Talking about the rather invisible and efficient oligarchy in America, do people really have any concept of its existence?

You know, when James Madison who is very much the creator of our constitution in 1789, somebody said to him about the representation that was in the Congress, that suppose the United States acquires the population of a hundred million people, that would mean a Congress and a House of Representatives of half a thousand. How on earth can you get any business done? With five or six hundred legislators? And Madison said: "Never forget that the iron law of oligarchy always obtains; few people will always run everything, no matter what the institution or what the country.” Constitution was carefully arranged for white men of property to do well in, since then the franchise has been extended to the young, the black, the female, but because the sense of the oligarchy is everywhere, the people at large don't know about it, they have no place to find out.

When we decided to become a global empire after the war, it was Harry Truman who decided to drop two atomic bombs on Japan and make us a national security state and a militarized economy. The people were not advised, they still don't know, they still think that it's a free country, open country, but we decided to stay armed and to be involved in every country in the world. And that was their decisions and who are them? They are traditionally the very wealthy, the one percent that my cousin Albert dared mention at one point in the campaign as owning practically all the property in the country. The one percent dominates. They reign through twenty percent of the country who are doing very well, these are the prosperous people which we read about, these are people that are put in the Congress and in the White House. Eighty percent of the people are doing very badly and are rather poor.

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You have mentioned president Truman’s decision to drop this bomb, but there were other people behind Truman; was Truman a stooge of a greater force?

Well, under our system any president is a stooge of the great financial forces that own the country or govern the country. The brains behind Truman belong to Dean Acheson, who was a brilliant man, very witty and very imperial, very much, if anyone disobeys the United States, we must destroy them. That was just his mind. He was a throwback to an earlier time, but he was the one who helped Truman militarize the economy, create NATO, create CIA, interfere anybody else's elections, and get rid of the Bill of Rights. I don't say he set down and did everything in order, but that was the result. So on the one hand you have the pressure of the military, who had developed at Los Alamos these extraordinary weapons and they really wanted to try them out, and Truman vacillated, and on the one hand he saw that it was going to change the nature of warfare, and he knew perfectly well the Japanese were defeated. So we made a big deal over "unconditional surrender”. As it turned out Japan did completely collapse after two bombs, but it was interesting the extent - Eisenhower denounced it publicly. Admiral Nemetz, who was the great figure in the Pacific, denounced it. Curtis LeMay, who was the war-lover, liked to blow-up everything, denounced the atom bomb. And all of them said the same thing: we didn't need it. And why use it twice? They were going to surrender.

I don't think there was one single General Officer in that war that approved of it, and they all went public very quickly to denounce their Commander-in-Chief, Truman. Who had dropped it for one reason, which was to intimidate Stalin, keep him out of the Pacific war, let him have no share on the peace that we were going to impose on Japan, and just keep him nervous. And it worked. Then a year or two later we divided Germany, taking the best part for ourselves, and made him the world enemy to justify our military build-up, which then started all over again and continues to this day.

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This is connected also with the occupation by the Russians of the Central and Eastern Europe, with the different revolts, first in East Germany in 1953, then in Budapest in 1957, 68 in Prague, how do you really see this Russian occupation and the line of Stalin through Brezhnev?

Well, having been a Russia-watcher all my life, I mean back to Peter the Great, their policies have always been reactive. And reactionary. They were so terrified, after all they've been invaded quite a few times from the West, they felt quite naked there. We have promised them 20 billion dollars worth of reparations, without Germany, at Jalta and again we have confirmed that at Potsdam. They never got it. We said we would include them in the Marshal plan. We didn't. They took the position that we have had declared war on them, by the division of Germany and by the re-arming of the Germans, that was the red flag that really scared them. So then they tried to get us out of the Berlin, that failed, then later they tried the business of the air-lift and that failed. They then began to collect the border states, as buffers. Yes, they behaved very badly to the buffer states. They moved in, I mean there is this story of Czechoslovakia and that bone headed Ambassador, Steinmetz was his name, that we had there. He made every error on earth in dealing with the Russians, because we could have kept Czechoslovakia, probably, out of the Russians' grasp, but he made a series of wrong moves and no-one knows the true story. They were just going to make sure that in the entire Eastern Europe they had a row of states that they controlled. They also needed to steal money and they needed to steal manufacturing plants, they didn't have anything left.

