Richard D. Wolff & Michael Hudson: Middle East Exploding, Ukraine Crumbling! the US Take Action?

Michael Hudson had a normal one today. Even Richard Wolff was like wtf.

Also a lot of interesting anecdotes of Hudson (who apparently still live in the 1970s) during his time at the Hudson Institute (no relation, named after Hudson River) dealing with the neocons.

Judge for yourself if these are banger quotes or the deranged ramblings of a madman:

• “The United States doesn’t want to see a ceasefire, it wants to use Israel as a catapult; everything that happened today was planned out just 50 years back in 1973-74. I sat in meetings with the head of Mossad who then became Netanyahu’s chief military advisor. The whole strategy was worked out essentially by the Defense Department by the neoliberals and [Henry] “Scoop” Jackson - the ultra-right wing neocon who sponsored them all.”
• “The starting point for all US strategy since the 1970s was that Democracies no longer can field a domestic army with a military draft. America is not in a position able to field enough of an army to invade a country.”
• “That means today’s tactics are limited to bombing, not occupying countries. Neither the Israeli army or any other army are really able to invade and try to take over a country the way armies did during WWII.”
• “The US wars haven’t scaled back because it has a fallback position - it was going to rely on foreign troops to do the fighting as proxies instead of itself. The first example was to create the Wahhabi Jihadi fighters in Afghanistan and Jimmy Carter mobilized them against the secular Afghan interests. Carter justified this by saying, yes they’re Muslims, but after all we all believe in God, so the answer to the secular state of Afghanistan was Wahhabi fanaticism”
• “The US realized that in order for a country to fight to the last Afghan, the last Israeli, the last Ukrainian, you really need a country whose spirit is one of hatred.”
• “Herman Kahn’s (model for Dr. Strangelove) greatest achievement was to convince the US empire builders that the key to achieving their control of the Middle East was to rely on Israeli as their Foreign Legion.”
• “The US realized then that the only kind of full scale war that a Democracy can afford is an Atomic War, but that only works against adversaries who can’t retaliate. The result of today’s military alliances means that any attempt to use nuclear weapons is going to risk full scale nuclear war. What is left for the US? There is only one form of non-Atomic war that Democracies can afford, and that’s Terrorism. You should look at Ukraine and Israel as the Terrorist alternative to Atomic War.”
• “The whole idea of Ukraine and Israel is to bomb civilians, not military targets. It’s a fight to destroy the population under an Ideology of Genocide - that is absolutely central and not an accident.”
• “Zionism has been Christianized and has accepted the hatred of the Other”
• “There cannot be peace in Asia or in Ukraine, because then the status quo would remain and the US would not be able to take over these countries as satellites; peace would mean dependent countries gaining independence”
• “Many neocons at the Hudson Institute, 50 years ago, were Trotskyists or their fathers were Trotskyists and they have picked up Trotsky’s idea of Permanent Revolution; but instead of the Permanent Revolution spreading from the Soviet Union, the neocons believe the Permanent Revolution is the American Empire itself spreading to the entire world.”
• “Who wants to live in a world where we can’t control? Who wants to live in a world where we can’t siphon off their economic surplus for ourselves? That’s the kind of mentality we’re dealing with.”