Philosophy professor emeritus James Fetzer, a former Marine Corps officer, has published widely on the theoretical foundations of scientific knowledge, computer science, artificial intelligence, cognitive science, and evolution and mentality. He is well-known for rejecting orthodoxy on a wide range of historical and political issues. He recently interviewed me for his Revolution Radio show. Below is a partial rough transcript.
Jim Fetzer: I'm delighted to be joined for the second hour by my dear friend and colleague Kevin Barrett residing in Morocco. Kevin, among the developments we've been addressing during the first hour was Colonel McGregor's observation that the U.S. has no foreign policy, that in the Middle East we’re simply instruments or pawns or tools of Israel and that you can best understand what's going on there by assuming that Benjamin Netanyahu is the equivalent of a commander-in-chief of the American military. Your thoughts?
Kevin Barrett: Yeah, I think it's that's pretty much the case, although it's it's not clear whether Netanyahu is 100% in control. Maybe 65%, I would say.
There are reports that immediately after the successful Palestinian raid on Israel, the breakout from their concentration camp on October 7th, that the Israelis were about to go all out against Hezbollah. And according to reports, the Biden administration or whoever's in charge in the U.S. gave them a very firm no.
But there haven't been very many firm no's given to Netanyahu and his crazy extremist co-ministers. So yeah they (the Zionists) are largely in charge.
I recently published an article entitled “Flashpoints for War” looking over possible places where the next world war could start. One of them was Florida, where I said: Imagine it’s October 2024. Trump's ahead in the polls 55 to 45 percent and leading in the swing states. Suddenly a drone swoops down on Mar-a-Lago, smashes through a plate glass window, and stings Trump with its explosive charge. But fortunately, even before what's left of Trump is declared dead, the media tells us that an Iranian Palestinian terrorist named Lee Harvey Atta did it. He's arrested on the seventh floor of the Palm Beach School Book Depository, but is accidentally defenestrated before he can be questioned. Fortunately on the floor of the Book Depository the authorities find an Iranian-made Manlicher-Carcano drone control rig, complete with instructions in Farsi, signed by the Supreme Leader of Iran.
And so that then would indeed cause Biden to fly Bibi Netanyahu straight into the White House Situation Room where he will take full control of U.S. policy.
Anyway, hopefully there won't be one of these crazy false flag type events that would put Netanyahu in total charge like happened on 9/11. But you never know, do you?
Well, your satirical gifts have not failed you, Kevin. I've always admired your stylistic manner of lampooning events in a way that gets right to the heart of the matter. You mentioned Florida's one location for World War breaking out. What were the other four?
Well, the others were more obvious ones. Though I guess killing Trump and blaming Iran is pretty obvious, too. But the other ones included the Red Sea, where instead of a Persian Gulf of Tonkin incident, which we've all been waiting for for 20 years now, we could get a Red Sea Gulf of Tonkin incident: An American ship could go down and it could be blamed on the Houthis, whether or not they actually did it, and of course it would be blamed on Iran as well.
Another possibility of course would be another attack from militias in Iraq or Syria. Any that did a whole lot of damage, killed a lot of Americans, might work.
Within (Occupied) Palestine itself there's always the possibility of some kind of big event happening. Right now, so much of the world is so angry at the Zionist genocide that it wouldn't surprise me if actual no-return address WMD suddenly went off inside of Israel. That very likely wouldn't have to be a false flag, it could be true.
Other flashpoints include Ukraine and Taiwan. In Ukraine, Zelensky's faction, the fanatics, don't want to give up. So the only way they even have a chance is to drag NATO into it, and that would take a big false flag, like maybe a nuke blamed on Russia.
And then over in Taiwan, the final flashpoint that I listed, clearly that's the big kahuna that would pit the number one power, the US versus the rising number two power, China. The Americans have been provoking the Chinese and poking the dragon for years. And if they poke hard enough, the dragon might bite back and we'd be off to the races.
I so admire the Houthis and stand with them, and yet they're having to suffer ongoing bombardment by the U.S. and the U.K., which is taking place in violation of international law, the Geneva Convention, the laws of war and all the rest. It is shameful.
Well, I think the Houthis have a pretty good argument that they are enforcing the World Court's judgment that has ordered the Israeli government to stop any acts of genocide that appear to be going on there. And that order is being flouted by the Israeli leadership, which has continued to massacre the 100 to 200-plus people per day, most of them innocent civilians, the majority women and children, while Israeli leaders continue to make genocidal statements…
I gotta say, Kevin, for the poorest nation in Africa, that the Houthis are setting a hell of a moral example. I mean, they are exemplary. I applaud them. They are heroic.