When they left Central Europe to gradually get back into their homeland, they didn't enough truck, tractors, they used horses to pull their cannons back into holy Russia, they were that poor and that knocked down, when they lost 20 million people. So the fact is that they were paranoid and behaved extremely badly with their satellite countries, and we behaved rather better with ours, because we were much richer and it was easier for us to bribe the Italian communist party than it would have been to head troops there to shoot communists, which the Russians would have done. So each behaved according to his financial capacity.

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This cold war - was it a complete illusion?

No, it was a complete fact. But it was based on an illusion that the Russians were coming. This was the propaganda that never ever let up. Until finally Gorbatschev dissolved the whole story. We had maintained that myth in order to keep, even as we speak, fifty-one percent of the budget of the United States goes for war and there is no enemy. And they're going to increase it and increase it, we have a junta now running the country from Pentagon. Vice-President Cheaney is our Bismarck, he is the Chancellor, Runsfeld is his side-kick at the Defense Department, Collin Powell is from the military - it's a total Pentagon government. Dedicated to more and more weapons and more and more enemies. There's Kaddáfí one month, Saddám was in the other month... Charles A. Beard, he was our great historian, he's been erased since, said: “America's post-war policy is very clear - United States is dedicated to perpetual war for perpetual peace.” And that's what we've been doing for these fifty, sixty years. We've lost the educational system for the general public, who is mostly ignorant public of many major or any first-world public: no health care, civil liberties are diminishing, and government harassment of the people is more intense, I would suppose, than anywhere other than in a pure communist state, where it is easier and cheaper to control the people.

We have mandatory blood tests, urine tests on the work place, ordinary factory people, who are not making any weapons, secret weapons, can be tested any time. We are at war with drugs, which means that we can arrest anybody anytime we feel like it, and we do. We have 6.6 million people in prison or in correction, as they call it. That's three percent of the adult population. We build more prisons in the United States than we do schools, and the schools that we have are a wreck, as far as educating the general public. Those of us who belong to a somewhat higher class have a better educational system, but much more subtle indoctrination. 

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And how did you come to this position, the position of almost an outsider, a great essayist and critic of America, which many elements you love? Do you feel lonely?

No, I wouldn't mind a little more assistance, yes, actually. I forgot, who it was in the nineteen century, who said that Intellectuals are the only élite, the only minority on earth, that wishes to extend its ranks. Most élites want to shrink themselves, so that they would have more to themselves, we are really only ones who want more and more of us, not less and less. But our system, that oligarchy we have been talking about earlier, is totally efficient. For instance throughout the fifties, sixties, seventies, into the eighties, I was a fixture on National television.

When they wanted the liberal voice, or whatever adjective was in use at the time, they turned to me. And I had a considerable following. I even had my own program for a while. By the Reagan revolution, coup d'état, I've been erased from television. No way. They know that when I am on, when I go out to speak, I attract large crowds. The press won't report it, television is shut to me, there's some little liberal radio stations that are happy to have me talk, but I've been erased. I am no longer asked on anything where I might cause trouble. Where I might say something that they would find embarrassing, which would be practically anything I would say about how the country is run. So I am the perfect example of the total censorship in the United States.

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Yet you have not been destroyed, you live partly in Italy and in Los Angeles, you are in New York, how come they didn't destroy you? They've destroyed many people.

Well, I think I'm tougher than most people, and I find ways of getting through. And I connect up with a very large audience, I would say. I would say a majority of the thinking people of the country, and that must be five percent, are with me and they support me. They buy the books, they come to hear me speak, and I think also I am too difficult to catch. I am a member of the ruling oligarchy, and I am sort of off-limits for them. That doesn't mean they won't quietly try to destroy a book, give it terrible reviews, denounce me here and there and everywhere, and try to create an image of me as sort of the great Satan. After all they did it to Clinton and he ended up more popular at the end of it and his administration than at the beginning. That goes on all the time, but they do it to so many people that it doesn't really matter. 

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7 March 2001