07/30/09 – Eric Stoner – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
Our first guest on the show today is Eric Stoner.
And you can tell I'm delaying trying to get his bio open in front of me here.
I thought I had it.
Eric Stoner is a freelance journalist based in New York.
He's a contributor to Foreign Policy and Focus.
His articles have appeared in The Guardian, Mother Jones, The Nation, and These Times, Z Magazine, and The Independent.
He worked at the Center for International Policy in Washington, D.C. on U.S. policy toward Latin America, and most recently as a researcher for Jeremy Scahill's New York Times bestseller Blackwater, The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army.
Very interesting.
And he can be reached through his website, ericstoner.net.
Welcome to the show, Eric.
How are you doing?
Good, good.
Thanks for having me.
Well, I'm happy to have you here.
And I'm really interested in this project you have going on, Waging Nonviolence.
Sort of like non-interventionism rules.
A little bit of, you know, get them in their phony bone to get them to pay attention kind of thing, I guess.
How exactly do you wage nonviolence?
Tell us about this group and what it is that your purposes are.
Great, yeah.
Well, we started this project just about a couple months ago.
And I've been interested in nonviolence for the last few years and just realized that there really wasn't anything out there like this, being aware of all the different peace groups in the country and kind of following their websites and realizing that nobody was collecting these stories of people resisting and fighting for their rights and freedoms all around the world but without violence and collecting those stories in one place so that people could see how active of a force this is.
And, yeah, so the idea was to basically collect stories of people using strikes and boycotts and demonstrations and blockading roads and things like that to fight for their causes.
And, you know, one of my reasons for really being interested in nonviolence is because I feel like most people support military action or violence in the first place, or at least a lot of mainstream folks do, because I think they don't understand that there isn't any alternative.
You know, you have ruthless dictators and, you know, what do you do about it?
What do you do about Saddam?
What do you do about these people?
And if you don't have any alternative of how you can bring some of these governments down or do things like that, then people are going to be more easily swayed to support violence.
So the idea was just to show how many ways this is happening every day around the world, and the idea also being that, you know, it could serve as a useful tool for activists in their own countries to kind of plug in to see what's going on and check out other tactics and strategies the groups are using.
And also for, you know, this growing field of peace studies, people that are actually studying this in an academic way, just to see every single day what's happening around the world.
So that's the essence of what the site is about.
Well, as far as getting rid of the dictators of the world, I guess the first thing is we can stop subsidizing them all.
But, you know, when it comes to Saddam Hussein or something, I mean, could you really see some kind of Gandhian movement being able to overthrow the Baathist regime or say the Politburo, the Communist Party in China?
Like they could actually be forced out in some sort of velvet revolution or something?
I mean, I've been studying case studies for a while now and realizing that nonviolent tactics, movement strategies have been effective in even really, really trying situations, even against dictators that really don't care about human life and are willing to kill thousands of their own citizens.
So you have the nonviolent movement in the Philippines, for example, that brought down Marcos in 86 or against Pinochet or against the Argentine military government in the late 70s that was sparked by the mothers of the Plaza del Mayo, you know, got out in the streets and were demanding to know where their disappeared sons and daughters were.
Or, you know, even in Serbia, you know, with Milosevic, what eventually brought him down was not, of course, the bombings that were happening that we were dealing through NATO, but actually a student-led nonviolent movement that basically paralyzed the government and forced him to step down after he tried to steal the election in 2000.
Well, it seems like the CIA has learned that lesson, too, huh?
Yeah, I mean, yeah, that's one of the big debates right now around in the field of people that study nonviolence is, you know, the idea that maybe some in the government are kind of picking up on the fact that this is actually a useful tool.
And, you know, I think there's definitely reason to be suspicious and to kind of examine who's behind some of these movements.
But I still haven't seen anything, for example, really convincing for me that, for example, with the recent movement in Iran, that that was somehow sparked or being controlled somehow by the CIA or, you know, the U.S. government.
Right, I mean, that's what's funny is the state has co-opted the, you know, Martin Luther King style of dissent, and they've done it so many times now that it can't even happen without people being suspicious that they're the ones behind it.
Yeah, it's really sad because, you know, the idea is that, you know, there's a couple different schools of thought around nonviolence.
One is kind of referred to as pragmatic nonviolence, and one is considered more principled.
And the pragmatic school is kind of pushed by this guy named Gene Sharp, who's probably the leading advocate for this.
And then, you know, you have other places like this place called the International Center for Nonviolent Conflict in D.C., and they really analyze nonviolence from almost like a military perspective, you know, where they're studying strategies and tactics and how do you, you know, defeat your opponent using nonviolent strategies.
