Episode 355 – Dialectics of Dominance with Aaron Good

Steve Grumbine:
00:00:42

All right, folks, this is Steve with Macro N Cheese. And you know, I have talked a lot, you think about the last several episodes.

We’ve really dialed our focus on kind of how does common sense come to be and the rugged individualism that has been turned into the cultural norm by the ruling elite.

And we’ve looked at the concept of libertarianism and liberalism and the self-made man and the whole apparatus that makes us selfish, zero-sum thinking and hating our neighbors and all the other machinations that have been used and leveraged against collective power, against collective strength, atomizing us to like little teeny consumption units that are  jerked around by the latest headline and jerked around by the latest oligarch whims. A lot of people just can’t seem to wrap their head around that because it’s scary.

Once you go there, you have to answer a whole bunch of other questions. The dominoes don’t just stop there, the dominoes keep falling.

And as you continue to follow the path, it gets scarier and scarier because realizing you’re not voting your way out of it might be the most terrifying “aha moment” of them all. Because then you’re left standing there looking in the mirror saying, “now what?” And “now what?” is terrifying, right?

It’s absolutely terrifying because your whole life you grew up believing that it was simply, you’re going to go. You’re going to head to the polling booth. You’re going to put an “I voted sticker” on your forehead. And good things were going to happen. And what we’re watching now is something quite terrifying.

It’s even more terrifying if you understand hegemony and you understand how vital oligarchy is in terms of addressing and shaping cultures and the way that we view ourselves and view each other.

So to discuss this phenomenon with me today, I brought on the author of the American Exception, Aaron Good, who is just a brilliant guy who’s done lots and lots of great historical work on JFK, but he’s also done a lot of work in this space as well.

And that’s why we’re bringing Aaron on, to add to the conversation, but to give a new perspective and a new flavor and some of his recent work and updated work plays right into this. So without further ado, let me bring on my guest, Aaron Good. Welcome to the show, sir.

Aaron Good:
00:03:10

Hey, thanks for having me.

Steve Grumbine:
00:03:12

Yeah, so you heard the intro there.

Why don’t we get started with, I guess, I don’t know, a rebuttal, response or whatever, but then we can get into the meat and potatoes of the current situation. There’s so many of them. I just will say situation to kind of be a catch-all for this kind of weird timeline we’re living in.

But if you wouldn’t mind, go ahead and address the intro and we’ll get started.

Aaron Good:
00:03:37

Well, we are certainly at an inflection point and something that I think should be called a civilizational crisis, an existential crisis for the prevailing order,
as it stands, because centuries of Western imperial dominance over the rest of the world are coming to a close, this does not seem to be irreversible.

And in typically dialectic fashion, as is often the case, probably invariably the case with dying empires, the actions of the empire in terminal decline are only exacerbating and accelerating its demise. And, you know, the Ukraine war, the Gaza genocide, the potential attack on Venezuela, these are all symptoms of this.

And seeing the continuity of policies now should make it very clear that the electoral process is a managed spectacle. If you consider that people want to blame Trump as this unique aberration, you know, and if only the Democrats were in there.

Well, it was Obama who signed this ridiculous order. I mean, of course, the US tried to overthrow Chavez in Venezuela in 2002, and they eventually succeeded in assassinating him., apparently… that’s what [Nicolas] Maduro had said.

And honestly, when you look at the West and the way it has all these sophisticated ways of killing people, I think he was likely given some sort of cancer bioweapon. That’s what Maduro thought. And I mean, it just seems pretty likely to me.

But under Obama, he declared a state of emergency regarding Venezuela to justify whatever covert actions or policies or sanctions against Venezuela. And it’s clear that there’s no threat represented by Venezuela.

Venezuela is not the vanguard of a revolution that’s going to take over the United States.

This is all about the hegemony of Western capitalism over the resources of Latin America and the Global South, of course, in general, but especially Latin America. And it’s so obvious whether it’s Obama, whether Trump.

The only difference is in, you know, the tone, the style, and then maybe how far they’re willing to go to pursue imperialist ends there. And if you look at Biden vs Trump in Ukraine and Gaza. I mean, there aren’t big fundamental differences in the policy, despite what they say.

I mean, what Trump said about “heat” in the war today, it was obviously not true. And you know, the Gaza genocide was aided and the US was a co-conspirator under two regimes to genocidal crimes in Palestine.

And if you go back, of course the genocide didn’t really begin following October 7th. It’s of course been ongoing since the ’40s.

So it’s just the West cannot really withstand any honest scrutiny and it’s causing a crisis among the elite. It’s a frightening spectacle.

And it’s also hopeful in a sense because the US empire, Western imperialism, the rule of white supremacy, as a political project, we could think of it as this has to end for humanity to advance and it’s hard to imagine a way that it would end without any turmoil. So we’re going through something that is necessary one way or the other, and we have to hope it doesn’t kill us all.

 

Steve Grumbine:

00:06:46

That’s brilliantly stated. I’m curious though. You know, we’re sitting here talking and I don’t consider myself to be exceptional.

I like to think I’m a decent dude and I try really hard. But there’s nothing exceptional about me necessarily.

And I won’t speak for you, but my point is we’re sitting here talking and we’re talking about how this timeline is playing out in the worst possible fashion.

But you rightfully point out how this was not a partisan thing. This is an oligarch thing. This has been going on for probably since the dawn of this nation as a colonial project.

But looking at the current setup, you’ve got media manufacturing consent for each move, you’ve got a whole host of players within, you know, the theater that this is playing their role. And it’s all to get us to either do something or believe something or say something.

And I consider the election season part of that.

I consider the campaigning part of that. But I look at Fox News, which is the easy whipping boy because it is just so atrocious. You listen to the way people that listen to that come out.

They come out with a very interesting worldview, a very much a makers and takers hating the poor. They just assume everyone is a moocher, a taker, a thief. “You’re stealing my hard-earned tax dollars” and on and on and on.

And then on top of it, each of these manufactured wars, I mean, you’ve got the same people coming out going, “We gotta get rid of the fentanyl crisis. That’s why Trump is gonna blow Venezuela to pieces.”  And, you know, on and on and on while simultaneously accepting that the US is broke, while watching Trump give $20 billion to Argentina.

