Derek: 00:28

Welcome back to the Fourth Wave Podcast. Today is a somber day. It is September 11 and it has been over two decades since the September eleventh attacks in New York City in the World Trade Centers. And while, you know, I grew up in high school when that happened, There's also a reason that today is a somber day for another group of people. It is a somber day for the Chilean people because back in 1973, about thirty years before the September eleventh attacks, there was a great coup that occurred against Salvador Allende by somebody who would replace him, Pinochet.

Derek: 01:19

And that coup, that murder, that installation of a dictator came maybe not quite directly at the hands of The US, but with with assistance and guidance and prodding and encouragement and all other kinds of things, it was it was US backed encouraged, however you want to put it. And as a result, a horrendous dictator for, you know, over a decade was installed in Chile and had a reign of terror, made people disappear, imprisoned people, tortured people, murdered people. And it was terrible. So I thought today would be a fitting day because in this episode, Uncovering Empire, we are finishing up our section looking at the government and military. And while I think of, because, you know, I'm a child who grew up with, in the shadow of September 11 and just, you know, that being the world that I grew up in when I went to college and stuff and on, and had friends joining the military and everything.

Derek: 02:34

Like, that's what I think of when I think of military, our response to people attacking us. But hopefully what you've seen this season is that people don't hate us because hate The United States because we're free, they hate us because we're hateable. We've done so much evil in the world as an empire. And so, this date, I figured it would be kind of a doubly good date to release this episode. In memory of September 11 and the innocent people who died as a result of the hatred that other people have for us, but at the same time, in remembrance of the rightful hatred that a lot of people have towards The US because of the way that we have functioned in the world.

Derek: 03:27

And so this is a great day to release this episode and take a look at some of the resources that have guided me throughout this season, throughout this particular section. Since I broke this section up into two sections, military propaganda, which is of course an arm of the government, but nevertheless, broke it up because it's such a big entity into military as well as government. So we'll start with military. For military propaganda, hands down, the the book that you really need to read is War Is A Racket because it's such a short book and it's, I mean, it's such a classic. It was was written before World War Two, and so and it was written by a guy who has so much credibility, Major General Smedley Butler, one of, if not the most decorated marines in US history to this day, and he doesn't have an axe to grind.

Derek: 04:18

Like if anything, he should be propping up the government, but and The United States. But he's able to, more objectively than any of us, he's able to take a look at what the government had him do, who he did it for, what the results of that were, and he lays it out and he says, War is a racket. If you want another book that kind of goes into this and kind of more of the effects, I didn't find it as good, I mean it was interesting, but Gangsters of Capitalism is another book that kind of is more biographical and takes a look at some of the background to Butler. I also found the Afghanistan Papers were, was a good book to take a look at how this kind of thing happens in more modern times, you know, what was going on there with the propaganda, what we were told versus what was actually happening, who knew about what when, and yet how the show just went on for two decades. Terrible for the people involved in it on both sides, in Afghanistan and the soldiers who thought that they were doing great things for freedom.

Derek: 05:27

But the Afghanistan papers are a good look at how military propaganda kind of plays out, like what goes on behind the scenes. Of course, base nation, you heard me talk with Doctor. Vine this season, did an interview with him, which is a fantastic look at the footprint that the military has around the world and the empire that we truly are and kind of how that gets couched. And there's a great, I don't know if it's a meme or whatever you wanna call it, but you can look, just do

Derek: 05:57

a Google search and you can find The US always says, you

Derek: 06:03

know, well China's encroaching and China's doing this and all that, but then you can go look at a map of The US military bases and we have like China, Russia surrounded. Our military bases are like right on their doorstep and they don't have anything close to us. And it's just, it's really interesting. So base nation kind of gives you more of a feel of how how expansive and imperialistic the army for The United States really is and it's fascinating. More for the propaganda side, if you wanna take a deeper look at how propaganda kind of instills itself in people, you know, these other things that I mentioned are more of like the effects of propaganda and the recognition of it, but if you wanna see, well like, how does that stuff ever get into our heads, like how do we believe, how did Smedley Butler believe that he was doing good things because it seems so obvious to us that he wasn't.