And it's very different than, you know, Gandhi or King who, you know, just as important as using nonviolence was the fact that you were fighting for a just cause, you know, and that's kind of been lost when you kind of just look at it from a strategic or pragmatic perspective.
Yeah, well, I think that tends to happen a lot where, you know, like media matters.
They'll defend a liberal from a conservative no matter what.
So Charles Kruthammer says, Obama's promised not to bomb Iran.
They say, no, he has not.
In fact, he's threatened to bomb Iran over and over again.
That kind of thing where, you know, I see what you're saying, where the principle gets lost.
I'm looking at the Iraq War, and after, you know, six years, I'm kind of thinking, you know, if anything, maybe the anti-war movement made it worse.
I mean, maybe at the time of the James Baker report, the pressure was on Bush so much, cornered rat has no choice but to lash out.
So he went with fat-necked Fred Kagan and doubled down in the surge.
And maybe we only help prolong the war rather than end it faster.
I wonder, you know, what do you see as the future of the anti-war movement in America?
I mean, is there even one now that the Democrats are in power?
I mean, I think it's taken a big hit, you know, especially, you know, with Obama in power.
I think, I mean, I was kind of speaking out during the elections against Obama and getting a lot of heat for that.
And, you know, being friends with Jeremy Scahill, I know he was also getting a lot of heat for speaking out.
So it kind of revealed that, you know, a lot of people that were supposedly in the anti-war movement, you know, really were just more kind of part of the Democratic Party and were willing to kind of go with the flow and willing to accept really, really incremental change when, you know, when thousands of people are dying and, you know, there's just incredible suffering going on.
We can't accept, you know, such slow change.
If you even want to look at, if you want to think that it might be going in the right direction, I mean, obviously with Afghanistan it's going in the wrong direction.
And in Iraq, you know, it's really ambiguous what's happening right now.
So I don't know.
I think the anti-war movement is in a pretty sad state.
And I think, you know, part of it is because we don't have a very good deep knowledge of how to use nonviolence effectively.
You know, the idea that we could come out on the streets, you know, two or three times a year in big numbers, you know, 100,000, 200,000 people, and, you know, go home for dinner, make sure that we can go home for dinner, follow the prescribed path that the police have let us follow, you know, the idea that that's going to somehow put pressure enough on the government to, you know, get out of a war where there's these huge economic interests is really, you know, fanciful.
You know, we don't have any sense of what it would actually take using nonviolence strategies to bring an end to a war.
I mean, if you look at Vietnam, for example, what ended up doing it, you know, was, you know, obviously the massive movement within the military, you know, soldiers speaking out.
And on top of that, you know, people taking much more drastic actions with civil disobedience.
And, you know, across the war, people, you know, the tactics that were used became much more dramatic than anything, I think, that has really been used so far during, you know, the current Iraq war or the war in Afghanistan.
So I think it's part of the fact that, you know, we really are not very well educated on how to use nonviolence.
So that's also a purpose of this site would be to kind of educate people about this and critique the movement as well.
Say, you know, strategically, this is not a wise move.
You know, we need to step it up and kind of encourage people to take more sacrifice and to risk more as really the only way we're going to be able to see some of the goals that we're fighting for.
Well, like what?
I mean, what should we do?
Occupy our congressman's office and refuse to leave?
I mean, that's something, yeah, that's definitely better than a demonstration, I think.
But I think, you know, also if we can, I mean, it would take a huge amount of organizing and a huge amount of people willing to risk more than we seem to be willing to risk right now.
And I mean, I think, you know, you know, some kind of, you know, obviously the most dramatic example would be kind of like a general strike or something on that level, which seems like, you know, like that would probably never happen right now with the current state of things.
But, you know, it's the idea that you would need to have tactics that, you know, are putting much more pressure on the Obama administration than things that we're currently using.
It seems like it's very easy to dismiss a massive rally.
Even though I go to these rallies and I'm part of this, I think that if I put myself in their shoes, I could be able to write it off pretty easily.
Well, you know, I talked to a guy once who was a consultant for a major American corporation, and they complained that their exports are just dying everywhere.
People hate Brand USA so much right now, and it's just costing billions of dollars.
So you think about all the economic interests in this country that are not on the dole, that do not just, you know, dip their hand in the Pentagon honeypot, but actually have to work for a living.
This is costing them everything, and yet the state is so powerful now that any company big enough to have influence doesn't want to cross them.
