08/05/10 – Glen Ford – The Scott Horton Show

All right, y'all, welcome back to the show, Tantot War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, starting up the second hour here.
Our next guest on the show is Glenn Ford from the Black Agenda Report.
It's BlackAgendaReport.com.
He is the executive editor there and is a founding member, was a founding member, of the Washington chapter of the National Association of Black Journalists.
And I'd say more, but the bio is so long that it would take the whole interview to get through it all.
But go look at BlackAgendaReport.com and read all about us, as it says there.
Welcome to the show, Glenn.
How are you?
Oh, I'm all right to have such a long bio.
Well, I appreciate you joining us on the show today.
And you know, I'd be lying if I said I kept a regular track of your blog here.
There's so much to read all the time.
But I have read quite a few of your articles in the past, and I've heard your podcasts and all that.
And I guess it does say in here that you're a longtime radio guy.
In D.C., is that right?
In D.C., in Baltimore, in Atlanta, lots of places.
Oh, right on.
Okay, so I really enjoy hearing your stuff.
It's good stuff, and I recommend people go and check it out, especially if it's not a point of view that you're used to.
After all, most people in America aren't black.
So nice to go and, anyway.
So let's talk about the warfare state, but most importantly, let's talk about how to end it.
Seems to me that I'm kind of in the same position as you, and that is that most Americans aren't libertarians either.
And most people are not, even people on the left, there are 15 different descriptions of people on the left and the right and whatever.
And yet we have a real crisis in this country in the wars and the destruction of the Bill of Rights.
And so it seems to me like what we need is, well, maybe a new level of tolerance for the places where we disagree with each other, if we can agree on the most important things, peace and the Bill of Rights, and corporate welfare for that matter.
And maybe we can have a real realignment, a real change in American politics where we really do have a much more of a us versus them party than a left versus right one.
Well, if you're talking about the much debated left-right coalition, the problem has always been, this is not just confined to anti-war politics or contemporary left politics, the problem in the United States in terms of tolerance, if that's the word, has always been white people.
And I think that that now applies in terms of those people who consider themselves to be conservatives or libertarians, who have a problem with what passes for an anti-war movement.
The right-wing cadre, who are infected virulently with racism, who I believe in fact opposed the war, and I'm talking about the rank and file, I'm not talking about you, you can speak for yourself.
But who opposed the war for some rather different reasons, I believe, than much of the left does, and that most of black America does.
I think that's always been the problem.
I went to a conference in which left-right unity was discussed, and one of the subjects was what kind of words can you use?
And one of the words that was recommended by one of the conservatives there, that should not be used, is actually the word peace.
Because peace, according to this person, reminds the people in his circle of peaceniks, and hippies, and the counterculture, and the 60s, and those images and memories are apparently painful to many of the people, his white conservatives, too painful for them to associate with.
And so, whose problem was, in that circumstance, who had the problem of intolerance, who had the problem with stepping up to the war movement?
I think that if we just speak in generalities, everyone can agree that everyone who opposes the war should welcome the anti-war positions taken by whoever, everyone else.
But in practice, it's the right, the right that does not tolerate many of the folk, including black folk, who make up the natural constituency, or the traditional constituency of anti-war in the United States.
Well, first of all, I completely agree with you about the quibbling over the language.
I think that it's just ridiculous.
You can call it empire, but not imperialism, and this and that.
Of course, I get complaints all the time.
We get complaints at anti-war.com all the time, and we ought to be pro-peace.com, because you can't be anti.
That doesn't sound right.
You should be pro-peace.
And I actually reject that in a way, because of the connotations of hippiness and all that.
But to me, more specifically, it's at least the image of the ignorance of the hippies, saying, well, just give peace a chance, but not really knowing anything about it.
Whereas being anti means you're willing to object to the premise of the war party's argument, and willing to actually take them on head on.
It has a better connotation to me.
But as far as rules as to what people ought to say or not, I think that's crazy.
But then again, well, there's a couple of things I've got to argue about here.
I mean, I don't know how you could think that libertarians are racist, when libertarians are individualists, and are therefore incapable of being racist.
They would implode in a poof of illogic, and disappear from space-time, if they were racist.
Yes, yes.
