09/04/09 – John V. Walsh – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
Our next guest on the show today is, well, our only guest on the show today, really, is John Walsh.
He's a scientist who lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and is a frequent contributor to counterpunch.org.
Whoops, wrong one.
Welcome back to the show, John.
How are you doing?
It's nice to be back.
Thank you.
Well, so, I've always been a big fan of counterpunch, and in general, counterpunch-style politics, exactly what you call them, I'm not really sure.
I kind of object to the whole left-right thing in the first place, but then again, I guess, you know, people fit in categories where they think they do, or, you know, self-described kind of things.
So, that's my favorite kind of left, though.
Of course, Alex Coburn stuck up for the Branch Davidians, which made him, I think, the only leftist in America to do so.
And ever since then, of course, there's a lot of places where counterpunch-type point of views coincide with libertarian ones, and I've been thankful to see, over the years, I guess, articles written by you specifically kind of lambasting some of the mainstream left-wing movement for excluding libertarians and conservatives from their anti-war rallies and that kind of thing, because frankly, you know, it weakens the anti-war movement to do so.
Now, it looks like we're in a situation where it's maybe going to be left to the conservatives and the libertarians, because the progressive movement seems to be bowing out of the anti-war politics.
I'm sure you saw the article about the survey done at the Roots Nation Convention, formerly the Yearly Coast, where basically the Iraq and Afghanistan wars were the very least priority of the hundreds of attendees there, maybe more than that?
Well, you know, your points are well taken.
For one thing, one of the two co-editors of Counterpunch, as you mentioned, Alex Coburn, and the other one is Jeffrey St. Clair, Alex has been for a long time interested in this left-libertarian joint point of view, and the more I see what's going on and the more I think about it, the more I think it's important.
For one thing, if you compare a lot of liberal leftists and radical leftists, too, of the dogmatic stripe, it is true, they have no place in their anti-war movement for people who don't either share their dogma, in one case, or support Democrats above opposing war.
And last summer at the Future of Freedom Foundation, Alex gave a talk, and he said, you know, what we rely on in the anti-war movement, what we rely on the libertarians to do, and the paleo-conservatives, I would say also, is to provide a real passion.
And, you know, at first you might say, well, passion, what about thought?
But by implication, the so-called left, at least the leadership and the Democrat party left, lacks that passion.
Well, you know why.
That's a pretty sorry comment when you think about it, because almost anything you do will not succeed without a certain amount of intensity and commitment, which we call passion.
And it's not, well, a recent example of Cindy Sheehan shows it's not there.
Yeah, well, you know, we see with the libertarian movement that the closer you get to Washington, D.C., where Ron Paul accepted, but the so-called libertarian think tanks and those kinds of things, they end up compromising their principles.
They don't have much of a passion against the war, most of them.
Obviously, there are individual exceptions.
But for the most part, I think what's wrong with the Democrats, with the progressive left, is they like Obama enough that they can kind of live vicariously through him and imagine that the power is theirs now.
So what's to complain about?
Well, the thing is, I should mention that one of the things that I wrote about very recently was Cindy Sheehan, who, of course, protested the war in Crawford, Texas, George Bush's summer residence, and came last week to Martha's Vineyard to protest Obama's war.
Now, it was very interesting that on the left, and that includes United for Peace and Justice, even Code Pink, a group that has a reputation for being militant, of course, Move On, which is more or less just part of the Democrat Party, and many other groups did not support her, did not publicize that.
And I was out there for a day at Martha's Vineyard, and she made the comment, Cindy did, that the real news was not that she came to protest Obama's wars, the real news was that the people who supported her so much before, on the so-called left, were absent, wouldn't come out, wouldn't...
There was one leader of the anti-war movement in Massachusetts who, well, she's recognized as a leader, she has a summer home right where the ferry takes off from Martha's Vineyard.
Oh, no!
She's 30 minutes away.
Not only did she not publicize it, but she did not come.