Every one of these dialectical, like the contradictions are so unbelievably loud.

Yet when we watch the folks that listen to these various programs, and I don’t want to spare MSNBC, CNN and all the other not so alternate media, they’re the mainstream vocal messaging arm of these oligarchies. The Larry Ellisons of the world owning TikTok and on and on and on. And it’s just across the board, the oligarchs control the messaging.

What is it about us as a people that makes it so that we refuse, or maybe not refuse, we don’t even realize we’re being lied to? Or if we do realize we’re being lied to, then we end up suckling into the convenient lie. I mean, is that just human nature or is this the plan?

Is this what they already know at the top? This is why they do it. So they do it. That’s why invest so much into it.

Aaron Good:
00:09:28

There is not a monolithic face to this regime. The political and cultural schisms are engineered and massaged in different ways and changed over time.

So you can’t speak of the US prevailing order as something that just indoctrinates people with the perspective, you know, the point of view, the capital T, truth.

They seem to have given up on that at some point in the Cold War, and especially I’d say following Watergate and the end of Bretton Woods, although it has its roots even earlier than that. But a more of a cult of individualism prevailed in different ways that manifests itself in different ways in different sectors of society.

So you do have this kind of libertarian-minded American right wing that really believes in property above all and is suspicious of the government.

And in recent years, I think that they have become manipulated in kind of a certain way and algorithmically managed to have an even bigger footprint in society. Because I think there’s some recognition that the narratives of the prevailing order are not plausible.

And so you need some people to address these narratives and have some way of speaking to them, to things like the JFK assassination.

I mean, it’s the wildest thing to see libertarians and others talk about the JFK assassination when it was a crime of a propertied regime of capitalist oligarchs. And so we’re hearing people talk about oligarchs who are like libertarians. It’s ridiculous.

Because every oligarchy is a function of the political economy that sustains that civilization, that prevails in that civilization.

So if you’re saying they’re oligarchs, if you’re saying, “Oh, we gotta unite against oligarchy” it’s like, well, how are you going to do that when you basically have no problem with the system that invariably generates oligarchy and has never not generated oligarchy? And this is, I think, sort of by design. It’s a kind of cultural social engineering boosting on Internet algorithms.

The conspiracism of the right is now sort of useful because it’s pro-capitalist.

So whatever you believe, if ultimately you think that property is sacrosanct and that the whatever property one acquires under the system is unquestionable and totally legitimate, then you really have no way of combating this oligarchy. Because they’re the oligarchy because they have all of the money and they own everything.

And so they get to control the algorithms. They get to control the universities. They get to control the media. They get to control the political system because it’s all animated by money.

And so if you are someone who you say you don’t like the system, or you have a problem with these bastards that are running it, but you have an almost religious devotion to the system that cannot but be dominated by moneyed oligarchs, then this is politically, essentially an inert kind of formation. And that’s one thing that we’ve been going through lately.

We have a Left which sort of denies a lot of the state criminality, especially the clandestine kind, or, you know, is misdirected in different ways.

And then a sort of populist Right that is also misled about the nature of the system as a whole, and they’re sort of socially manipulated through essentially psychological operations that we just call mass media, even alternative media now, the alternative media that gets boosted by YouTube, et cetera, and every other, you know, internet platform. This is a very weird time with an enormous amount of social engineering and technocratic manipulation management.

I mean, it’s like MK Ultra, you know, of course, that it’s very unlikely that they would just suspend all sorts of research and things in this direction. But it’s as if it got more and more applied on sort of a mass society level in order to politically neutralize the West.

And as a result, I think that the political sense of the West is so fragmented and atomized and stupefied that the moment that we’re living through in the collapse of this global system or the Western dominance of it is something that we are just spectators at, if we’re either learned, wise, judicious spectators of it, or we’re misled in one way or another. And of course, you know, who gets to determine who’s correct on these issues.

But as much as it sucks, I believe, because there’s no money in institutional support or marketplace of ideas where these things can actually be discussed and adjudicated without the people with money putting their weight on the scales. We are totally unable to respond and are just spectators to this.

Steve Grumbine:
00:13:52

You know, I’ve been saying for probably five years, and mind you, I admit man, I’m a late bloomer to a lot of this stuff. And I think a lot of people are either late bloomers or just now beginning to open their eyes a little bit maybe.

I’ve been talking for a long time that we need to kind of look at some of the other resistance movements like the Young Lords or Fred Hampton and the Black Panthers and others who understood that you had to educate the people, but you had to build dual power. You had to have parallel systems in place to support people so that they could resist.

Because otherwise you’re leaving people as prey to a system meant to devour them, meant to manufacture a certain kind of consent and condemn and destroy those who don’t fall into that neat little bucket, if you will, that mold. And let’s just stay in America, the US in particular, for this moment.

How would you assess the US’s ability to see beyond the electoral system, to function outside of, to create even a mental vanguard that. Let me step back, I think about, like the Underground Railroad as an example of the kind of times we’re in right now.

If we were being honest, we’d be looking at the Underground Railroad as dual power, as actual direct action, as taking kind of action towards the system as it is. I feel like in America, people are so adept at falling into hero worship.

The latest thing with Mamdani and New York City as a mayoral candidate, et cetera. I mean, there’s so many reasons to say, “Yes. Oh, I’m so excited.”

But having a sober perspective of oligarchy and a sober perspective of power within a capitalist system, and power based on history and understanding that they’re not giving anything away. I mean, if you could vote it away, they would have already made it illegal.

What are your thoughts on the American citizens ability to resist, the ability to fight back, and the willingness to see beyond the electoral system?

Aaron Good:
00:16:00

Well, you know, I think if you start talking about the Young Lords and the Black Panthers, these are communities that were so marginalized and exploited and oppressed that there was an element within them that could be brought to basically a revolutionary state. That’s really a minority of the population in the United States.

You know, if you look at political science, there’s a lot of useless quantitatively-based garbage that presupposes the rule of law and transparency and democracy prevailing when we all know that’s not the case. And so it ends up being very silly and irrelevant. Apolitical pseudoscience is really the way you could describe a lot of political science.

But there are some useful works in political science that are kind of commonsensical in a way. And the relevant one here is Theda Skocpol’s book on revolutions, on social revolutions. Right?