Derek: 07:00

How did, like, did he think that he was doing good things? Or the people in Afghanistan, how did the soldiers believe that they were doing good things? How could they not see what was really going on? So a couple books were Ordinary Men was really good in relation to this and to how just regular people can believe things. And they thought they were free, which is a World War two book as well.

Derek: 07:30

But this guy goes and he interviews like after World War two, he interviews 10 people along the spectrum of like Nazism, like they were dedicated Nazis versus kind of indifferent, and just, he's like, Well, what were you

Derek: 07:42

all thinking? And of course

Derek: 07:43

he asked that he can't come in straight up ask them, but he asked these people and he evaluates their responses and it's really fascinating to see how could people like go along with these kinds

Derek: 07:53

of things. There are also a

Derek: 07:56

couple videos that I have linked here. One from Second Thought, which is more of a, I guess he's explicitly Marxist, pretty Marxist. But I find that I like to get videos from Marxists and capitalists and you've seen that through this season. I've interviewed people, I've interviewed communists, I've interviewed capitalists, right, all across the spectrum because I think Marxism does a really good job of identifying systemic issues, whereas capitalism does a good job of keeping an individual view. And so you've got the collective versus the individual and both of those things are good in a sense, but each one doesn't seem to be able to keep the other in view.

Derek: 08:45

If you're all about the collective, you're willing to sacrifice individuals. If you're all about the individual, you're willing to sacrifice collectives, groups of people, through systemic injustice. And so, don't dismiss the Second Thought video just because he's a Marxist, you should check it out, and he has a lot of good things that help you to think through stuff. There's also some videos in here about military recruiting practices, and one of the books that I loved which, I don't know that it really fits under propaganda, but it it kind of gets the discussion rolling on on something called moral injury and like what's really happening to soldiers who are returning home. It's called Achilles in Vietnam and it was just a phenomenal read to kind of see the mindset that that soldiers have and what war does to them and just what people are starting to figure out with PTSD and such, but it still, you know, it still gets kind of minimized and George Carlin, I think it was, has a really, a really good skit on this where he talks about how we use language to soften things, you know, with PTSD.

Derek: 09:55

He's like, it used to be called shell shock, now, you know, and then he goes through the, he traces the different things that it was called until it's like, well PTSD, it's kind of informal and it's like a medical diagnosis and it doesn't feel so bad. And it's just really good to how

Derek: 10:13

we're propagandizing our our soldiers and people into thinking that that things aren't so bad. Alright, and now on

Derek: 10:23

to military conspiracies. There are loads of conspiracies that we could get into when we get to the military and the government, and if you just Google, you can find your own set of conspiracies that interest you. I'm gonna try to highlight some of the ones that I think are the resources that I think are most interesting or most pertinent. So I'll try to hit some of the things off the beaten path, as well as some of the things on the path that that might be more mainstream conspiracy types of things. The first that I'd recommend that is just really applicable is the Senate Intelligence Committee Report on Torture.

Derek: 11:01

And they've even got a video about this that does a pretty good job of of showing what happened. But, and the book's not super super interesting, you can find different versions of it that summarize it differently, but it's just really

Derek: 11:12

good to know what we were doing and

Derek: 11:16

who knew about it and the language that they used to obfuscate and it's just terrible what we did in regards to torture and how we know it's ineffective. I mean, we know that it doesn't lead to good results and we know that it gives us a lot of bad data apart from the ethical issue. It just gives us bad data. We don't have any anything good that has come out of it. I don't know that there's ever anything that we gain from torture that we

Derek: 11:46

can show we gain from torture and not through other methods. It's just bad. So,

Derek: 11:53

that's really pertinent to know. McNamara's Folly is one that we covered actually in our section on race, but it's really interesting. And so I'd recommend checking that out about how they lowered the IQ standards in order to allow cannon fodder essentially into the military. They needed warm bodies. And so that's a good read.

