is the government of canada but they it's quite likely they were really the american government working hand in glove with the canadian government it's not worth my getting into how that happens but some representatives of the government either canada or the united states or both had approached her and tried to recruit her to be an intelligence asset in iran and she was talking about this in a girlish world oh isn't this just the limit you know like that she would be this disgust anyway i didn't interrupt her but i went over to her because there for a couple hours and went over to her some some number of minutes later and i said look you know i understand i understand you're just laughing about it but really you should never discuss that openly this way and you should be very careful what you say in email or facebook messages because when you go back to iran the government of iran will know that you had that meeting they'll know like even if you think it's a joke and you'd never do it right they will know that you have been contacted that you've been spoken to and they'll know basically what you just said in this in this room now and when you say that you just laughed at it they may not believe you this is someone who may be imprisoned tortured and interrogated the next time they go back to iran and if you look at it from the perspective of the iranian government like you know in a perverse machiavellian sense can you blame them they have a problem with iranian citizens going over and living in western countries whether france america canada and coming back with political attitudes and an agenda and attachments to intelligence agencies and reporting providing working as assets and again you could become a janitor in a hotel right it's not just scientists in a nuclear research facility right because the point is if you're a janitor in a hotel sometimes scientists from a nuclear facility stay as a guest at that hotel right like this is it throughout the whole society and this is the way intelligence work pervades uh the whole society okay but we're talking about ethics and motivation and education and culture think about how difficult it is for the canadian government to find a young woman like that who is so profoundly muslim so orthodox muslims so committed to the religion that living here in canada she's still wearing the full black smock which you know like you have the right to do that here illegally you can but very few people do like a lot of people when they come over here they start dressing like a canadian they start wearing sorry i shouldn't say like a canadian they start dressing like a californian let's put that away they start wearing blue jeans and a t-shirt or whatever even if when they go back to visit their family in iran they then wear more conservator so this is someone who is so deeply committed to islam fundamentalist extremist islam let's put it that way that that's how they're living their life and you think she is going to make a commitment to work for the queen of england to betray the people and government of iran and inform and you know again do all the work of intelligence she's going to do that for you with the knowledge that this will lead to again eventually her being tortured and executed her being imprisoned tortured and executed and quite likely her relatives at least her relatives are taken in and interrogated quite likely her her brothers or what have you been her parents other members of her family even if they're not tortured and executed they will at least be imprisoned and interrogated and you know everything you think that is her level of commitment to king and country to the queen of england to canadian democracy the great inspiring ideal of canadian democracy how rare would that be to find someone who can work that way for the cia making the transition from canada to america i can now say exactly the same [ __ ] to you about chinese communism right we have all these chinese coming here and they come and they study our universities you think you can sit down with one of those people and you can turn them you can get them to work for the cia when they go back to china and even if you think you can the vast majority of those people the minute you do it they're gonna contact the chinese embassy or they're gonna they're gonna contact one of the organs of the chinese communist party and they're gonna say hey look you know this is what the government of canada or the cia or the government states wants me to do and then they will become instantly a double agent because the chinese government will say okay just keep pretending like you're cool with that keep it go that's what sorry this is standard melissa surprise this is standard practice they say okay we're going to give you some fake files you can share with them look we're going to give you intelligence you can share with your cia handler or whatever the agency you can hand up the line you know we're going to get full we're going to keep cultivating you as a false asset for the caa and again it's not it's not it's not like opening a bakery okay you open a bakery maybe it's going to fail and you go bankrupt maybe it's going to be a huge success maybe something else you are engaging in a venture that inevitably ends with your death and again really serious consequences certainly in china your whole extended family you know if you become a cia informant or asset in communist china what's the consequence for your parents your brothers and sisters your children or grandchildren if you have any where do you think that leads to for them all right they're on a list forever you know and by the way i do think i do think the communist government of china it's less brutal than the government of saudi arabia or iran it is you know um and to be fair how do you think the government the united states of america treats people who come to the united states to spy for vladimir putin and that exists and there are for example yeah it may be less brutal than some other countries but there is some measure of brutality involved in this okay and now let's flip that scenario around you want to talk about motivation and ethics for people working in intelligence how many people are there who go from iran to the united states of america and are die hard deeply loyal to iran and will continue reporting to iran and serving iran for its own for the rest of their lives and it doesn't matter if you torture them it doesn't they believe and i just when you talk about iran