She points out that in modern civilizations or in modern times, the only real social revolutions were in China, Russia and France, the French Revolution. So the American Revolution is not a revolution. And anti-colonial revolutions are something different.

They aren’t a society overthrowing its own, you know, oligarchy or own regime and then replacing it with one totally opposite. Right? The only times that these have happened were in France, Russia, and China.

And these were cases where the state essentially lost its capacity to maintain its rule, that the people were subjected to so many hardships and difficulties, and that this coincided with a collapse of state power that was brought on by foreign wars, essentially, you know, world war.

In the Chinese case, it was the decades of the Japanese, you know, incursions into Manchuria, et cetera, coming after things like the Opium wars, the Boxer Rebellion, the Sino Japanese War.

I mean, that they had been put through hell for decades and decades, going back to the 1800s, especially in China, by Western imperialism and then by the Japanese copycats of Western imperialism. And so this was a state of misery that they had to achieve, at which point being a revolutionary becomes kind of existential.

So for Americans, there are very few people for whom, I mean, there’s almost zero people for whom a revolutionary action is existential for them. And so this is a sobering realization that you’re just not going to get people in a revolutionary state of mind when it’s not existential for them.

This is, I think, the lesson of history that this is the case. However, it’s also the lesson of history that empires do fall, and that’s what we’re experiencing now.

And this regime is something that’s been more or less increasingly dominated by a kind of imperialist global dominance mindset. And everything has been geared towards this in decades.

And because of schisms, I believe, among this oligarchy of corporate capitalist wealth we have seen in the 21st century one particular group, which is a neoconservative, super Zionist-dominated, I believe, coalition take control of US foreign policy and send the US on one imperial disaster after another.

I mean, most of these can be explained or best understood as really things for the benefit of a Greater Israel project, pretty much laid out in the Clean Break Report in 1996, which marked a shift from other imperialists who are not good guys in any way, shape or form, but like George H.W. Bush is the most notable one here. And this was abandoned in favor of a more neocon super Zionist direction.

And it has resulted in disastrous wars for the US as this Project for a New American Century as it was called. That was the American version of the Clean Break Report, except it really didn’t frame things around Israel, it framed it around global dominance.

But this pursuit of global dominance in the wake of the fall of the Soviet communism, this has been a disaster. And yet the population of the US doesn’t have a coherent critique of these things.

And no political party is, or nobody with a major platform and money behind them and institutional support is really able to reach the public on a large enough scale to create a new, more reality-based common sense of what this country’s situation actually is and how it got to be this way. So it’s a difficult if not impossible time for anybody who is going to be very fixated on the idea of how do we fix this system.

Because history suggests that this is not a revolutionary population, because there’s no solidarity.

There’s plenty of dissatisfaction about the terrible regime and the undeniable reality that we have just been facing decline for living standards and human indicators in the US for decades, which really shouldn’t be the case. Technology should be improving and improving people’s lives, but it’s not.

So people know that there’s like a top-down kind of power that’s fixed against them and that everything seems more and more like a racket and that you’re getting screwed by more and more people and that this collectively makes everything more expensive and makes life more difficult, makes their children’s futures more precarious and uncertain. And yet we have no institutions that are going to give people the sense-making ability that they would need to understand their plight.

And I think that this is pretty obviously by design. This isn’t something that just happens organically.

This is oligarchy is doing what they invariably do which is dominating the sense-making and cultural apparatus that keeps them in power.

Steve Grumbine:
00:21:38

Yeah, I love the way you said that. I don’t love what you said, by the way, but I absolutely love. How do I say that? I love what you said. But I.

Aaron Good:
00:21:45

It’s a downer and there’s no getting around it. It’s not, you can’t, there’s no super happy and positive thing in a sense about dealing with this.

Because what do you do when there’s nothing that you can really do is a question.

And the first step is perhaps understanding why there’s nothing that you can do and then somehow managing or it’s almost like a Taoist kind of a thing. There are powers and historical currents that you just cannot resist. Somehow you have to exist even in states of chaos.

Steve Grumbine:
00:22:20

That’s a brutal truth you’re laying down there, Aaron. I mean, and it’s a brutal truth that I guess I agree with.

I think the greater concern from my vantage point, because you just nailed almost 90% of where I’m at, is there’s nothing we can do about it now. We aren’t living amongst revolutionary people.

We’re living amongst people who are just fat enough to not want to lose something, yet not fat enough to survive in a good way. And knowing full well that it takes the material conditions of society to reach such contradictory points where the rupture happens.

And we’re not there because this managed democracy, what it does is it keeps us all just above. Like our nose is just above the water line but our mouth is under. And if we don’t stay with the cause, we’ll take on water.

So it leaves us in this position where it’s FUBAR [fucked up beyond all recognition].

And yet the standard ways that we’ve been told we can handle it, vote harder, vote stronger, donate more, show up to rallies and celebrate and so forth.

I mean that’s the hopium. That’s the LARPing. That’s the cosplaying of a democracy that we see especially largely happening even within a lot of my friends’ worlds.

I mean democratic socialists are busy selling that world right now as if it’s a real possible thing that we can just sort of vote our way out of this. And maybe that’s because we need the comforting lies to do exactly what you said and that’s survive what we cannot change.

What’s that old saying, you know, “Lord, help me accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

I think that there’s some truth in that kind of phrasing, given that it feels, I don’t want to say impossible, but like we’re nowhere near where we would need to be to take any kind of action. And yet you’re watching drones and AI literally begin to run cover for oligarchs to lay the working class off.

We’re seeing 15,000 layoffs come through Amazon. We’re seeing tons of layoffs at all these other companies. We’re seeing an AI tech bubble.

We’re seeing where people have placed all their hope and dreams, wrongly, but regardless in these things, in their stock portfolio to try and survive the coming and going of the economic downturns that we experience more and more and more frequently these days. What do you think the average person, how should they process their reality right now?

I mean, I know that’s intentionally vague to give you room to speak on it, but how do you think the average person should communicate this reality? What do you think is a helpful, healthy way of seeing the world for what it is making do, and at the same time resist in whatever fashion you can?