Derek: 12:18

You can also find a lecture or a discussion from the guy on YouTube. There's Day of Deceit, and Day of Deceit is about D Day and what The US did or did not know, the evidence that we have for that, and that's fascinating. You know, I don't a 100% know where I stand on it, but if this guy really found some of these documents that he said, which I guess I I just haven't done the legwork to look at them, but you could follow that up and it's, it really is fascinating, and it wouldn't surprise me if we knew more than than a lot of people say that we knew. The plot to seize the White House was really interesting and nobody talks about it. And it involves Major General Smedley Butler, who actually was a whistleblower against a bunch of people, a bunch corporate capitalist individuals, wealthy people, aristocracy, whatever you wanna call them, who are trying to say, hey look, we don't like what's going on in the White House, we're gonna basically plan a coup.

Derek: 13:19

So all these business people plan a coup and they want Butler to lead it because Butler is really popular with the army, right? For a good coup, you need an army, a loyal army. And Butler had been fighting, I can't remember what it was called, but when he was trying to get the World War I fighters their money that they were due, he was trying to get that to them and then actually MacArthur ended up like fighting against these World War I veterans to kind of kick them out of Washington and I think they even killed some. But Butler is on their side and trying to get them their pay and stuff. And so all the, like, you've got all these veterans who love Butler, and these corporate guys are like, Hey Butler, how about you help us out with a coup here?

Derek: 14:09

And so they wanted to seize the White House, and Butler's like, No way. And he goes and he blows the whistle on them, and there are these like congressional hearings and nothing happens to anybody. It's insane, it's insane. So that's a really good one to take a look at. That involves the military, I mean, because the butler's in it and because they try to get veterans to help out, but you could also put it under corporate, right, because they're trying to take the reins of of politics.

Derek: 14:45

You could get into Dark Alliance and Legacy of Ashes which, I mean, that deals with the CIA, so where's the line between what we're talking about here with the military versus government? I don't know, but Dark Alliance and Legacy of Ashes are good. Legacy of Ashes is specifically about the CIA and Dark Alliance is of course about Gary Webb, which we talked about under our section on media and his, the crack epidemic and how the CIA funded the Contras and all kinds of stuff, but that's Webb's story about how that came to be uncovered. And it's really good. There's also a movie about it, might be the same name, Dark Alliance, I don't remember.

Derek: 15:25

But it's a the movie was actually really good and it didn't deviate from the book as far as I remembered. It did a good job of portraying Webb's claims, not conspiratorially either way. Like, it didn't say he was crazy, but it also didn't say that he was making these claims that conspiracy theorists say he was making.

Derek: 15:44

So it was a good movie. And then, so I think it's, here I can tack on it, it's not dealing with

Derek: 15:53

the military again, but it is a government office and it is a violent office, so I'm gonna put it under military. But there are a number of resources on policing that I strongly recommend you look into, and policing actually, for as much damage as our military does, policing is something that is more on the ground level and maybe impacts most of our lives, more of our lives day to day. And if you can see it on the ground level, you can imagine what things are like, what the corruption is like when you scale that up to the military level. So it might be a good place for you to actually start by taking a look at policing. There are a couple really good ones that I'd recommend, and maybe you'd want to start with some of the some of the more like podcasts and stuff.

Derek: 16:43

So Behind the Bastards, you know, as far as credibility goes, like they're fun, they're interesting to listen to, so that might be good to wet your whistle. I wouldn't hang my hat on all of their facts and stuff that they're saying, but it's really, it's a good start and it'll get you interested in terms of, well, where do I go from here? Like, what aspect of policing do

Derek: 17:04

I wanna study? But as far as

Derek: 17:06

a couple really good examples of just seeing corruption in policing, you can check out Breaking Blue, which I found really interesting. I don't know why other people might not like it, it didn't get us all that creative ratings from other people, but I was just fascinated by the story, it was so intriguing. I'd recommend Breaking Blue or Bluegrass Conspiracy, and both of those are gonna deal with how there are corrupt cops in those different areas, completely different areas of the country. One's out West, and I think Washington, the other one's, I don't know, like Georgia. And then there's I Got a Monster, which is up in Baltimore, and that one, if you want to get like deep into how things work, and it was a really high quality book because it was taken from like affidavits and court hearings and all kinds of things, so this guy really, or the author really pieces the story together really well, and you're able to see how how corruption in policing works.

