08/06/10 – Kevin Zeese – The Scott Horton Show

Alright y'all, welcome back to the show, it's Antiwar Radio, I'm Scott Horton, check out all the archives at antiwar.com slash radio, you can also find me on facebook.com slash antiwar radio if you want.
Alright, our next guest on the show is Kevin Zeese, Executive Director of Voters for Peace, and they held this meeting in February trying to bring together the real antiwar movement, left, right, libertarian, and anybody else who wants to be involved, and it's developed into a project called Come Home America, the website is comehomeamerica.us, and there's a book coming out this fall demonstrating the history and current opportunities for an across the political spectrum antiwar, anti-empire movement.
Welcome back to the show, Kevin, how are you doing, man?
Good, good, thanks for having me on again, Scott, good to hear your voice.
Well, I'm really happy to have you here, I appreciate that, and appreciate you joining us.
This is my thing, man, I've been saying for years, I don't know how many people ever noticed or heard, but I noticed long ago that the good leftists and the good right-wingers got a lot in common, and they're against a lot of the same things, and it's pretty easy to be against these things, because they're horrible, horrible things.
Permanent warfare, the destruction of our Bill of Rights, and corporate welfare, and banking bailouts for the people who are already the richest and most powerful among us, and this national government being used against us all, there's no reason why we ought to be divided between people who like guns and people who like, you know, granola or whatever, all that stuff has got to fall to the side, and we got to get it together, a new realignment, us versus them, peace and freedom versus the war party.
No question, especially on the issue of war and empire, I see more and more Americans feeling the same way from various parts of the political spectrum, you know, the cost of militarism is undermining the economy, the national security of the United States is undermined by us being in aggressive wars in many countries, and having more than a thousand military bases and outposts around the world, and we need this, we can see more and more clearly that the Congress does not represent the views of the majority American people, because the majority American people aren't working together to influence the Congress.
If you look at this most recent vote on Afghanistan war funding, you know, it's evident that we need to have people from both the right and the left, and the radical center, people who are concerned about deficit spending, and see that militarism is a big cause of that, we need to have people from across the spectrum coming together to vote against war funding.
The left alone in Congress can't do it, there are more than 100, you know, votes from progressive Democrats against the war in this last bill, there are only single digit votes on the Republican side, we need to change that so that those who oppose war, those who really want a government that doesn't waste money on weapons and war, to vote together to stop these wars, we have the power to do it, but we've got UNITE to do it.
Yeah, well, you know, I can't even get that excited about voting because I don't see the opportunity in it, although times are changing, and it is, you know, I'm an anarchist, I'm against voting in principle, but then again, even Lysander Spooner said it's okay to vote in self-defense, that that's not aggression necessarily, you know, and so I think, well, if you're going to talk about voting, I think the key on voting for office is never vote for someone who you disagree with.
I mean, if you're, even if the person that you agree with has no chance of winning, you should still vote for that person.
It's, as Eugene Debs said, you know, he ran for president six times, and he went to jail for speaking out against the war, and he said that, you know, I'd rather vote for someone I agree with and not get it than vote for someone I disagree with and get it, and I think that's right.
So, if you are going to vote, don't waste it on someone you disagree with, and too many Americans hold their nose and vote for something they disagree with, and that's a gigantic error.
Yeah, well, and then once they get loyal to a politician, they'll bend over backwards to justify him, too, and that's something that can be really problematic.
I think it's very important for the anti-war movement to be independent of either of the major electoral parties, because the two parties that are in control of government are controlled by corporatists who support American militarism, and voting for those parties does not help to undermine their power.
We need to undermine both those parties' power so we can really put in place people who actually represent our views, but even beyond voting, movements are what change the direction of the country.
That's been true throughout history.
It's always been movements, women fighting for their right to vote, unions fighting for their rights to organize workers, farmers fighting for their rights to avoid bankruptcy and foreclosure from big banks, the 40-hour workweek, workers working for that.
I mean, it's people who make change.
It wasn't Woodrow Wilson who gave people the right to vote.
It was women demanding it.
He didn't want to do it.
He put them in jail when they advocated for it, but he was forced to do it because women demanded it and their supporters demanded it.
It wasn't LBJ who gave the Civil Rights Act.
It was the Civil Rights Movement that forced him to.
The Democratic Party was a white, dominated by white segregationists in those days.
It was not in their political philosophy to support civil rights.
They were forced to accept it.
Nixon, you know, was forced to wind down the Vietnam War, and while he was forced out before it finally finished, you know, he was winding down the Vietnam War not because he favored ending the war, but because the people demanded it, and so people demanding in the United Way is what makes change happen in this country.
The politicians follow.
They get in front of the parade.
They don't lead the parade.
Right.
Yeah, I mean, I absolutely agree with that.
Education is the key, and the problem is most people don't agree with us.
Most people think it's okay to nuke Hiroshima.
Most people, in fact, I saw Greenwald on his Twitter feed pointed out the other day, people in all the polls, they say Vietnam, yeah, that was a mistake.
Afghanistan now, they say in majority, yeah, apparently that was a mistake to do the Afghanistan War.
In Iraq, oh, that was a mistake, and then they support a war against Iran by 60-something percent.
Yeah, no, there's a lot.
We have one of the biggest problems we have in this country is the corporate media, the mainstream traditional media that is dominated by six corporations, including those that have a lot of interest and relationships in the military-industrial complex.
That is a source of misinformation, misinformation.
Thank goodness there are radio shows like yours.
There's websites like antiwar.com.
There's a whole lot of advocacy groups that are putting out the truth on what's happening on war.
We don't see, for example, much discussion in the corporate media about how Obama's ending the Iraq War is leading 50,000 troops and 100,000 mercenaries.