Aaron Good:
00:25:09

I think on some level, if you can’t change the reality and the prevailing order, you can at least be honest about it. And so for these Social Democrat types, I think that I’m not going to say that I have no sympathy for them at all.

And I think on balance, Mamdani’s candidacy is a sign of positive things among the American people, that the major city, biggest city in the US would elect someone who essentially is for negation of Zionism. I mean, he doesn’t quite come out and say it, and I haven’t followed him that closely because that’s just for reasons that are pretty obvious.

I don’t think we’re at a revolutionary moment and that revolution will come through voting. But I heard him asked, “Do you think Israel has a right to exist?” Which is always a stupid question because there’s no state has a right to exist.

States are human contrivances. They are organizations. The humans have rights, not states. So it’s ridiculous.

But leaving that aside, Mamdani said that, “Yeah, he believes that there could be an Israel where everyone has equal rights.” So that’s really not Israel at all. Israel’s a fascist, essentially Nazified, project.

And that’s a positive sign that in New York, which doesn’t have a shortage of powerful Zionists, you would have somebody elected the mayor there. That seems to point to something, to some flicker of human cognition and decency that’s still there even in a political system as corrupt as this.

But I do find the democratic socialists, the liberals, the faux leftists, the Trotskyites and so on, I find them to have an ultimately pretty useless frame of reference because reality is that we don’t live in a democracy. We live in a lawless, top-down oligarchy bent on global dominance.

And in maintaining their totally unjust privileges and power over society infinite into and you know, as long as they can. It’s a system that you cannot really justify if you talk about it in an honest way.

And I think that it’s because of institutional manipulation that there are just many dominant influential thinkers or institutions, people with institutional backing. To the extent that there is such a thing on the Left, it promotes people who are basically safe.

They’re the loyal opposition because they don’t point out that whatever the…

I mean I have not gone wrong in the last 30 years over any major international event as it’s gone down in terms of determining the Western hand behind it and ultimately imperialist criminality behind it and the responsibility behind it in the West.

Because if the West explicitly has a grand strategy of global dominance forever and it has deployed all manner of covert operations and the manipulation of civil society and of democratic processes to maintain this imperialist project.

And so whatever is going on in this other country where the US wants to intervene, it’s essentially invariably some nefarious plot, plan, strategy to extend the domination of Western money and oligarchy over the world’s political economy and its resource-rich areas. I do not understand how there’s a Left that is fixated on America’s enemies. It’s the most ridiculous thing. It’s pathetic. It’s embarrassing. [Yes.]

And you know the people at Jacobin, people at Democracy Now are paid frauds by and large. And it comes down to like, “Well, do you have institutional support? Do you have a salary?” Then probably you are co-opted in one way or another.

There’s a handful of like actually radical academics in our universities and some of them got in because the times were different when they got in or because they managed to maneuver one way or another. But they’re eliminating tenured jobs. They’re destroying the modern university. So even that’s not there.

And we’re just left with these fake annoying revolutions that can’t appeal to people on a mass level like Breadtube and figures like oh man Contrapoints the people that write of Jacobin, Democracy Now, et cetera, et cetera, that just when you live under a despotic lawless regime bent on global dominance, that’s the political situation, that’s really the only political issue.

Because if you don’t even have a democracy in any meaningful sense and the regime is lawless, murderous, and bent on dominating US and global society forever, if they can do it, then that’s your political issue. It’s not that in Russia they passed a law against gay propaganda. Oh, no. Well, you know, as an American, what does that have to do with anything?

Like, America didn’t even strike sodomy laws from the books until the 21st century. So we’re going to really act like them being a couple decades behind us or more on these issues is somehow important.

But you hear people make all of these stupid arguments about the regimes that the countries that the US wants to destroy. It’s embarrassing. And I would just urge people to recognize that. Keep their eyes on. Keep their eye on the ball.

Keep their eye on the real enemy, which is the regime that dominates them and seeks to dominate the whole world and has explicitly asserted this strategy in different documents and policy pronouncements and also in the historical record. It’s pretty much undeniable. So I would say that people need to stop being the dupes of their enemies.

Steve Grumbine:
00:30:24

You know, I’ve got friends here, and I’m sure you have them too, that they don’t quite rise up to the level of Breadtube. We’ll call them Shitlib-tube.

I don’t know what you want to call them, but there’s like a very acceptable level of progressive, you know, the gatekeepers that, you know, of course, they’re the “of course type people” that live and die for every Bernie rally. And I was once a member of this.

So I’m calling myself out, past-Steve, years and years and years ago Steve, but still call myself out in that. And they can’t fathom that. I wanted to jokingly interrupt you and just say, “but they’re for Medicare for all, Aaron.

But they’re for free student debt relief or whatever. But they’re for a bucket of policies, Aaron.” And this constitutes to them, you know, “Oh, well, then they’re the good guys, right?”

Look, what’s wrong with that? Why would you think of them as your enemy? And enemy is like a weird word. It really is more a matter of what they’re saying.

And what they’re doing is literally leading you back to believing that this is something you have power to vote your way out of. They’re leading you back to helplessness.

They’re leading you back down a train path, you know, that is then treaded on a million times in the past to lead to nowhere or right back to where you are today, anyway.

And ultimately, it’s not so much that they’re your enemy, it’s that they are sucking the oxygen out of the room with their huge platforms and they’re, “Of course I’m pragmatic. Of course. What do you want, Trump? Of course I’m just pragmatic.” And this faux pragmatism, I think hides more than anything.

It’s kind of like, you know, “Hey, I can’t really live with this world, so give me some good cocaine and let me go out on a high.” And I feel like they would rather be lied to. And this is a meme somewhere.

I’m sure they would rather a comfortable lie than just acknowledging the truth, just looking this in the eye and saying, wow, I can’t just vote for Hillary and make Donald Trump not come back. I can’t just.

It’s not going to change because going back to the Greater Israel Project, which I’d like to talk about here for a minute, they just treat these as like afterthoughts or, like, “That’s just your issue, dude. That’s just this thing that you’re focused on.” But they don’t realize that is the issue. It is the driving force between all things that are happening.

Can you talk a little bit about that and then jump to the Greater Israel Project?

Aaron Good:
00:32:51

Yeah.

Maybe rephrase the last part again, because I got lost in thought as you were talking about that, but I had things I wanted to say, and then I started thinking about them, and then I lost my train of thought.