Derek: 18:11

And all of those are really good. So those are three examples from three different parts of the country about corruption in policing, and there are so many more stories. I mean, read another one called Convicted, and I don't remember where they were, maybe Indianapolis, I don't know. But like, the amount of corruption and the way that policing works and how hard it is to fight that if you're a new person coming onto the force and, you know, whether you just look away or you're actually active in the corruption, like it's everywhere. The system is really messed up and the more stories you're able to listen to or read, you're able to see how messed up that is.

Derek: 18:56

And then you just imagine, what does that mean for the whole system? What does that mean for the military and bigger systems where more money's changing hands, there's more power, all that kind of stuff. And in line with that, you could get into into things like, you know, the the prisons, which are really depressing too, and there there are lots of things. I think I'll recommend that

Derek: 19:18

in the government section though.

Derek: 19:20

But last one here, I would recommend Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish. Yeah, Foucault's kind of a strange person. If you read about him and like some of his beliefs, he's kinda weird. But his Discipline and Punish, even if you just read summaries or or whatnot, is absolutely fascinating as far as a systemic analysis of how prisons and the justice system function. And then particularly, even if you're not maybe so much into that, the second half of his book and his discussion on the Panopticon, which I hope to have an episode on, is amazing.

Derek: 20:02

The Panopticon deals a lot with government surveillance and how surveillance influences our lives and freedoms and all of that. So I would highly recommend Foucault's Discipline and Punish. Alright, on to government propaganda. I think hands down the best book, but it's as long and it gets pretty tedious. So, I don't know, I don't think it's popular enough that you can buy summaries on it or anything, but manipulating the masses shows you how everything was birthed.

Derek: 20:39

It gets way, way too deep in the details, but even if you read the first 100 pages, get a pretty good idea of, oh, okay, I see how, how where we are now, how that was kind of born. And it gives you some interesting leads like you get different people like I think Bill Donovan is here and he comes along later, I think in World War II, and he's got like a biography, several biographies. So it just gives you a good starting point for for where things start in The US at least, and kind of on the world stage because it's kind of going on at the same time. I also recommend Gulag Archipelago if you want to take a look. You know, in this season, we pick a lot on The US because I'm into internal critiquing, and it's not because I think that communism, the Soviets, and whoever else are the good guys, It's just because I believe in internal critiques.

Derek: 21:37

But Gulag Archipelago, super long, like three volumes I think, and it's long and really repetitive. I mean, he says the same things a thousand different ways. Nevertheless, it's really good and it's fascinating and you're able to get abridged versions too. So, I might recommend the abridged version, especially if you're strapped for time and don't have as much interest, do the abridged because there's a lot of repetition. But it's all very good and he he's he's kind

Derek: 22:09

of sassy, I like him.

Derek: 22:13

Another one, you know, I recommended They Thought They Were Free earlier which would go good here too for government propaganda because it does deal with kind of how the government, not just the military but the government, can kind of sway people. But another one of the along those lines would be called Defying Hitler. And in there, he has a short section where he even talks about how the propaganda was working on him and like how he was able to see that in retrospect, and that was interesting. Alright, coming back to The US, you can talk about dog whistle politics and that goes into the language that politicians use, is helpful to kind of see how we finagle words to mean things that we might not, we might be able to say, Oh, I didn't say that, right? But you did say it.

Derek: 23:02

It's what your words meant even if you didn't say those exact words. I would also recommend, maybe for this section, reading fiction, right? So I would recommend two books, and I would I would read them both together. I would read Nineteen Eighty Four and Brave New World. Everybody knows nineteen eighty four, like everybody's familiar with that, probably, because our idea of dictators and bad governments and all that stuff are totalitarian in the sense of, you know, they're gonna be like North Korea.