As individuals in the abstract, they're not racist or anti-racist.
But Ron Paul and his son, still on principled grounds, oppose the 1963 civil rights legislation as government intrusion.
Those of us who hold the United States government and the white civil society responsible for the not just lingering and vestigial effects of slavery and Jim Crow, but the ongoing manifestation of white supremacy, understand that state power is needed, needs to be in the hands of people who oppose racism, and to use actively to stamp it out.
So yeah, Ron Paul can talk.
I don't know if he's your mentor or not, but since he's so well-known, we'll knock his name around.
Ron Paul can stand for anti-war on foreign policy, but on domestic policy, he has nothing in common with black folks.
Well, he's got some things in common with black folks, right?
Like, well, I don't know how black folks feel about the drug war, but I know he wants to abolish the drug war, which seems to me to be the most destructive thing when it comes to the black community in America.
You're right about that.
I overspoke.
And, you know, the thing is about Ron, I mean, it's, I'm sure from your point of view, it's a very, you know, quirky, beyond reason sort of a thing to be against the Civil Rights Act and whatever, but, you know, he is at least, you know, compared to the rest of the congressmen or whatever up there, he seems to me like he's a real human being and he really does care about people.
He just wants to see liberty enforced from the bottom up, not from the Justice Department, and you know, wants a more limited central government than that.
So I don't think that he's a racist or would countenance racism.
I don't think he hates anybody, honestly.
He seems like too gentle of a nice old guy to me.
Well, you know, I don't know of him.
I don't, that is, I don't know him personally.
I don't know how he treats his family.
I don't know if he has and how he treats his black friends.
It would all be nice if he treats everyone well.
But opposition to federal intervention on behalf of people's unrequited rights is not quirky.
Okay.
Well, fair enough.
And you know what?
You know, I'm of two minds about that and maybe three minds about that question, and obviously reasonable people can certainly disagree about the civil rights thing.
But and you know what?
You're right that there are a lot of conservatives and right-wingers who are opposed to war, who just can't stand to hear another word about Mumia Abul-Jamal or whatever.
But then again, mostly they don't even have a chance to hear about Mumia Abul-Jamal because they're never invited to participate in any sort of, say, for example, when ANSWER does an anti-war rally or anything.
It seems to me like it would just be smart strategy to invite conservatives, if only to prove that, see, even these conservatives are against this war.
That's how bad it is.
And instead they're, they're left out completely.
Oh, and I'm sorry, because now the bumper music's playing, Glenn.
Hold it right there.
We're talking with Glenn Ford about right and left and the empire and race and all kinds of things.
You can interact with other LRN listeners in our message board at forum.lrn.fm.
That's forum.lrn.fm.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Glenn Ford, not the star of Brotherhood of the Bell, but the executive editor of the Black Agenda Report.
All right, so now we're talking about left and right and libertarians and whether we can get along.
It, you know, it seems to me like there's so many things to disagree about.
You know, the civil rights issue hits home to you much more than it does to me because you're a black guy and I'm not.
I'm the beneficiary of this system rather than the victim of it as far as, you know, in the general sense there.
But it seems to me like the biggest crisis in the whole wide world is the American empire mass slaughtering people by the tens of thousands on a monthly basis or whatever.
And something's got to be done.
If it means you and Pat Buchanan standing on the same stage and talking about let's end this empire, isn't it worth it?
In a practical sense, no, because Pat Buchanan and those who are associated with the Tea Party and they're not necessarily the same thing, Buchananites and Tea Partyites, are anathema to black America.
They are associated with domestic racism and it is impossible for black Americans to make common cause with them because it's quite clear to us that they do not make common cause with us.
Buchanan, for example, is the senior journalistic-funded representative of white nationalism in the country.
I see great problems with making common causes with Pat Buchanan.
It's always good to look way across the fence or the railroad tracks and see that imperialism has problems with white folks, too.
But that does not, in a practical sense, lead to some natural alliance between black folks and white nationalists.
The real world doesn't work like that.
It never has.
I can't imagine black people not shunning, out of hand, any kind of political links with Tea Partyism or white nationalism in any form.
Well, but I mean, I don't know, it sounds like kind of an overly broad definition of white nationalism.