we're not even really talking about islam you're talking mostly about nationalism there are very secular people in iran i'm not joking there are people who are you know kind of nominally muslim they're just barely they're pretty secular modern people but they are passionate nationalists they support iran as a nation-state going back to you know the war with ancient greece you know they think of it as ancient persia all the way through their imaginary glorious future there are people who are iranian nationalists and then of course in addition to that there are muslim fundamentalists who see iran as the you know unique bastion of the one true form of their religion that they want to find out you think that's hard to find like think about which one is scarce and now let's think about the language dimension how many people are there in iran who speak good english or speak good enough english they can come over and do this job here right how many chinese people are there who speak english speak good enough english in every single case right this game is massively stacked in favor of the anti-american forces right and you can't take a white guy and train him to speak korean and insert him in north korea [ __ ] okay you can't take a white guy from boca raton and get him to become a janitor in a hotel in north korea you have to have some way of finding within north korea someone who ostensibly and on the level is a good loyal communist but who deep down in their heart is willing to betray north korea fighting subvert and fight against north korea and do this for you right ultimately at the cost of their own life the lives of their family all right that's what we're talking about here and it hasn't changed in 50 years okay and email and uh recording telephone conversations and satellites and you know that's what we're talking about and the quote unquote failure of the cia is not what the new york times is reporting i just feel like these people are completely politically illiterate they know what they're talking about they don't understand anything about it the failure of the cia is not that people are dying this has always been a game played you know those those high stakes the highest stakes imaginable okay that's more than a hundred years that hasn't changed that's that's not gonna change right the failure is much more profound okay people are not willing to fight and die for the future of democracy in afghanistan white americans are not willing to fight and die for the future of democracy in afghanistan people born and raised in afghanistan are not willing to fight for future democracy i'm guessing they think the american empire is a [ __ ] joke there's a demoralizing effect of the last 20 years of warfare there's an extent to which institutionally culturally and politically america has been discredited right in a way that nobody wants to face up to nobody wants to take responsibility for nobody can even seemingly conceptualize this as i've said in terms of particular decisions made by particular leaders right in terms of the consequence of those decisions in terms of educational change in terms of the competence of the people involved and then yeah more broadly having a having a culture you know having a culture that can transform afghanistan into a modern cosmopolitan democracy right having a culture that can change its own future change the future of the rest of the world um joe biden has been asked recently what he's going to do about taiwan taiwan is kind of sort of in a state of constant war with with china and joe biden's answer is nothing a few months earlier people were asking joe biden what he was going to do about cuba and joe biden's answer was nothing what if instead joe biden said i want you to know my wife and i are practicing the chinese language every night together we're sitting and learning chinese and i've been talking to the ambassador in taiwan about finding and buying a house for me and i am so committed to the future of democracy in taiwan that when my term comes to an end my wife and i are going to retire in taiwan when we need medical care we're going to go to a hospital in taiwan we're going to die of old age in that one so if china ever invades taiwan they will know that they are bombing they are shooting at literally the house their retirement home of the present united states america you know what if he said that let's take it up what if when he was asked about cuba he said let me tell you how i feel about cuba communism in cuba is going to be destroyed it's going to be replaced with democracy and it's going to happen within my lifetime and i know that's a fact because my wife and i have been practicing spanish every night and i'm going to buy a retirement home and when this is over i'm going to move there and i'm going to live there for the rest of my life my life is going to end in a democratic cuba where they have elections so so and i don't care what it takes it's happening it's happening now and that's going to be my legacy and my accomplishment and that's how my own life is going to end i'm personally committed to it to that extent i'm going to spend my last years with my pants rolled up walking in the ocean on a beach in cuba and reading the newspaper in spanish and everyone's going to know that communism is never going to come back because former president united states there's a little island south of turkey called cyprus 50 years nobody wants to do anything it's a lot like cuba that way it's just this conflict that goes on and on and on for 50 years and never gets resolved and nobody [ __ ] doesn't it's a lot like taiwan that way it's a conflict that goes on and on for 50 years all three are islands too right a lot of parallels there all right and nobody wants to do anything about it because the united states has had the world's most phony counterproductive alliance imaginable with turkey you know now this one frankly it doesn't matter if you're talking about the present united states or the prime minister of england because it could be countries other innocent what if what if joe biden said look let me tell you something this situation with the turks conquering and occupying half down service it's going to end it's going to end now because my wife and i have been studying greek every night i'm personally committed i'm going to retire my life is going to end you know i'm going to buy a house on the north side of cyprus and i'm going to live in the reunified democracy of cyprus the cypriot