Interview with Gore Vidal

AMY GOODMAN: Gore Vidal, President Bush also said, “All who live in tyranny and hopelessness can know the United States will not ignore your oppression or excuse your oppressors when you stand for your liberty, we will stand with you. Democratic reformers facing repression, prison or exile can know America sees you for who you are-- the future leaders of your few [free] country. The rulers of outlaw regimes can know that we still believe, as Abraham Lincoln did, ‘Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves and under the rule of a just God, cannot long retain it.’”

GORE VIDAL: Oh, what bull. I notice all the help that we gave Mandela before he himself extricated his people from the white rule of the Boers and the English in South Africa. We went to great lengths to see that he was silenced, that he was not helped at any time. And we were -- Is that how we stood up for other countries trying to liberate themselves? We’ve never done that. We went into the first two world wars for self-aggrandizement. We did very well out of it. We’ve gone into Latin America, and every time that there's been a democratically elected government, from Arbenz in Guatemala in 1953 to Allende in Chile, we have played a vicious game. Sometimes we assassinate the president, sometimes we overthrow him. Sometimes -- all the time, eventually, we establish a military dictatorship. We’ve been doing that for 200 years. But, for a people that knows no history, does not want to know history, with a corrupt media that will not tell you the truth about anything going on in the world, what else could we have, but a dumb, cheerleader president?

[...]

GORE VIDAL: I don't see much future for the United States, and I put it on economic grounds. Forget moral grounds. We're far beyond any known morality, and we are embarked upon a kind of war against the rest of the world. I think that the thing that will save us, and it will probably come pretty fast, when they start monkeying around with Social Security, that will cause unrest. Meanwhile, the costs of the wars the cost of rebuilding the cities immediately after we knock them down, if we didn't knock them down, we wouldn't have to put them back up again, but that would mean that there was no work for Bechtel and for Halliburton. We are going to go broke. The dollar loses value every day. I live part of the year in Europe, which is always held against me. What a vicious thing to do, to have a house in Italy; but I also have one in Southern California. We are a declining power economically in the world, and the future now clearly belongs to China, Japan, and India. They have the population, they have the educational systems. They have the will. And they will win. And we will -- we only survive now by borrowing money from them in the form of treasury bonds which very soon we won't have enough revenue to redeem, much less service. So, I put it down to economic collapse may save the United States from its rulers.

We have to destroy the country to save it?

Read the whole interview.