Derek: 23:38

But Brave New World gives you another vision for what totalitarianism can look like and how that can function with people kind of going along with it and thinking it's good. And I think both of those views of what could be are really important to understand the range of dictators and totalitarian states and oppression. And you could probably throw in some kids books here, I mean, The Giver is sort of, sort of along the lines of A Brave New World, you know, City of Emperor, think, like those types of things are kind of in that realm if you want more of kids books that go along with that. Executing the Rosenbergs was a good book and of course I talked to Robert Meirpole in our section on media propaganda, and so his story and his book as well. His book maybe might even be better and I don't remember what his book is called, but you can go back to that episode in the interview and see a link to his book which was very good at seeing how did McCarthyism and this communist scare, the Red Scare, how did that get two people killed?

Derek: 24:53

One of, at least one of, who was innocent and or not worthy of death and the other one who, I mean, I don't think was worthy of death even on US standards, but they got, they both got killed as kind of like pawns and because of the propaganda machine. And it's a terrible story that left two boys orphans. And yeah, it's a good story to look into it to see how propaganda works in the real world. For Christians, I would strongly recommend Cruz's One Nation Under God because, especially if you're coming like I am out of a conservative background, conservative Christian background, it's important to be honest with ourselves about our history, our nation's history and Christian history. And you can't really do that if you're fed on all this propaganda about what Christianity is and America is a Christian nation and all this kind of stuff, you need to kind of know where you came from and how things transpired.

Derek: 26:01

Cruise's One Nation Under God and Fitzgerald's, I think it's The Evangelicals, but those are both really good books to kind of get you started. And now of course, there were some things that, especially I remember Fitzgerald saying where I was like, I don't know if you can back that claim up in terms of like what she was saying that Protestants did or did not believe back in the day, But they were minor details, they were like theological details, they weren't historical details so much. But her book was was really good. Lastly, so there's a video that I put in here, Michael Perenti's The Dark Myths of Empire, and that's just going to be a good consolidation of discussion about The US Empire and kind of the way that things actually are compared to what maybe we've been taught. So as far as conspiracies, I'm going break government conspiracies up into two parts because they are kind of the simple conspiracies like one off conspiracies, and then there are conspiracies that are a bit more complex, compound conspiracies perhaps.

Derek: 27:14

So simple government conspiracies, I've got some links in here to things like Cointell Pro. There's a Cointell Pro documentary which is amazing, just this this story of Cointell Pro and it uncovered a lot of different things about how the government was basically spying on everybody. They were they were like ruining people's lives, like if a professor was too far to the left, they'd be they'd like set them up and make their wives think that they were having affairs and all kinds of things and they threatened Martin Luther King Jr, they told him to commit suicide or else they were gonna release, I think, information about his affairs to the public and things like that where they're trying to get people to assassinate themselves, right?

Derek: 28:01

There's MK Ultra which is hard

Derek: 28:04

to even believe was real. Like they were taking people off the streets and like drugging them and testing LSD and all kinds of things on people. It's insane. It's like, that one to me is like science fiction. Like holy cow, how do you get away with doing that?

Derek: 28:20

But, you know, under MKUltra, around that time, you've got all kinds of other things going on. Operation Condor, where we are assassinating people in South America and making coups and things. HT Lingual, where we're where the government's opening people's mail, like lots and lots of mail. The Pentagon Papers, which, you you can find documentaries and books, including by Ellsberg himself, on the Pentagon Papers that reveal Vietnam was started on a farce, right, that we weren't really attacked by a Vietnamese ship. And then even in the modern day times, WikiLeaks and you can get into Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning.

Derek: 29:02

But there's so much that's been that we know the government has done that is just absolutely wicked and evil and spying on its own citizens and the terrible things that we're doing, the torture, everything, the coups, the assassinations, it's insane. Like, it is the stuff that we know, we don't even need to

Derek: 29:23

get into the the conspiracies that we're not sure about to know that we are so screwed up and so evil, just absolutely evil. But,

Derek: 29:33

it is fun to get into some of the the other more ambiguous conspiracies. I really liked the one on Martin Luther King Jr, The Plot to Kill King. That was fascinating to me. And now I didn't follow-up on the book, but from what it was, the way that things were presented, there were so many things where I was like, oh, that there's no way that's coincidence, right? There's no way, something is going on.