people have their country back in they're going to have democracy and some um george w bush had no military background he had no sense of himself as a potential or actual hero i have been told i don't know if this is true but i have been told by different witnesses to history that when he was the governor of texas he actually spent most of the time in his office playing video games the video game console set up with the tv that is the kind of claim so people who were in his office with him reported this in some ways it's very believable in some ways it's it's hard to believe all right back in the year 2001 or 2002 how would things be different today how much different would everything be if george w bush said look he had never thought about learning any of these languages before he had never thought about this part of the world before he never thought it would be a part of his life but guess what now he and his wife are going to devote the rest of their lives to afghanistan that he's bought a house there that he's learning the language there and that he knows he's committed to the democratization of afghanistan working and lasting forever because he's going to put his own life on the line he's going to transform afghanistan to such an extent that it is possible for a white american like himself to walk down the street and buy a newspaper and sleep at night right that he personally is committed to it the language the history the politics the culture that he's going to throw himself into this 110 that he is in this small way going to be a hero you call this an unwinnable war no it's not it's the easiest war to win in the history of the world you're up against men on foot with rifles oh the taliban had no air force okay and the taliban also refused to use chemical weapons and they didn't use nuclear weapons it was really unbelievably asymmetrical warfare right okay you lost because of particular decisions made by particular people right how do you motivate how do you motivate afghan people to be your informants to be your spies to work for the cia when george w bush himself doesn't have that level of commitment when the american people themselves don't have that level of commitment when the american soldiers at all levels like elite brass generals commanders down to the benefit none of them have that commit none of them are saying they're going to get married to an afghan woman and stay in africa afghanistan forever they're gonna raise their own children there they're gonna like imagine you're committed enough that you're gonna whether your kids are white or black or they're half white half african whatever you say yeah i'm committed or i'm gonna raise my own children growing up here and going to school here and george w bush says he's he's so old it would be his grandchildren or great-grandchildren sorry he was too old to talk about his children but he's going to have his descendants actually living there actually committed to that place okay the reason why the cia can't win especially now especially in this phase of the 21st century is that okay the supporters of xi jinping the supporters of the communist regime in china they believe in the future of china in a way that americans do not believe in the future of america in a way that americans do not believe in the future of democracy and very briefly i think that problem is the same in france and in germany and in belgium and in the netherlands and in england and in australia okay there is a commitment to the next thousand years of china's history that runs really deep and people are willing to risk their own lives and do daring things right for that thousand-year future and it runs so deep that even if they personally dislike the leadership of xi jinping you know like even if they dislike the person who's in power right now that's not gonna shake them that's not gonna turn them right in in the same way that the fact that you personally dislike george w bush or you personally dislike donald trump that might really shake the way you feel about democracy that might really shake the way you feel about the future of america and i mean that whether you are american or swiss whether you were american or french or english right because those people also have to think about how they feel about the future of america and the future of american democracy okay there were a lot of people in iran again whether they are secular or devoutly muslim and they believe in the thousand-year future of iran really for real okay america is up against enemies and guys you have to know russians it's not everybody in russia but russian nationalism again whether christian or secular oh yeah there are there are russians who believe in the thousand-year future of russia and even if they dislike the guy who's in charge right now like they are looking at this on a time frame where like hey communism came and went vladimir putin's going to come and go but they are really deeply committed and it doesn't matter if they've lived in california for 10 years and they have a better quality of life in california than they would have had if they stayed in vladivostok they're aware of that but their commitment on a deep level the same way you have chinese agents in america right their commitment on a deep level is is to serve to serve that agenda so what really matters about the failure of the cia that we right now in october it's not going to last right now in october 2021 we're having a brief period when the newspapers and news services are wringing their hands over this okay it means a lot more than people think it does it reflects an underlying weakness in our civilization that cannot be solved by increasing the budget for the cia and it also cannot be solved by defunding the cia see where i'm going with this [Laughter] what's wrong with our police forces cannot be solved by increasing the budget for the police and it cannot be solved by defunding the police what's wrong with our health care system broadly speaking doctors nurses hospitals everything cannot be solved by increasing the budget it cannot be solved by by decreasing the budget we have some really hard questions to ask ourselves and the chinese they think they've got the answers we're up against enemies all around the world who are done with asking those questions and i feel we are still at the very beginning stages of examining as we are now sleepwalking through the wreckage left the consequences left over after the end of what were called the forever wars