And then, there was a small number, the afternoon I was there, we walked down the road, Cindy was only about a quarter of a mile away from Obama's place, with a banner, and she had a poster, they've made this poster of her, some artist did, I probably should know who it is, and she signed it, calling on him to end the wars.
Mr. President, it's time to end these wars, Cindy Sheehan.
Well, number one, they obviously, the Secret Service and the local police, they were horrified that we were doing this.
I think they were afraid somebody would take a picture, and they wouldn't accept a poster.
They wouldn't accept a poster.
And they wanted us far away, a few hundred feet away from that entrance to his compound.
Well, and you say in your article, and I'm sorry I didn't mention this in the introduction, but you can find John V. Walsh's columns at AntiWar.com, including Barack Obama to Cindy Sheehan, Get Lost, and you say in there that they basically, like George Bush, at his little pretended Hollywood-set ranch there at Crawford, Texas, refused to even send someone out to say, go away, other than just the security people.
No, there was no response at all.
And as I mentioned in the article, that really sent me thinking, because, you know, here's this beautiful country, idyllic place, and he's in there with his family, his daughters, ordering the deaths of innocent, halfway around the world, people he doesn't know.
And it's very hard for me to imagine how you could do that in a war that is senseless, because I guess many people have made the point that if you have to occupy every country which potentially has a, quote-unquote, safe haven for so-called terrorists, you have a lot of countries you have to occupy, including Saudi Arabia and Germany, and probably the state of Florida, where the 9-11 attacks were apparently hatched.
So this strategy makes no sense.
It makes sense for trying to control Central Asia, it makes sense for trying to control pipelines, but not for controlling so-called terrorists.
It seemed to me a tremendous inhumanity for him to do this, and I will wager, just like George Bush was not willing to send his daughters, when Obama's two daughters grow a little older, I doubt whether he'll be encouraging them to go off to fight some future war in some country inhabited by Muslims that the United States and Israel doesn't like, or stands in the way of control.
It was really, I mean, almost viscerally distasteful for me to think about that.
And then, even worse, I think, is that Obama, at the end of his trip, and I think this was...
Oh, wait, wait, hang on about the counter-mom, because I want to explore that whole thing, but I just wanted to focus on this thing where here's Cindy Sheehan, and this is a lady, again, who, she's not just some lady who's got an anti-war bent, she's a lady whose kid died in some ridiculous battle in Sodder City where he should have never even been sent, in a war that he never should have been sent to in the first place, and she's paid her dues, and she's got a right to complain, damn it, and she's the one standing at the gate there, and here's Mr. Obama, Mr. Slick, he's not George Bush, the bumbling fool, who's going to get caught by her or something like that.
He could just as easy as not let her in and have a few conciliatory words and say, you know, I'm very sorry about your sacrifice, and pat her on the head and blow her off.
At least he would have let her in and been, you know...
But I think the deal is that he didn't feel the pressure to do so, because, as you said, nobody else was backing her up.
It was her and you and a few other people there, but none of the left-wing peace groups were there backing her up.
The media wasn't paying much of attention to it because of that fact, so there was no pressure for him.
He didn't feel the heat, like George Bush must have at least been feeling the heat while he was out there riding around the track with Lance Armstrong, for all the people who showed up to support her in 2005, but he felt just as comfortable blowing her off, because who notices Saview, John?
Who wrote about it at Saview?
Actually, it's interesting that I got a lot of email from these articles about this incident, an unusual amount, and virtually all of it.
I can think of maybe one or two exceptions that, you know, we felt the same way.
It isn't the rank-and-file.
It isn't the independent.
It isn't even the Democratic Party activists who have no influence.
It's this core leadership at the top that is too close to Washington or too close to their own dogma, and, you know, it all depends on partisan politics and a Cold War mentality, and these people haven't, this leadership hasn't snapped out of it.
I don't think they ever will.
I think we just have to forget them and create something brand new.
I think that's the most important thing here.
Yeah.