Derek: 29:59

And so of all the conspiracies that are out there, like, you know, JFK, King, all of Roswell, whatever, the plot to kill King has me the most convinced on on some of the, like, more maybe far out conspiracies. I the MLK, I think was was a setup. And especially knowing what you know about the the CIA, we know that they were trying to get King to kill himself, and we know some of the other people that they essentially had assassinated, and the black leader leaders and stuff, and some of the things that they were doing

Derek: 30:35

to them. What I really don't doubt that MLK was assassinated. But I didn't want

Derek: 30:42

to include that in in the season because it is disputed enough that I don't think it's worth doing. There's another book called American Conspiracies and Cover Ups, which goes through a lot of different conspiracies, so that might be good for good bang for your buck. The Creature from Jekyll Island, the guy who wrote it is kind of a little off his rocker, think, from from what I researched on him. But his story is really interesting, deals with the financial system and all that stuff that went on. And what he says about inflation and the way that that works makes a lot of sense in regards to why this conspiracy might be true and why people did what they did.

Derek: 31:23

It's an interesting read and something worth checking into, but I wouldn't stand behind as a conspiracy that I'd say happened. As far as another conspiracy that we know happened, or maybe I shouldn't say, yes, we know it happened, but to what extent, I don't know. So in Japan, unit seven thirty one were simply like the Nazis, and some would argue worse, some would argue the same, I don't know. I don't know exactly the scale and and stuff, but in terms of the things that they were doing to people and the sadism, they were really nasty. They were terrible.

Derek: 31:58

So I've linked, I think a video, there are also some books. I didn't read one that I really liked that was good that I'd recommend, but there are a number of videos on it that give you a synopsis of these essentially Japanese Nazi psychos. And where the conspiracy comes in, okay, yeah, that's conspiratorial to a certain extent, but where the bigger conspiracy comes in is you have to ask yourself, well, I've heard of the Nuremberg trials, but there were never any trials for the Japanese and if they did the same thing, like, shouldn't there be war crimes trials for them? Nope. And so the conspiracy goes that and I think I've I think I read a document that that kind of backs this up, but I I can't vouch 100% for for that because I can't find whatever link I I had.

Derek: 32:53

But essentially, the conspiracy is, look, The US essentially had because we defeated Japan basically essentially by ourselves. Right? We dropped the bombs and we went in. Unlike Germany, you got Russia coming in, The US, Great Britain, like everybody's coming in and so we kind of have to split. Well in Japan, we had free reign, it was just us.

Derek: 33:15

And so we say to these Japanese people who are doing all these biological experiments, hey, I'll tell

Derek: 33:19

you what, you give us your information and we will kinda look the other way.

Derek: 33:24

We'll let you go, you'll live your life, you'll have a nice, comfortable life and you're free. It doesn't matter what you did, the

Derek: 33:30

past is in the past. Just give us your biological warfare information and you're good. And so The US let psychotic, mass murdering, sadistic, torturing Japanese criminals go

Derek: 33:49

so that we could have, you know, our our own information on biological weapons and things, right? So, I think that makes 100 sense. Of course, the Soviets actually had war crimes trials for the Japanese, right? So those those nasty communist Soviets had war crimes trials. Now, am I naive enough to think that the Soviets who are themselves horrendous people who like shoot their own guys if they they run back and retreat, Am I naive enough to think that they had war crimes trials out of the goodness of their heart?

Derek: 34:24

No, of course not. I think it was that was probably their own propaganda and trying to say, hey look, we're good, we have war crimes trials. Well, look at what The US does, they don't do anything. So of course that was probably propaganda too. Nevertheless, The US did, we let people go so that we could have our our own information to make our own weapons pretty terrible.