So the first part there and now before Greater Israel, you’re saying, how do we get these people to recognize that they’re being led down the garden path to, you know, irrelevance and such, basically?

Steve Grumbine:
00:33:12

That they’re being neutered.

Aaron Good:
00:33:13

Yeah, yeah.

Steve Grumbine:
00:33:14

They’re going out there by these left tubers that aren’t really left at all. They’re kind of like centrist shitlibs.

Aaron Good:
00:33:20

Yeah.

Steve Grumbine:
00:33:21

And they listen to them and they’re like, “No, but Kyle’s a good guy. You don’t understand. Or, no, Cenk is really…
No, you just. He’s really fighting hard for us.” Or. And, you know. Or, you know, and I could list a lot more, but those are the easy ones.

Intermission:
00:33:35

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Aaron Good:
00:33:56

And then the alternative people, like there’s Alex Jones, you know, there’s James Corbett. Yes, there’s a lot of like right-wing conspiracism, which is also a newer thing.

It’s so easy to make arguments about how bad the liberals are and how hopeless that is.

It’s interesting that, I mean, at present we have basically an outlaw murderer, you know, who’s been just like killing people in the Caribbean for, I won’t say, for no reason.

The whole reason that he’s murdering people in the Caribbean is so that he can accuse them of being drug dealers, so that he can murder more people in Venezuela in order to steal the oil. That’s literally what the state is doing right now. And the Democrats, to my knowledge, aren’t speaking to this.

They might say, “I don’t agree with the policy,” but they’re not going to speak about the whole reality of it. To my knowledge, I must admit I don’t follow the pronouncements of senators and so on that much anymore because it seems such a waste of time.

I think that the reason that these platforms exist, the reason that they do end up following left coded or branded, you know, productions and personalities, is because those are the ones that do have some institutional support. And they’re the group that’s saying something that appeals to some vaguely liberal, lefty-ish people’s ideology.

And they’re sensed to want to do something because people don’t want to accept that there is like zero that they can do.

So they take all of this energy and the energy that exists in the population instead of being channeled in a meaningful way with a critique that actually resonates and could produce some solidarity among people.

They end up just wasting their time on trifling, silly politics that are doomed when they could recognize that in reality, we’ll endow one with a kind of revolutionary mindset.

Even if they’re going to have to face the truth that they live in a pre-revolutionary or non-revolutionary society or anti-revolutionary society really. And so it’s just a difficult thing to get people to grasp the sense-making apparatus.

The cultural apparatus in the US has been manipulated in so many ways and it’s done the same way now, except in ways that we don’t even know. The fakery that exists online and on these big platforms like Reddit and Wikipedia and Facebook and Twitter.

These are essentially, they may as well be run by the intelligence agencies in terms of the algorithms and how TikTok was there they couldn’t accept that it’s the discourse and the numbers that seem to prevail there. You have no idea. These people are all anonymous.

You know, you have no idea what is meaningfully behind things on Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia and so on. It’s all top down. Everything is top down. And there’s so much misdirection.

I have no ballpark estimation of the number of people who are online, you know, managing personas and multiple accounts across multiple websites, who just spend hours creating a false sense of what like public opinion is in ways great and small every day. I would guess that it’s staggering.

And I would guess that one of the main things that they are really excited about AI for is that they will be able to create infinite numbers of anonymous spammers who are engaged in all sorts of propaganda operations of every flavor.

Whether they’re bespoken for different political groups, whether they’re conservatives or liberals or leftists, or whether they are rural or urban, coastal, interior, et cetera, et cetera.

They think that AI is going to give them the key to basically take away the power of organized workers and to dominate the cultural space as essentially a warfare that they’re waging on all of us.

It should be easy to recognize this, and it should endow people with a real disdain, contempt, antipathy, hatred even for the oligarchy that does this to us, while pretending to be a democracy, which is a country ruled by the demos, when it most certainly is not and never really has been.

And with the benefit of hindsight, we can see that the moments when it appeared more democratic, this was more or less an illusion designed to confer legitimacy on the oligarchy when it needed it for things like surviving the Great Depression without becoming socialist, or rallying the country to fight to win the peace after World War II so that the US oligarchs could establish a Wall Street dominated American century, a dollarized empire over the whole world that they would like to make last forever, but which cannot. And that’s the moment that we’re in now.

And I think that they think these technocratic clandestine meta operations of just manipulating the internet and dominating corporate media and creating alternative media that’s so specialized and niche that it’s just going to atomize and befuddle people. By and large, they think that this is going to save them.

I think ultimately they’re going to be transcended by countries and emerging great powers whose regimes are animated by something different than capitalist greed.

Steve Grumbine:
00:39:08

Wow, powerful.

Can we touch on the Greater Israel here real quickly because, you know, before they clamped down on TikTok and before many of the, if not most of the people of the press that were in Gaza being killed now, it used to be my wall was filled with information and now I have to actually go search for it to find it. The algorithms which are controlled by these oligarchic elements have basically silenced anything that competes with that space.

But the elements that we’re talking, I mean, it’s so ridiculous to see the narratives surrounding Israel. And you know, I find it humorous in a sick way that some New York yuppie can lay claim to property held by a Palestinian over in Gaza.

And this whole concept of Zionism is such a letch, just a wretched, twisted, grotesque form of colonialism and fascism, quite frankly.

Aaron Good:
00:40:07

Yeah, it’s anti-Semitism.

I mean, to be real, it basically takes the Nazi argument that Jewish people cannot really [be] full citizens in other countries because of their cultural historical uniqueness and so on and the hatred that it engenders in people that so they have to have this state or some of the writings of some of the Zionists who said like that they invoke some of the stereotypes of Jewish people that are like, “Oh, we are weak and effeminate, but it’s because we don’t have a state, you know, and if we had a state we’d be strong and powerful.” I mean, it’s a form of Nazism really.

Nazism emerged, a modern industrialized “blood and soil” fascism with a project that’s exterminationist, you know, for Lebensraum and so on. This is so analogous to Israel that it’s, you know, it’s almost cliche to point it out at this point.