Well, yeah, it's certainly important, although, well, and here, I want to talk about the right-wing antiwar movement such as it is and what can be done with it in a second, but I also want to give you a chance to tell the story of how here Barack Obama safely felt he could ignore Cindy Sheehan and her protest and, I guess, attempt to ask him what noble cause, but instead he went and set up a photo op to meet with some other mom who was more than happy to give her son's life for this ridiculous, not ridiculous, this mass murder in Afghanistan.
Well, actually, I saw that article in the Cape Cod Times which described this woman and her family.
She lost her son who decided to go to Afghanistan after hearing Obama make an appeal for it, and Obama happened to meet him when he was departing, I think, I don't know if it was Camp Lejeune, yeah, Camp Lejeune, and he went off and died, and this woman accepted it, and so she was chosen, and I believe, I can't show this, she was chosen to be there as a counter to Cindy Sheehan, and so after keeping the poor woman waiting for two hours as he left the Cape, he went in, he and his wife, and spent almost nine minutes with her, and that was her reward, that was her reward for sacrificing her son, and I feel very bad for the woman, but there's almost a Stockholm Syndrome in that you could possibly, she's obviously very religious, she takes solace in the afterlife, she believes her son is up there in heaven smiling down on her and Obama, and maybe that's enough to get her to accept all this, but I found it very unusual, and I think in the Cape Cod Times just today or yesterday, a letter appeared from another mother who lost a son, and she raised the question, why did Obama just pick this one family?
How about the rest of us?
And I can't prove this, but I think he might have had trouble finding many other mothers who were quite so accepting in such an unconditional way as this woman, so I see it as a very cynical use of a PR machine, because people on the Cape, the Cape Cod, did know this happened, and this was an offset, if you will, to counter it and show the man was sympathetic, and perhaps if Cindy had managed to get more national attention, this could have been used to counter that.
And so it was a choice of this one woman more than any other, but as I say, it was a pretty cynical use of this woman.
Obviously, just like people like George Bush or like Barack Obama who send people off to these wars in an unthinking way, I don't know.
It almost strikes me that they don't qualify.
They're not normal human beings or something.
I actually have trouble understanding it, but it's there, and we should take account of it.
Well, you know, it's funny.
There was a thing in the L.A.
Times, and it was great.
The way that they covered it, they were like, huh, well, this is kind of weird.
I'm not sure what to make of this, but according to this new psychological survey, politicians are just like psychopaths, and they have all these exact same qualities in common, where they're good at feigning emotional reactions and empathy and sympathy because they become masters at mimicking the feelings that others have, but really they are the center of the universe to themselves, and many of them have weird beliefs in magic and how they can suck the power of other people's lives away from them, and God knows what, and this is how politicians are.
They've got no shame whatsoever, and they're just, I guess, psychopaths that are a bit more well-born, and rather than going the Ted Bundy route, they settle for killing people vicariously.
Well, driving out to the ferry that goes over to Martha's Vineyard and coming back, I happened to be listening to an old book on tape, on CD rather, Elmer Gantry, and it just struck me that Obama's morality was pretty much like Elmer Gantry's, you know, say anything, do anything, and just ride along higher and higher.
But in any event, could I just speak about something?
Because whoever is listening, I hope we can get people to think of this, but I think until the day arrives and we have on the same stage or the same venue people like Cindy Sheehan, who is something of a leftist, Pat Buchanan, Justin Raimondo, Ralph Nader, perhaps if he's still around, George McGovern, until we can have Ron Paul, until we can have those people spearheading a new anti-war, anti-empire movement, forgetting their differences for that one cause.
We can argue, as a matter of fact, maybe if those people appeared together, they might find out they have some other things in common, which I found in my dealings with libertarians.
It's been an eye-opening experience to me.
But until we have that, we're not going to have an effective anti-war movement.
It's not going to happen.
And I think the other importance of the libertarians in this country is, you know, they're people who have different vocabularies, different ways of expressing their anti-war sentiment.
Religious people have one way of doing it, leftists have another way of doing it, libertarians have another way of doing it.