And so, like in this anecdote, the advice was, well, why don't you guys make a couple of phone calls?
And the answer was, no, I don't think we want to go there.
And so Lockheed has their say, but Blue Jeans Company X has none.
I mean, yeah, when you look at the military-industrial complex, and you look at how the major defense contractors, they're definitely not just backing the Republican Party.
They're kind of hedging their bets, and when you look at campaign contributions and things like that, they're basically bought off, you know, both major parties, in my opinion.
And so, I mean, it's tough, you know, when you think about how many millions of people are kind of part of that machine.
You know, when you kind of look at the numbers of people that work for the defense industry, and then when you factor in everything else, I mean, we are pretty beholden to this thing, and it's hard to see being able to break out of it.
Yeah, you're right.
I mean, one possibility would be to emphasize more how the rest of the U.S. economy is really going to be taking a hit, because we're souring our name in such a way that it's going to, you know, have really long-term impact on kind of the U.S. economy.
I can't remember if – I think it was Iraq that I was reading about, where the tradition always was everybody drank Pepsi.
That was the big drink, but no longer.
Now they drink something that's bottled in a cutter or something, and that tradition is broken.
And that's just a little thing, right?
Except that's probably, I don't know, a couple of billion dollars a year that Pepsi's not making.
You know, take any other example.
There's got to be a million of them.
And it seems like – well, you know, I don't know.
I can only express frustration here.
I mean, you think back to 2002.
We had these massive marches all over the world and all over this country on February and March 15th against this war.
And we've hardly heard a peep since.
Everybody, including myself, we all just sit in front of our computers and talk to each other over that all day.
And I think most people, Eric, just feel helpless.
They don't know what to do.
You know what I mean?
And a lot of people don't even bother caring or knowing, because why bother when they know they're powerless to do anything about it anyway?
So they just quit paying attention at all.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, it comes back, in my opinion, to kind of the lack of knowledge of how to use nonviolence.
And also how I think most people have very little knowledge of our history of people using nonviolent action.
You know, like when you look back at the labor movement or, you know, so many of the rights and freedoms that we kind of take for granted today were fought for, you know, in the streets, you know, by mass movements of people that were demanding that, you know, the government, you know, give in.
And, you know, the stuff that Howard Zinn writes, you know, I think if just that knowledge could be more widespread, I think people would have something to connect to and feel more a part of a movement.
And we could, you know, create more of a dialogue and learn from each other and debate strategies and tactics and try to figure out how we can try to take a couple steps forward here.
And, you know, the Waging Nonviolence site is definitely, that's one, you know, hopeful goal, is to have those kinds of discussions and debates, you know, through that site, you know, and to spark those kind of conversations.
So, yeah.
Let me ask you about humanitarian war.
You know, the neocons say, bow down to what we say or we'll kill you.
The liberals say, we're here to help you.
You know, when the Democrats wage war, it's always, and I guess, you know, the neocons adopted some of that rhetoric.
But for the most part, it was pretty blatant that they're just imperialists.
But there's, for example, a whole movement in, I don't know how to characterize exactly, some sort of liberal and progressive circles, not so much the hard leftists, I don't think.
But a movement to intervene in the Darfur region of Sudan to help the poor people there.
Now, never mind the fact that the worst of the fighting and massacring of innocent people was over there in 2005.
And never mind that the more they hear promises of intervention, the longer it takes for anybody to make peace with each other because they're waiting to get the U.N. or the United States in on their side when the intervention finally comes and all these things.
This is just, it's kind of like proof of what a good and caring person you are, that you think that the military ought to go help these people instead of bombing Iraq, which is mean.
We ought to go and save Darfur, which is nice.
And I just wonder, what do you think the future of that is?
Are they going to get away with actually pushing for, or do you think there's going to be a serious push for intervention in Sudan?
And what about Somalia?
Just, you know, a few hundred miles away where it's actually the worst humanitarian crisis in Africa and it's all the United States' fault.
Yeah, I don't know.
I mean, I think they're definitely going to keep pushing for it, and it does have probably an appeal to, you know, more of the mainstream because they can kind of claim these humanitarian motives.
But it doesn't seem like that's really on people's minds a whole lot right now.
And it's hard for me to imagine, you know, getting into another war on top of Iraq and Afghanistan and Pakistan, you know, right now.
But, I mean, who knows?
I think, you know, especially more the neocon crowd is going to keep pushing for just, you know, military solutions to all of these problems.
So I don't know.
I definitely think that, you know, there's really no such thing as a humanitarian war.
I mean, especially when you look at U.S. foreign policy and our history, we don't intervene for humanitarian reasons.