And it just flies in the face of all of our notions of progress and the enlightenment and modernity, the 21st century has revealed the West to be totally morally bankrupt, dishonest, lawless political project at its apex.

That’s not to speak about the people in the West because they are deprived from, you know, impacting power and influencing the policies in any real way. But this is more and more clear to people. We’re just the villains to most of the world.

To the world that’s halfway conscious of all the U.S., is this dangerous problem whose decline they need to manage with as little carnage as possible.

Steve Grumbine:
00:41:31

Well stated.

Aaron Good:
00:41:33

I just want to clarify, and this is where I think the sort of emerging right-wing, anti-Israel people are predictably getting it wrong. The issue is not, “Oh, everything’s great. If it weren’t for Israel and for Zionism.”

The problem is we created a system where money and acquiring great amounts of money through political corruption and dominating rackets and monopolies and sectors of the economy is the way that political power is achieved and exercised and extended. And Jewish Americans didn’t create this, you know, and Zionist Jewish Americans didn’t create this.

It turns out that they put together a political formation, neoconservatism, that was intertwined with the National Crime Syndicate, Meyer Lansky and the Teamsters and all of that.

And that was given protection by this regime of the US because it was useful to these actors in terms of dominating US society and also international politics, you know, in fighting the Cold War with this sort of underworld army that’s intertwined with capitalism and intelligence agencies. And the role of Zionists in this was foundational because of the Vegas Teamster mob syndicate that Robert F. Kennedy went after.

And really nobody else did, except for Nixon to some extent, which is why Lansky had to go to Israel in 1970.

But it isn’t a case where, “Oh, if it weren’t for the globalists and if it weren’t for the Zionists or if it weren’t for the Illuminati or the Freemasons or the Jesuits, that everything will be fine.”

It’s a system that is designed around the acquisition of wealth through the exploitation of workers and people and also political domination, which allows one to control entire sectors of the economy and establish, you know, essentially monopolies over essential human functions like health care, agribusiness, energy, you know, everything. Every aspect of our economy is essentially dominated by these corporate oligarchs. That’s really the root of the problem.

So Zionism is uniquely historically impactful in the US because of a number of historical accidents that the world has paid for and has suffered a lot for this. Nobody more than Palestinians and people in the Middle East in the 21st century.

Steve Grumbine:
00:43:44

That’s extremely well stated. I was going to take us in a slightly different, but almost exclusively related to the system kind of direction.

Aaron Good:
00:43:53

Yes. I just wanted to establish that. I’m not trying to argue that, “Oh, it’s just Israel is all our problems.” People don’t know my work that well.

I would like to clarify that. So thank you for that.

Steve Grumbine:
00:44:02

Absolutely. No, and that’s exactly what I wanted. It is systemic and it is beyond systemic, because the system itself isn’t failing.

It’s doing what it is intended to do. It’s been designed this way. And some of the tactics. I spoke with a great author and a scholar named Clara Mattei about the capital order.

And some of the stuff that she raised was about how austerity is a tool that economists created on behalf of the ruling elite to discipline labor and to create this otherness, to create the bad guys, the good guys, the makers and takers, as part of the cultural tactic, if you will, to manipulate [the] public, to hate the poor, to hate those that are different, etc. And it’s definitely part of the Zionist project, but it’s not the Zionist project that’s bigger than that.

It’s part of this othering that they do as part of fascism, et cetera, to create the conditions that keep us at each other’s throat instead of looking in the direction where the real problem lies. But what I wanted to do is just bring your attention to Washington D.C. for a moment.

And Washington D.C. is a non-state that has sort of elected representatives. Not really. It’s kind of like a dog and pony show at best. And there’s these sports teams that are, you know, there that everyone takes great pride in.

And I think there’s a lot to be said for just having some sort of distraction to keep you from slitting your wrist during this period of like, helplessness. But nobody wants to be the poor. Nobody wants to be the guy on the outside looking in.

And so I wanted to read this to you because this is kind of the way I believe they keep us as divided as ever as part of that atomized man that you talked about in the beginning, et cetera. And I said “The cycle create austerity, cut spending, make it harder for people to survive. Folks break laws when they’re trying to survive.

Assholes ignore the cause and effect and want tougher laws, not a return to the necessary spending. They begin talking about personal responsibility and then blame the poor for being irresponsible. Cops are called to crack down on the poor.

Then they begin to talk about abuses in the system. They ratchet the austerity. Cut more spending and more police spending is added.

And they act like more police and more tough on crime is required while not helping the poor. Wash, rinse, and repeat. I said be careful who you blame.”

And I think that ultimately people are so bought into this notion of, “If I have the most toys, that makes me a good person. Whoever is rich, they must be good because you got to be a good person to become rich. I’ll follow them. I’ll worship them. I’ll hero worship them.”

And you don’t have to look farther than Elon Musk and Bill Gates and all these other figureheads that own all the social media platforms, own the regular media platform platforms, etcetera, but this whole concept of blaming the poor for our societal problems, punching down on immigrants, et cetera, why do you think this is so effective and useful to these oligarchies that do this repeatedly? It’s not some new phenomenon.

Aaron Good:
00:47:17

They control our sense-making institutions and they direct the political regimes that have existed in the US and so there’s always been various others that have been deployed as props and, or as real adversaries throughout the history of the US. So it wasn’t a matter of pitting us against ourselves or I mean, white people pitting themselves against other white people in the early American experience because there’s the frontier.

Of course there are conflicts in US politics, but this fact that you had the frontier as a way to externalize this conflict and that you had an externalized other that was very useful for them.

You know, initially it’s the Indians who are not Christian, not white, and didn’t have a system of property rights that would give them title to the land in the way that they did back in Europe. And then of course, there are realistic problems about running into wars with Indians and how using European labor would exacerbate these problems.

Indentured servants would exacerbate the problems because it would necessitate more westward expansion so that more people would have land if they survived their indenture.

And the result of that crisis faced by the colonial class there, the owning class, and especially in the American South, was slavery initially for their tobacco plantations, because that’s what made America viable as a colony for England in the first place was tobacco. And eventually they used slaves for this. It was kind of on the decline because tobacco was not as lucrative.

But then of course, cotton revived slavery in the U.S. and you know, it’s the most important part of the economy for many decades in the US and in the South, you had this system which really did have whiteness.