Yeah, I agree. Now, they're not in Africa. They're across the Red Sea from Africa. But yeah, they're very poor. They're probably the poorest nation in the region, especially after the suffering that they've had to undergo since this crazy US supported and instigated—well maybe not instigated, since there's dispute about what the then Obama administration's viewpoint was about the launching the war on Yemen from Saudi Arabia and the Emirates—but the Yemeni people have really suffered horribly. they've been undergoing the kind of suffering that now we're seeing in Palestine. I think that's one reason that they are working to support the Palestinian genocide victims right now, because they understand that kind of suffering and so they want to stop it.
Yes, I have no end of praise for the Houthis. And here you have the Israelis practicing genocide on the Palestinians by means of starvation with the siege they imposed after 7 October. No food, no water, no fuel, for the most part no communication. I gather a lot of Palestinians are on the verge of starvation. And of course I mentioned the rule of three, that a human being can go three minutes without air, three days without water, three weeks without food. Well, it's now been a hell of a long time. What do we have, 120 days of this siege, Kevin? It is outrageous. It is monstrous. And I can't understand how any decent human being could possibly support it and not be vehemently opposed to Israel.
I agree, Jim. And I'm going to say something maybe a little controversial now. It just occurred to me that people say that the state of Israel was supposedly basically legitimized and became a state because of the Holocaust, right? Everybody around the world made a huge exception for the Jews, because nowhere else would you ever allow a group of settler colonialists to travel thousands of miles across the seas and basically displace, murder, and expel the indigenous people and call themselves a country and claim that they have the right to do that…
The slogan “never again” slogan emerged from the Holocaust. Jews all over the world have always said, “never again, never again, never again.” And liberal Jews like Samantha Power, Cass Sunstein's wife, have made a whole career of saying that we need these humanitarian interventions.
And in fact, when I look at Israeli behavior, it occurs to me to question whether the Jewish people in Israel actually believe that there really was a Holocaust. Because if they did, if they really believed in the historical reality of that kind of suffering that Jews underwent—and regardless of what we think about might have happened there, obviously there was a tremendous amount of suffering. But if it was really as off-the-charts as the standard Holocaust narrative tells us, with six million dead, most of them killed in gas chambers, as part of a formal total extermination plan, that would have been so horrible that you would think Israeli Jews would be very aware of the horror of genocide.
But I have to wonder, Jim, whether those Israeli Jews really believe the Holocaust narrative. Because as you and I have both looked books by Holocaust revisionists and books that attempt to refute the Holocaust revisionists. And obviously the Holocaust revisionists have a pretty good case that the whole “six million dead mostly in gas chambers as part of a deliberate extermination plan”—the Holy Trinity of the Orthodox Holocaust narrative—is just not true, and that the reality was a lot less than that, and we got that exaggerated version due to wartime propaganda that somehow survived the war.
I think smart Jewish people know this. Take Philip Zelikow, for example, who talks about “public myths.” I think he knows that the Holocaust was very likely not nearly what the official myth tells us it was. He knows it’s a public myth, which he defines as “beliefs (1) thought to be true (although not necessarily known to be true with certainty), and (2) shared in common within the relevant political community.”
And I wonder if it isn’t just the intellectuals like Zelikow (who don’t really believe the public myth) but it also filters down to the Israeli people. Maybe they realize this based on the kinds of nonsense that they’ve been fed, as illustrated by the film Defamation depicting Israeli children being indoctrinated with insane Holocaust propaganda. I recently learned via a Ron Unz article that in the 1960s and 70s there was a huge wave of Holocaust pornography in Israel. Israelis were getting off on watching Nazis rape and torture Jews, and Jews raping and killing Nazis in revenge. That was what got them excited sexually. There's something weird about this. I think that at some level the Jewish Israelis actually know that they're liars, that they founded Israel on a whole series of lies, including the maximal story of the Holocaust, and that's why they're perfectly happy to do another genocide, because they know that the supposed genocide that was done to them didn't happen, or at least it didn't happen to the extent that their extreme myth of the Holocaust tells us it did.
So, I mean, am I crazy to think this? Could it be that (their genocidal psychosis is caused) not so much by an extreme belief in the Holocaust, but it's that actually at some level they know that they're completely full of s**t?
Kevin, you're spot on. I wrote the introduction to Nicholas Kollerstrom’s Breaking the Spell, which may be the most important book on the Holocaust, confirming the results of the International Committee of the Red Cross, which was keeping meticulous records on the age, the sex, the ethnicity, the religion and the cause of death of all the inmates. In 1993 they recalibrated the total as 296,081 deaths from all causes, none of whom were put to death in gas chambers using Zyklon B, which was in fact being used to kill body lice spreading typhus and dysentery in the camps. In other words, to preserve the health of the inmates, for the obvious reason that you can't get work out of a corpse.
We'll be right back with my special guest Kevin Barrett right after this break.
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Jim Fetzer asks me about Gaza, Houthis, Holocaust, and immigration