But the vocabulary, I think, that most people in this country share is the libertarian vocabulary.
They can see the anti-war sentiment through that frame of reference.
And somehow, that has to be brought in and hooked up with other anti-war sentiment in a way that takes leadership.
If we don't have that, we're going nowhere.
Yeah.
Well, I totally agree with that.
And it's funny, because I think there's another lesson there about libertarianism and the left and the right and how modern, from the libertarian perspective, how the libertarian creed, most of us think of it as simply the Declaration of Independence, what America's supposed to be, that it's all sold out.
And we consider the modern liberal and conservative movements to be perversions of that.
But that is why we all have that language in common, because the left and the right both believe that they're descended from Jefferson, right?
Yeah, I think that's very important.
Yeah, that's extremely important.
And the other part of this, why this new kind of anti-war movement makes sense, and Justin Raimondo brings this up in his book, Reclaiming the Right, that in the Cold War, people had different outlooks on things.
But the Cold War is over.
The whole world is recognizing that.
The new elections in Japan, the new development in China, the world understands that that epoch of war after war after war should be over, except for the United States.
We seem to be wandering around in a fog, armed to the teeth.
God knows what we'll unleash by accident if this keeps up.
And even if not, if you just care about the well-being of your neighbor, we're driving ourselves into bankruptcy if Paul Craig Roberts is to be believed.
So we have a terrible situation here, a situation which need not be, which reflects the sentiments of an elite which is now out of touch, and I would say dangerous.
They're dangerous people because they are incapable of facing the new realities, and they could kill us all before they get finished.
I wouldn't put it past them, either.
Well, no, listen, you're really hitting on what's really my pet project, and not that I have any resources to really put behind an anti-imperialist movement of what I'd like to see, but I guess I learned in community college about how they consider the rise of FDR as a realignment in America, where all these loyalties switched from this way of looking at things to that, and it was a new day forever.
Eisenhower didn't come and undo the so-called 20 years of treason of Roosevelt and Truman.
He basically ratified it all and that kind of thing.
And so that's what I want to see is a realignment, because from my kind of plumb line libertarian perspective, I sort of look at it like the left wing is half right about stuff, I mean the left wing in general is basically half libertarian and half authoritarian, and the same thing for the right, although maybe it's a little more 70-30 on that side, although you could argue the percentages either way, but basically there is a lot of libertarianism at the core of conservatism and of liberalism, and what I want to see is a real realignment where the left and the right cease to matter so much, and it's a difference between up and down.
It's a difference between liberty and slavery, a difference between a bill of rights or a high-tech surveillance slave state, police state, like we're moving into, between peace and world empire.
And this is the kind of thing where, like you say, Ron Paul and Cindy Sheehan, Pat Buchanan, Justin and Glenn Greenwald and Alex Coburn and George Will and all these people need to all be able to stand on the one stage at the anti-imperialist league and say enough is enough of this.
We want our bill of rights, we want the executive branch cut down to size, and etc. etc.
Start thinking toward a long-term future, rather than just driving ourselves over the edge of a cliff here.
Yes, and you know, as far as the view of the state goes, there is more, in terms of the theory of the state and how we regard it theoretically, although I don't like to get into theory that's too fancy because you can leave reality behind, but in terms of the theory of the state, the far left, or the far left, I don't want to use that, the genuine left and the genuine libertarians look on the state in pretty much the same way.
We may disagree a lot about economics and other things, but in terms of the state, there's not a big difference in our point of view.
And we both regard it as more often than not an alien and fearsome and potentially very destructive power.
We have to be vigilant about it.
That was the whole thing about the American Revolution.
Well, listen, thank you for having me on.
It was a pleasure to be here.
Well, it's been very good to have you here too.
Everybody, that's John V. Walsh.
You can find what he writes at Counterpunch and, of course, at Antiwar.com.
It's actually original.antiwar.com slash john-v-walsh, or just Google his name there and you'll pull it right up.
Thanks very much for your time on the show today.
Okay, thank you.
Bye-bye.