Derek: 34:49

Another interesting thing, and this I don't know that this is conspiratorial because it's right out there in the open, but it's it's something that people don't know, right? We we talk about how we hate we hate all these human rights violations and atrocities. But when I found out that The United States, up through 1993, supported Pol Pot of the Khmer Rouge, the guy who had, who committed a genocide against millions of people, we supported him up through 1993 for a UN seat, right? Of course, nobody talks about that. We don't talk about how we have no problems with dictators and mass murderers and genocidal maniacs.

Derek: 35:32

If it suits our purpose, we're happy to support them, or install them, kill the good guy and install the psychos as leaders. All right, so those were the more simple conspiracies, the things that are like more one off types of things. But now getting into the more ambiguous and the systemic government conspiracies. Snowden, Edward Snowden's No Place to Hide is a great book that kind of shows you the the government surveillance and all that stuff. It's really fascinating, really good.

Derek: 36:05

I highly recommend it. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Now if you want to take a really deep dive into history and kind of

Derek: 36:13

get a long look at where some of

Derek: 36:16

our systemic issues have started from, and why Africa is the way it is, why The U. S. And other countries have some of the wealth that we have, and

Derek: 36:28

all that kind of thing. It's a really good place to start. And I

Derek: 36:32

would also, I would read that after I read How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, I would take

Derek: 36:37

a look at Capitalism and Slavery.

Derek: 36:41

Now of course, if you're a capitalist, you're not gonna like the title of that book, but I mean it shows you, capitalism tries to argue that, hey look, you know, Marxism needs capitalism in order to in order to work, like they need the capital to run on for Marxism to work. And I think Marx himself, if I'm not mistaken, like kind of acknowledged that. But

Derek: 37:05

the thing for capitalism is that I would argue, I don't know

Derek: 37:08

that how Europe underdeveloped Africa or capitalism and slavery make this argument outright, but what I would draw from that is,

Derek: 37:16

oh, well, capitalism essentially needs mercantilism in order

Derek: 37:21

to work. Because what mercantilism does is it basically takes takes you and you extract all these resources, human resources and and natural resources from a country, and now you've got a huge pot of wealth to work with. And now, you sit back and you start creating and using all all of your advantages that you have in slave labor, and all these resources you stole, and the exploitation of people in other countries and their minds and all that kind of stuff, then you start creating all this wealth and all this material. You sit back and you're like, look, we're just, we're hard workers, we're using our brains, we're, you know, we're really, we've got a lot of ingenuity. Why is Africa so far behind?

Derek: 38:07

Right? Look at

Derek: 38:08

capitalism, it's working. And it's like, well, yeah, it's working because you're sitting on a dragon's pile of stuff that you got on mercantilism. And it so those two books are really good if you wanna get into if

Derek: 38:25

you wanna get into that whole discussion, and it it it overlaps a lot with Empire, with the Spanish American War, with The Philippines, Cuba, Haiti, all that we discussed in our episode on Haiti, and our interactions in the world and all that kind of stuff. But it also, for me, it brings in in the Capitalism and Slavery book, there was a part where he talks about how, you know, every pound of sugar somebody somebody like did the math and they figured out, look, every pound of sugar is worth about two ounces of human flesh because they did like a cost to cost comparison of a slave and sugar, however they did it. But every pound of sugar is worth two ounces of can buy you two ounces of human flesh. So a family using five pounds of sugar a week could save one man in less than two years, twenty one months. But the thing was, like, who's gonna stop eating sugar?

Derek: 39:22

Like nobody stopped eating sugar except the fearless Benjamin Lay, right? Which is a story that we did back in our section on race, right? So there's, we can look at those evil, bad mercantilists or corporate greed and all that stuff that we're doing to other people, but then, or Apple, who's got the slave labor, and you have to say, Well, you know what? In my family, when my kids get older, if, you know, 16, 18, whenever we decide to give them phones, if we'd ever decide that, it's like, if I bought six phones for our family, I wonder if we didn't, if we chose not to buy from a company that had slave labor, how many slaves would that be

Derek: 40:04

that that, essentially wouldn't be exploited?

