Conversations With Daniel Ellsberg On Why We Go To War
By Arn Menconi, May 2015
list of quotes
compiled by Joachim Gruber
Chapter 10
Sey Hersh may or may not be right that the assassination of Osama Bin Laden was a fairytale. The understanding of the Cold War that 90% of the Americans hold is a fairytale, has been a 70-year fairytale. I think that the key purpose of the Cold War paradigm both in Europe and in Asia was to block East-West trade. The nuclear weapons are in fact to dominate in the areas bordering Russia, threatening first use of nuclear weapons. ... The threats have been thought of by most presidents most of the time as bluffs.
The role of submarine Captain Sawitzki during the Cuba missile crisis: he was about to use the nuclear torpedo, he had to be dissuaded from using it by a superior who happened to there. That was when world destruction was just a hair breadth away.
Why do the leaders choose to threaten who the existence of civilization? An urge in humans to be dead, to have nothingness. Humans and hierarchical organizations are prone to what I call madness. It's crazy ness. They do not want mass suicide but they are willing to risk it. We stake the future of our children on the instincts of people of which the reality is to risk the world. Every day since the Soviet Union got the ability to annihilate the US (the mid sixties) we face an existential threat. We do face existential threats but we don't act to reduce them and we don't talk about them. So we need to get rid of capability of Ęthe Russians to annihilate us, and the way to do that is to make concessions ourselves and eliminate the existential threat to Russia, eliminate our doomsday machine. But we'd rather have two doomsday machines in the world rather than none, rather than us having any. So the whole world faces an existential threat since we constructec a doomsday machine n the mid fifties.
Chapter 11
The cold war was predominantly not about freedom and democracy - that was the pretend issue. The real issue was about trade, investment and influence. Russia is no longer communist, but the key issue still is the same: is western Europe and Japan trading with us or with Russia and China, is it depending on us or on Russia. It is about preventing Europe from trade and investment with Russia. How do you prevent that? Ideologically, militarily, by threats. We have to boycot Russia the way we embargoed Cuba.
Ukraine -
At a certain point - this is not the beginning, it is at some point - Putin offered cooperation, help together with Europe. EU demanded that Ukraine either sided with EU or with Russia.
NATO talks as if Ukraine as a whole is available. But Russia is going to fight against the East Ukraine becoming part of NATO. Russia is too big for this.
From that developed the coup.
If Putin loses East Ukraine he probably couldn't stay in power. If he had lost Russia's naval base in the Black Sea, Sebastopol, which was NATO's objective, he wouldn't have had a chance to stay in power.
Would we back Assad if our only base in the Mediterranean was Aleppo? Of course, 100 %.
About Whistleblowing and the Milgram Experiment
I do believe that you could increase the number of whistleblowers significally, and that could be very useful. It's possible to get the audience, to get a program instituted.
.... It's happening now, like transgender people, they are coming out of the closet. Whistleblowers are coming outof the closet. .I think that's useful. But I don't expect it to go very far. Far enough to be helpful. It'll be a good thing. That's what I do. Why am I going on this trip to Europe? I think it's possible to encourage people to be more whistleblowers than we've had. The more the better, but enough to make a big difference? I don't know at all. More than we've had. As many as we need? No, I don't know.
... What he [Snowden] thinks is a solution, may be he's right. Whether it's a useful solution. I'm dubious, I'm not totally dubious. He is a software person, he's a programmer. He wants to invent software, a program, so that you can have a thumbdrive or something that you just plug in to your computer that will very easily provide very good encryption that NSA can't easily deal with. I can't judge the feasibility of this, but I trust him. If he thinks it's feasible I would bet he's right that you can encrypt a lot more and that you can get a lot more privacy if you want for whistleblowers, for investigative journalists, for people who want privacy, whatever. That you can really afford (?) NSA quite a bit, if you have this little thumbdrive, that piece of hardware that you can insert and do it. In fact, there will be less transparency of private people to the NSA than there is.
I'm dubious that this will be a very useful change for the world very much, that enough people will use it, and they won't ve able to deal with it. Enough people will want to take the risk of telling truths that NSA doesn't want told, and so forth. Psychologically and socially I doubt that it will go very far, but I don't have any better answer. ....
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