TBT: The Brutal Truth

PW: Do you think that it’s possible the Bush Administration went into Iraq really believing that it was spreading democracy to the Middle East?

GV: Of course not. Why should they do anything like that? They go in out of greed. There’s been very little altruism in all of our history. We go into things for profit, and now that we’ve ceased to be any form of democracy, the people are not consulted about what their rulers want them to do. No war has been declared by that part of the legislative branch which is most democratic, that is most responsive to the people.

PW: So, it was just about oil and war profiteering?

GV: Yes. Meanwhile, we do not have a media that enlightens anybody about anything, and our public school system for the average person is pretty bad. We are quite uninformed about things. Therefore we are not in any position to make up our minds if they’re making good policy or a bad policy. First of all, no one will ask us what we think. And then if they say, “Oh, go to the polls,” we go to the polls and the election is stolen as in Florida 2000 and 2004 in Ohio.

PW: Do you think that the media is failing in this capacity?

GV: Get the tense right: It has failed.

PW: Has this president made this worse, by being so antagonistic to the media?

GV: Oh, who cares? He doesn’t run the country, a handful of corporations run it. No, this is not conspiracy theory, this is conspiracy analysis. The country is very tightly led with corporate goals which push out anything of a national nature. We’re out of it. It’s like being in a bubble. I’ve spent a great deal of my life living across the water, and someone said, “How can you follow American politics when you’ve had your house in Italy for all those years?” And I said, “Well, that’s the only way I can find out what’s going on in America, because the foreign press, at least in Western Europe, is quite good.”

PW: Corporate influence in politics seems more raw and apparent now than ever before.

GV: Of course it is. And it was all due to the “good luck” — those two words I have just used ironically — of 9/11. “I’m a wartime president! I’m a wartime president!” Well, he fucking well isn’t. He’s an accidental president. He happens to be put in by the oil and gas people to cut their taxes and then go in for preemptive wars against countries that are weak and that have done us no harm, like Afghanistan and Iraq. This was a godsend for those who would like to get rid of Congress and the courts and the Constitution. And they’re doing very well at it — very, very well. “Mission accomplished,” I believe, is what he said on the aircraft carrier.