In fact, later on the show, we're going to be talking with Matt Kennard, talking about General Petraeus' Pentagon actually recruiting Aryan Nations members to go and fight his wars for him, to be his death squads for him.
That's white nationalism.
You know, I don't know if, and even, you know, as you said, there's a difference between, say, the Buchanan Brigades and the Tea Partiers, and even among the Tea Partiers, there's a pretty big difference between the Palinites and the Ron Paul followers and that kind of thing.
But why not all of us?
Well, it seems that you guys, that you anti-war guys among conservatives and libertarians, really have your work set out for you.
Folk on the left and the black left, we have our work cut out for us, too, on our side of the track, or the fence, if you will.
I don't know that we really, given the grave problems we have, especially black leftists, with a black president as imperial commander-in-chief, I don't know that we have, really, the luxury of time to argue with Buchananites and such, when we have so many things to do.
Right, that's what I'm saying.
Let's all agree on getting these troops home right now, reinstating the Bill of Rights, and we can fight like mad over culture wars and domestic politics later.
It's an emergency here.
No, what I'm saying is, the political work that would be required to find this elusive common ground on anti-war territory between right-wingers like Buchanan and what the Tea Party appears to be, is really more time than we can afford.
Look, in black America, which has been for generations the most anti-war demographic in the United States, the anti-war momentum has been paralyzed, neutralized by the presence of a black commander-in-chief.
That is our paramount problem, not making nice with Pat Buchanan, or finding that flavor of Tea Partier with whom we are partially compatible.
Even if it could mean an end to the war sooner?
I mean, I don't get it.
You're saying the most anti-war constituency in America has been bought off by the presence of our current president, and so to end the war faster, we need to shun, for example, the population of the American Conservative Magazine, rather than embracing...
I'm saying the most anti-war constituency in black America has been neutralized by the presence of a black president, and that requires black folks on the left.
It requires all of our efforts to correct that historical anomaly.
Yeah.
Okay.
Well, you know, I don't know.
I don't think, to be very frank, I don't think those elements of the Tea Party that are sincerely anti-imperialism are as important a constituency if they were able to be mobilized as historically black people are.
And besides that fact, I'm a black person, and my primary area of organizing is going to be in black America.
Oh, sure.
Well, you know, that's fair enough.
But you know, it seems like...
Well, it's like I was saying about the anti-war protests.
It would seem to me like, for you to be able to say, look, these conservative rich white guys even agree with us about the empire, that's how bad it is, that that would strengthen the case against the empire in the real world.
Ah, but I don't believe that anti-war, that the anti-war element among these conservatives is a significant factor.
I don't believe that, you see.
If I did, then I'd be much more willing to discuss allocating very scarce resources to some kind of collaboration.
I frankly don't believe it.
Yeah.
Well, you know, the American Conservative Magazines publishes liberals and leftists all the time on civil liberties and foreign policy issues.
Seems like there's a lot of work already being done, you know?
I don't know.
I mean, what I want to see, Glenn, is I want to see you and Pat and Cindy Sheehan and everybody on the left and the right, you pick all the names, whatever, I don't care, at one big anti-war rally with, you know, Mark Twain and the Anti-Imperialist League or something, and here's what we all agree on, no matter what we disagree on.
We're all the same on the Bill of Rights, on bringing the troops home from everywhere, and on, well, really also, I think, the third leg on the stool should be, and kicking all the billionaires off of welfare.
And those three things, it seems like you could get 200 million Americans around an idea like that if we could, if those of us who are the writers and the talkers and the radio hosts and the whatever, if we can all see eye to eye and get together, maybe we can lead Americans that way, too, and actually have peace or something.
Well, you know, the 700 participants in the National Peace Conference recently in Albany all basically agreed on that kind of platform, if you can get a conservative clout somewhere to be on that kind of platform, I'm sure people would applaud that.
I don't think you can.
Yeah.
Well, I appreciate your pessimism, too, I've got to admit.
But thanks anyway.
I appreciate it, and I do appreciate your writing.
I urge everybody to go check out the Black Agenda Report at blackagendareport.com and the great Glenn Ford.
Thanks very much.
Thank you for the opportunity.