Derek: 40:08

I don't know, but I buy iPhones, and that's something that, also causes self reflection because we're a part

Derek: 40:15

of the empire too. So those are two really heavy books to kind of think through. A bunch of other books, start going through

Derek: 40:25

this fast because nobody wants to listen to just recommendations for books for a whole hour, so I'll work. Pathologies of Power by Paul Farmer, who is really good writer on Haiti, but Pathologies of Power spreads out and yes, it deals with his experience from Haiti but also all over the world. And it kind of explains how power functions and where conspiracies kind of come from. Radio Free Dixie I recommended in our section on slavery, racism as well. But Robert F.

Derek: 40:56

Williams and, you know, the Kissing Girls case and and just the CIA coming after him and and him escaping to to Cuba to get away from that. Then Waiting for an Echo and a Knock at Midnight deals with the criminal justice system and some of the evil that goes on there. The Pinochet File, I really liked. I really liked it. Probably, a lot of people think it's a really dry book.

Derek: 41:23

I mean it is, he uses a lot of like documentation, but oh, it's so fascinating what we did in Chile and how terrible Pinochet was and how we backed that and stuff. So it's a

Derek: 41:37

really good look at a not so well known case of US meddling.

Derek: 41:46

Fruit Broken Bodies deals kind

Derek: 41:48

of with, like, it's not really

Derek: 41:52

a conspiracy per se, but the way that we view immigrants and the way that what our government does impacts those people, and we know it, but we don't change our economics because it's out of our self interest, but we have narratives against immigrants and other sorts of things that are meant to free us from having to talk about how we're harming people for our self interest. New Confessions of an Economic Hitman is fantastic. You'd want to research it to back up its claims, but I strongly recommend it to see how governments basically put their dogs on a leash, how they they get lackeys, how they they get people under their thumb like the mafia. Secrets by Ellsberg is good, about the Pentagon Papers, The Tariff Factory, and We Sell Drugs are two really good books that deal

Derek: 42:43

with how The US kind of creates its

Derek: 42:49

own terrorists and bad people and how that's framed. And then Poison Spring, off the beaten track. It deals with the EPA, so if you're into more environmental sorts of things, it was interesting. Again, with all

Derek: 43:04

of these, I didn't do the legwork to back up all

Derek: 43:06

of the claims and things. These are, some of these you know are really good, but others it's kind of like, well, this is really complex, I would have to do a lot of research and digging to verify these things and to see the whole case. So, but Poison Spring is a

Derek: 43:21

good one in regard to environment. Things I want

Derek: 43:24

to read. I can't vouch for at all, but readings that looked interesting. Theater of Power, The Business of War, Uncle Sam Wants You, Democracy's Prisoner, A Season of Inquiry, and that one, I wanna say, I really wanna read that one. That's about the the church commission, and the church commission, insane. Like you should just go go research the church commit committee or commission, I don't remember.

Derek: 43:52

But it's basically after all these terrible things, I think it's after Pinochet comes in and after you had the Tuskegee experiments, all these things are kind

Derek: 44:04

of revealed at this time and it's insane all the things

Derek: 44:08

that are revealed and the CIA is kind of like, Yeah, we did that, we did that too, and oh yeah. But one of the things that comes out, if you look it up, is the CIA like admitted they had created a heart attack gun. Like that they could shoot this untraceable dart or whatever, I don't know if it would dissolve in your blood or whatnot, but they could shoot it into somebody and it would give them a heart attack. So they could assassinate people from some kind of distance with a gun that would give them, give somebody a heart attack. Like, insane.

Derek: 44:39

And this was back in early to mid seventies that they had this. So like, what technology do they have now fifty years later? Insane. How We Advertised America is also one. And then there's the Deprogram Podcast, which I haven't checked out, but they've got an episode called Conspiracies They Told You Weren't Real.

Derek: 44:58

And that gets into some of our more simple conspiracies that we mentioned here. There's so much I left off the list. These are just things that I think would be worth checking into.

Derek: 45:12

So hopefully that gives you a start.

Derek: 45:18

That's all for now. So peace, and because I'm a pacifist, when I say it, I mean it. This podcast is a part of the Kingdom Outpost Network. Please check out the links below to find other great podcasts and content related to nonviolence and Kingdom Living.