I mean, if we bomb, you know, Sudan, it's going to be for, you know, geo-strategic reasons or, you know, the oil or whatnot.
But it's not going to be because we care about the Sudanese people.
And I think the same could be said for Somalia, you know.
So I think, you know, in the anti-war movement, we need to keep making better arguments for why, you know, why this is kind of a ruse, you know, that we would actually do this.
I remember reading, I think, one of Chomsky's pieces, you know, a few months ago, where he just, I think it was in the monthly review, that was just pretty devastating about that whole idea of humanitarian war.
So I think we need to just keep, you know, pushing that.
And I don't think it's going to happen, but you never know.
I think we have to stay on our guard and keep making arguments.
Well, you know, I think the answer to the let's intervene in Sudan meme is Somalia.
I mean, simply, you look at what America's done in Somalia.
Barack Obama was just in the paper last week as sending, I forgot how many was it, 4,000 tons of arms to the government, which are the people that we back the warlords in overthrowing, who've now won that war.
And so now we're backing them against the crazies who are even crazier than them, who have been created as a result of our war to overthrow them.
Yeah, it's crazy.
I think it's just kind of a way to still sell weapons, you know.
And we have such a short-term memory, I mean, with kind of blowback in our history of, you know, just backing the Taliban and backing, you know, backing bin Laden and backing Saddam.
And basically every bad guy that we're at war with, we were funding and we were arming, and now we're facing those same weapons, you know.
So it's just crazy.
And, yeah, I totally agree with you.
All right, everybody, I'm talking with Eric Stoner from Waging Nonviolence, and I'm looking at your own personal website here, ericstoner.net, and you have a lot here about the new age of droid warfare, basically, just like the commercial on TV.
Join the army, you'll get to play with remote-controlled planes all day.
It's actually kind of true.
I saw a thing not too long ago, was it 60 Minutes, did the thing about the guys who sit in trailers in Nevada and bomb people in Pakistan all day.
Yeah, that was such a puff piece.
I mean, that was like, I mean, as bad a propaganda as I've seen about the whole issue of robotics.
I saw a short clip, and in the clip I saw it was like, well, they have rifles, so they're bad guys, kill them.
Yeah, it was unbelievable.
I mean, there was a campaign I saw about contacting 60 Minutes and trying to say, I mean, this is even out of character for you guys to do such a one-sided piece that basically just gives the military a line.
They didn't give any idea that there was any resistance to this idea or that there was any critical perspective on it.
Well, what are the worst implications of this new era?
Because it is a new era, isn't it, robotic warfare?
Definitely, yeah.
I mean, I think it's a really, really scary development, and one of the things that bothers me most is that there's been virtually no debate about it.
I mean, I've read really everything that I can get my hands on on this issue going back four or five years, and almost everything is kind of puffing this up and saying that this is going to be really beneficial to the future of war, right?
I mean, the main talking point is that it's going to save U.S. lives or take U.S. soldiers out of harm's way.
But I think when you start to look at it critically and think about the negative kind of ramifications, in my opinion, as this technology advances, it's going to make it so that right now basically one soldier has to control one robot, and in the future one soldier is going to be able to manage several robots.
And that's just going to make it, in a numerical way, easier to go to war, right?
Because you're going to be able to go to war with a lot less soldiers, so it's going to make the military's recruiting problem go away, even though the economic situation has already done that in a lot of ways.
Also, as casualties drop, which are likely on the battlefield in the short term, I think it's going to make it so that politicians and the government can go to war more easily, and people are just not going to pay attention, even less so than they already do.
Well, you know, even in the late 1990s, I guess before Iraq kind of showed the opposite to people, back before when they used to talk about the transformation of the military and everything, and that was the, I think even Homer Simpson said, oh, don't worry, all the wars of the future will be fought with lasers and robots and cool stuff, and it'll be like the Clapper, I think.
I think I have that clip somewhere.
I mean, the other thing is that these robots are being controlled through a video screen, and the drones have gotten a lot of attention.
There's something like, I think, 12,000 drones, which actually is more than all the manned airplanes in the Air Force, but that's gotten a lot of attention in recent months because of Pakistan and Afghanistan, but what hasn't gotten hardly any attention is ground robots, and that's been a real interest for me, in that there's actually thousands of ground robots in Iraq and Afghanistan, and they're just now starting to arm them, and they're being controlled through a laptop, basically, with joysticks and a video screen, and they're actually, when I've done interviews, they're actually trying to make these controllers look and be more based off of Xbox, PlayStation, the Wii remotes.