It had what we think of as whiteness in America really takes shape in this time. And it’s very useful because it did create a kind of solidarity.

In this case, it wasn’t dividing Americans as they were thought of at the time, just the white people against each other.

It was a way of creating fake solidarity among, you know, white people, because, “At least you’re white. You’re on Team Whitey and you’re part of the good guys. That’s how the Confederacy actually could field an army, which when you think about how many people actually owned slaves and such in the South.

You wonder how in the world could they have ever fielded an army when most of these people did not own slaves and the best land was owned by these slaveholders. So they were actually fighting for their enemies and dying for them en masse.

That was the power of the social cohesion created by whiteness, which is this fake idea. The idea that was created for social cohesion and for support of a prevailing political order.

And you know, that persists to this day among some people, like white nationalists and so on, are the dupes of political opportunists in the US you know, once we go sea-to-shining- sea and of course there’s Mexico. We fight a war with Mexico to steal Texas and California and everything from them. But then immediately, once that happens, the US keeps going further West because they needed this other.

They needed an other to fight against and a project of expansion. So they went West and they just kept going West. They went all the way into Edo [Tokyo] Bay.

Even before the US Civil War, Commodore Admiral or whatever you want to call him, Matthew Perry sails into Edo Bay and he forces the Japanese to sign a humiliating treaty with the US to trade with them and has other provisions as well, because they needed that expansion. And that has survived in one way or another through almost all of US history.

I think there’s a tiny window of like under Roosevelt where you had the good neighbor policy in Latin America and the US was generally sort of contracting inward from the imperialism of the early part of the 20th century. But by and large there’s always been boogeymen externally.

And increasingly they’ve turned since the end of World War II, the decades, you know, as the Cold War progressed, it was more and more sort of internal division and culture wars ginned up in different ways. Instead of rallying the population to this American cause in some sort of like Nazi-style global imperialist project, it’s more of that the population is atomized and instead of rallying all the youth to be prepared to fight in a big military mobilizations, big wars, they create economic conditions that force some people to regard military service as the best choice they have. And so it’s changed in its form, but there’s always been an imperialist aspect to it.

And it’s more a sign of the decline that our rulers have focused more on increasing social division. And they’ve kind of given up even on any national project for the US at this point.

They have the project that they manage, but it really is not something that the public is largely on board with or even understands.

Steve Grumbine:
00:52:02

I think most people are probably not even aware of Bacon’s Rebellion. But Bacon’s Rebellion, to me, showed the lengths that they will go and how easy it is to destroy solidarity in these very spaces. The poor black slaves, the serfs, white indentured servants, you name it, all kind of got together to fight back.

And all the ruling elite had to do was give the white guys a little extra benefits, and they abandoned all the rest of them.

And it quelled Bacon’s Rebellion simply by that economic inequality, by just dividing right there, by saying, “Here, we’ll give you an extra $0.05 to not stand with these guys.”

Aaron Good:
00:52:46

Well, they also ceased the use of indentured servants from Europe, meaning that there was going to be less people that were owed land after they survived. So it was this. I don’t even know how much they really gave. The people like Bacon weren’t necessarily given much. They didn’t get much benefit from it.

They got crushed. I think Bacon dies of dysentery, you know, because they did sack Jamestown and burn it down, as I understand it, which is, would have been something to see, but that was only after they’d gone out and tried to kill a bunch of Indians. This was a more populist kind of genocidal imperialism.

And it just shows you how in the early US among these, like, white colonists, there’s virtually no good guys in any meaningful sense.

Steve Grumbine:
00:53:29

Absolutely. Right on. All right, final thing. I know that you are in the midst of doing a rewrite for Japan for your book. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Aaron Good:
00:53:39

Yeah, we have a translation which is basically finished, as I understand it, and I’m working on the new preface for them.

I was excited that they wanted to bring this to Japan, because I used to teach Japanese history for three years as a high school teacher, and it was a class for high school seniors. And then I took a bunch of classes in college. I had almost a minor in East Asian Studies, so I knew Japanese history well.

And I’d been to Japan on a peace study tour with Peter Kuznick to Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the anniversary of the bomb dropping. And I just find Japanese culture fascinating.

The history is just amazing to me, and I was really touched that they would want to publish my book there.

And so I’m trying to write about Japanese imperialism, the oligarchy of Japan, and how its history has been shaped overwhelmingly by the United States since Admiral Perry sailed into Edo Bay.

And I enjoy doing this, but I also feel a bit of pressure, in a sense, because I’m writing about something that I’m not really a specialist on the way. I’m a specialist on US imperialism.

However, I think that because Japan has been dominated by the US and because so few US specialists actually understand what the US really is, I feel like my book explains the US regime very well and that it filled the gap in terms of understanding the American deep state, which is to say the top-down regime or oligarchy of the United States in the biggest sense.

That by understanding the forces that really dominated what, how history unfolded in Japan and by having being conversant in Japanese history that I would be able to convey the relevance of American exception to Japanese readers who would be probably of an anti-imperialist bent or they wouldn’t be reading the book. Right?

Steve Grumbine:
00:55:23

Yeah.

Aaron Good:
00:55:24

So it’s a shock when the US sails into Japan and forces them to sign a treaty. They had seen what had happened to China, of a country that they have very centuries long cultural and historical ties to and connections to.

They knew about the Opium Wars and the ruin, these things that the west had brought to China, but they couldn’t resist the US gunboats and they are forced to concede to the US. However, in Japanese fashion, they decide that they will borrow from these barbarians and reap and take their technology and make it better because they’re Japanese. They’re better than these barbarians.

And so they modernize, they industrialize Japan and they go from having a feudal oligarchy to essentially an imperialist-minded corporate oligarchy of corporate wealth, you know, represented most, I think significantly by the Zaibatsu corporations like Mitsubishi, which is still around today.

We think of the Japanese imperialism as like vicious and fascistic, which once, be honest, it pretty much was, if you understand what they did in China and elsewhere in Korea, et cetera.

But what’s notable about this is that especially in the lead up to or In World War II itself, they were essentially displacing Western colonial regimes with their own Japanese colonial regimes.

And they did it by copying the West and using Western technology and even changing their own political structure to be something more Western than what it was before.