They're actually designing them so that they're video game controllers now, except you're not killing somebody in a video game.
You're killing Iraqis or you're killing Afghanis, and the idea that this is just going to blur reality and increase civilian casualties, while at the same time people are just going to be paying less attention to war, I think.
So it makes a really scary mix for the future, and I think when I explain this stuff to people, it starts to make sense, but the first reaction of most people when they see these robotics is, cool, look at this cool technology.
We have kind of a technology-obsessed culture, and so I don't know.
I'm worried at the lack of debate.
Yeah, well, I think you're right.
I think, well, even especially the part about how cool it is.
I mean, I think every boy in this society grows up wanting to fly a fighter jet, and wouldn't it be fun, at least, if not they want to actually go in the Air Force or whatever.
I mean, they're the coolest inventions of all, but you've got to be a murderer to fly one is the only catch, you know, basically.
But, I mean, there's a reason that, you know, they've tested this, obviously, in the focus groups, and they use this in their commercials on TV.
You want 17-year-old kids to get excited about joining the military, show them playing with not just remote-controlled planes, but the very coolest taxpayer-designed remote-controlled planes that can ever be built, the most expensive and the awesomest, highest, finest ones, and that's pretty much all you need.
Put a joystick in their hands like that movie Toys with Robin Williams back in the day, where the line just completely goes away.
Your PlayStation is a weapon.
Yeah, yeah, it's crazy.
I mean, especially when you think about all the sci-fi movies, too, that kind of warn about what happens when you go down this path, you know, people love the Matrix, Terminator, you think of these huge movies, and for some reason it's not clicking that we're kind of moving quickly down that path and we're not talking about it.
So the other big argument that I think really needs to get out there with the drones, and this was by one of the guys that I interviewed for one of my pieces, he said, you know, the idea that this is going to even save U.S. lives is kind of, it doesn't hold up when you really test it, because if you kind of put yourself in the shoes of the Iraqis, right, or the Afghanis, and you think about if you have a robot coming down your street, right, that's armed, and you have no way to stop this robot, you know, what are you going to do, right?
You're going to look for where you can get them, you know, get us, right?
So whether that means, you know, attacking more directly the U.S. bases where these things are controlled from, or it could mean attacking the research centers at universities or the factories where they're being manufactured, or, you know, if they get desperate enough, just striking out at any American target they can find, you know, American hotels, you know, that's possibly why, you know, there was that big bombing at the Marriott Hotel in Pakistan.
The idea that, you know, it's basically, it could reduce casualties on the immediate battlefield, but basically the battlefield would completely expand, and, you know, many more targets would be seen as legitimate, and it would basically, you know, lead to a real increase in terrorism.
Well, and then the next time we have a big attack, they'll say, oh, my gosh, you've awakened the sleeping giant, and this next attack also came out of the clear blue sky.
Now we have to act out, everyone, come on, and we'll just go through the whole ordeal all over again.
Yeah, yeah, we have a short memory.
And it'll, yeah, I mean, that's the thing, is it'll kind of be true, the sleeping giant thing.
I mean, it's a joke, because we've been an empire since, you know, outright, nonstop, since the entry, since entry into World War II, but, you know, the claim that we were a sleeping giant then, you know, the metaphor had some meaning, but when they said that on September 11th, it was only true in terms of the American population, I guess, right back to the beginning again, and waging nonviolence.
There's so few waging any sort of dissent against this war, you know, or even paying attention on a day-to-day basis.
Yeah.
You know, it'll probably be right, and they'll probably be able to get away with the exact same line of propaganda.
They hate us for how good we are, not that our government's ever intervened anywhere.
Yeah, I think you're right.
I mean, it's kind of delusional that, you know, people just don't know about our real history, you know, and what our foreign policy has been all about.
I mean, I think for me, personally, once I started learning about why we've intervened in so many places and realizing that it has nothing to do with the ideals that, you know, every government, you know, Republican or Democrat has said, you know, that's when I really started to kind of, you know, be more critical, and I still think we have a long ways to go in terms of, you know, getting that kind of knowledge out to the wider public.
Well, I appreciate your efforts along those lines, and especially in creating a place where people can, you know, get together and make plans for future actions and things like that.
Waging nonviolence.
Waging violence.
No, that's whitehouse.gov.
Wagingnonviolence.org for Eric Stoner, and his personal website is ericstoner.net.
Thanks very much for your time on the show today.
Thank you so much, Guy.
Really appreciate it.
All right, everybody, you heard the man.
Get out there and occupy your congressman's office.