It was like a big board of directors is how I think of the Japanese eventually during this era where they tried to establish their own empire and then the US nukes them at the end of the war, enters the war really because of the Japanese attacks on supposedly US nominally US territories. But if you look at the US in the Philippines and in Hawaii, you can’t really justify that as you being American dominated in any real sense.

It just was we took it by force and that’s as much legitimacy as it had. But that gets left out of the story.

But once Japan is totally defeated, then the US drop essentially because the Soviets have invaded Manchuria and are poised to invade Japan.

That’s when the US just drops the bomb on two cities, two defenseless cities for a defeated empire that really has no ability to project force outside of its borders anymore.

But the US drops those bombs I think partly as a warning to the Soviets that they have this bomb and also because it provides this great pretext for the Japanese to surrender to the Americans. And they knew that the Americans would be much more friendly or they had hoped, I guess and probably had some assurances in some way.

I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s things we don’t know about this, that their oligarchy would be essentially preserved. Because if you wipe out this oligarchic class that ran this empire, you probably have a socialist takeover in Japan.

And so the oligarchy of Japan got essentially subjugated and made subservient to this US imperial project. And the same happens with Germany and NATO.

Gradually after World War II, none of these regions and countries, Europe and Japan and other East Asian countries like South Korea etcetera, have enjoyed real independence. They’ve been subservient to the US Empire. They have not had any real sovereignty. They’ve not been independent.

They have been subjected to with their own oligarchic political system as kind of the intermediaries, but they’ve still been subjected to the same mind-scrambling that the US has been subjected to. And it’s the same forces that are doing it.

And now that we’re at this inflection point, Japan is going to have to face the way that it’s going to be in the world going forward. They’re the biggest holder of US treasury bills in the world. And I don’t think that they have a choice in that.

I think that for economic reasons, but there’s a carrot and steak aspect to it, it helps their exports. But also I think if they didn’t have those, who knows what the US would do?

They have treaties that we know about that the US is allowed to be stationed on Japanese soil at Okinawa, which is enormously unpopular, but there’s also bases on the main islands and they are not at all a democracy.

The Japanese ruling party, the Liberal Democratic Party [LDP] which is a very deceptive name for it, it’s essentially a one-party state for almost all of the post war history and it was founded by two guys. One of whom was a class A war criminal who should have been executed.

He was essentially a yakuza [organized crime] man who worked with the Navy to loot China and other parts of Asia, but especially China, by dominating the opium trade and sucking as much precious metals and diamonds in platinum and such out of China.

And then with the money that he had stolen, I think it’s like 175 million, the precursor to the CIA sprang him from jail and used that money to create a slush fund for the Liberal Democratic Party that has ruled Japan forever. Not forever, but since the end of World War II, by and large.

And this guy was essentially a hard right imperialist gangster who was just repurposed to serve the new gangsters of capitalism, which were headquartered in Washington D.C. at this point they became a satellite. I mean, Chalmers Johnson was an expert on Japan and Japan’s economic development after World War II.

He was an expert on US imperialism later in his career. And he said that in the 80s he wanted to make a joke that the Sony Walkman tagline should have been “…from the people who brought you Pearl Harbor.”

Because they. It was the same group was basically the oligarchs were still left in charge, might execute some military officials and so on.

But just as in Germany, the real oligarchs were by and large left in positions of power in society and over the political economy in Japan and Germany both.

And so now when we see the descent into actual sort of Nazi-style fascism which the US is a party to in Palestine, it should crystallize a lot of things in the minds of people.

And I hope that eventually, when it’s clear that this system, when it’s undeniable that the Western hegemonic project cannot continue and it’s no longer viable, that, you know, hopefully I would love for my book and for books of other thinkers, the works of other thinkers to influence them and make them more aware of this political reality that the US and then US-friendly oligarchs in Japan and really elsewhere around the world, in every country under Western sway; It’ll break this spell that they have been put under, which is not merely a spell, but it’s got a lot of money behind it. All the money in the world essentially.

It’s the people that control the machines that make all of the money, as you know. [Yes] It’s a staggering thing to comprehend. And then I’m hoping that my preface and that the book is well received over there.

That would mean a lot to me. But that’s what I’ve been working on of late, in between doing the podcast. And we also have a documentary film.

I’ll send you the trailer for it, which we can’t post publicly because we have some issues to hammer out with that first, but I can send it to you and you can check that out. And I’ve just been, you know, pretty busy and kind of burned out at the same time, but still trying to juggle all these things.

I appreciate the chance to be able to talk about this here on your podcast.

Steve Grumbine:
01:02:33

Absolutely. Dude, you’re right at the fulcrum. Right? This is what the actual problem is, and so many things distracting us from it.

And you’re like right over Berlin, so to speak. So bravo. I appreciate it and thank you so much for the time you spent with me today. Where can we find more of your work?

Aaron Good:
01:02:51

The American Exception podcast is on Patreon, so I think it’s patreon.com/americanexception. And if you want the book, it’s just American Exception, Empire and the Deep State.

There’s an e-book, there’s an audiobook, I think there’s an e-book, there’s an audiobook, and definitely a hardcover. And I tried to make this more comprehensive in terms of addressing social science perspectives and critiques.

Because it was originally a dissertation. I tried to write it to make it a little less academic and turgid with the prose, but I think I succeeded partially.

But for the most part, I think it’s pretty readable, and most people who are educated, lay people, not social scientists, have been positive about it. So it’s a very good resource if you’re interested in the suppressed aspects of our politics and history.

I think people could benefit from checking it out… and the film when there’s more going on with that.

I’ll circle back to you when we have our news about distribution and everything, but it’s basically finished and I’m really excited for it to get out.

Steve Grumbine:
01:03:50

That sounds fantastic. Aaron, thank you so much for your time. I’m going to go ahead and take us out here, folks.

My name’s Steve Grumbine and I am the host of Macro N Cheese and the founder of the nonprofit that sponsors this, Real Progressives. We are a 501[c]3, not for profit. That means your donations are tax deductible. And I say this every time, but I think people ignore it.

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You can get us on patreon.com/real progressives, you can go to Substack/realprogressives and become a donor. You can go to our website realprogressives.org and become a donor there as well.

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End Credits:
01:05:51

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