That's an end of war?
They've just changed the name from conflict to anti-terrorism.
That's not an end of war.
It's just a renaming of it.
We don't see that discussed in the U.S. media, even though that's what's really happening.
So Americans are deceived.
They're led to believe that Obama is keeping his promise to get all the troops out.
He's not.
He's actually continuing the occupation, just under a different label.
So our job also in bringing people together is to have people from across the political spectrum who can speak to those audiences, because one of the problems with our independent media is that it's web-based and people go to websites that they agree with.
So if you're a conservative, you go to a conservative site.
Libertarians go to libertarian sites.
Progressives go to progressive sites.
Socialists go to socialist sites.
But if we have all those folks on the same message, putting out the truth about what's happening with our wars and our military budget, then we can reach an audience that can be a tipping point.
If instead we're divided and don't work together, we won't be able to accomplish that, and the corporate media will continue to misinform people, and we'll keep seeing the military-industrial complex win.
We'll keep seeing the masters of war having their wars move forward.
All right, well, so the website here, comehomeamerica.us, I can see right here on the front page you have links to articles by Left, Right, Libertarian, and everybody else written about their participation in y'all's first meeting.
And I guess just real quick here before we go out to break, can you sketch out for us where you think this thing is headed?
I mean, just for a lack of imagination, I guess, I imagine that what we need is a big stunt, right?
A big giant rally where you have all the people who supposedly are so different from each other all sharing the same stage, demanding an end to the empire.
I think whether it's a rally or whether it's a conference, I think what we really need to do is more in the conference realm than a rally at this point.
I think we need to bring kind of a model that an academic conference where we reach out to people from across the political spectrum, academics, think tanks, advocacy groups, and let's get them all together talking about specific issues.
Is an empire good for the American economy?
Is militarism good for national security?
Is it good for the rule of law?
Is it good for democracy?
And let's focus on those and really get people from across the political spectrum talking about these issues so that people from, Americans from across the spectrum can find people who they agree with philosophically and support our issue.
Yeah.
Well, all right, everybody.
Second, most important subject in the world after nuclear disarmament, the new realignment for peace and freedom in the United States of America.
Kevin Zeese from ComeHomeAmerica.us is on the line and we'll be right back.
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Visit the Liberty Radio Network program guide to find out at shows.lrn.fm That's shows.lrn.fm All right, everybody, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
I'm talking with Kevin Zeese from ComeHomeAmerica.us.
And, you know, Kevin, I was talking to my friend David Beto a few weeks back, and I thought he said that he had written something for you guys, but I don't see it on the site there.
He's written it actually for a book that's coming out.
Oh, really?
Yeah, so it'll be coming out in the fall, and it's a book that is divided in multiple parts, first looking at the history of advocacy against war from people from the right and the left to show that this is a long-term reality, that people from across the spectrum are opposed to war, then looking at the current debate and the current wars and where various people from the various parts of the political spectrum write about it, then looking into the futures of the possibility of what an across-the-board, real American anti-war movement would look like.
And so that's where he wrote something for, and it'll be published in there.
So really, I mean, we're kind of at step one here.
We're kind of starting all over from scratch with the anti-war movement now, aren't we?
Well, you know, there still are lots of good people doing work on anti-war, obviously, and a lot of the groups that advocated against wars during the Bush administration did have a hard time initially adjusting to the Obama administration, and more and more are seeing the reality of his administration now, are speaking out more aggressively.
There's a demonstration this weekend coming up that a bunch of anti-war groups, including my group, Voters for Peace, is sponsoring to support Bradley Manning, with the guy who is the WikiLeaks, allegedly the WikiLeaks whistleblower.
Right on.
Good for you, man.
And he's at Quantico right now, and a bunch of groups have joined again.
There was a national anti-war movement meeting in Albany at the end of last month that had about 500 to 600 people show up.
That's a pretty good-sized event.
So there is still anti-war movement, but I think we do have to start from scratch, and then we have to rethink our strategy.
You know, if you remember before the Iraq war, we had the largest demonstrations against a war before it started, I think in history.
I mean, they were just gigantic demonstrations before the war began, and it failed.
It didn't work.
And so the question is, do we rebuild that same movement, or do we realize that that movement's necessary but not sufficient?
We need to do something that's going to work.
We are going up against the most powerful empire in world history.
You know, you look at the British Empire, which was a very powerful empire, had 35 military bases at its peak.
We have more than 1,000 military bases and military outposts around the world.
We have a very well-ingrained military-industrial complex that has, you know, employees in every congressional district because they make sure that the weapons they build are spread across the country, so they have political influence everywhere.
So we have a very long-term, really 100-year-plus empire, so families who have lost people in wars, lots of veterans.
We have a lot of people to try to influence and overcome the mentality of war that dominates our foreign policy.
So this is not an easy task, and the left needs to do more.
The right needs to do more.
Activists of all sorts need to do more.
Average Americans need to get better informed.
We have a lot of work to do.
So I don't know if I'd call it starting over, but I think it's necessary for us to step back and look at what we've done and rethink it so we can be effective.
The goal is not just to make noise and be heard.
The goal is to be effective, to actually stop this militarist foreign policy, stop spending half of our discretionary spending on weapons in war, stop spending as much as the whole world combined on weapons in war.
And to do that, it's going to take a different approach than we've had in the past, because the approach we've taken in the past has really not worked.
We've got to face that reality.
Yeah.
Well, you know, part of this, too, is that most Americans, or I don't know about most, but many Americans, they don't even know what left and right means, liberal and conservative, really.
They're not sure which one pertains to which party, supposedly, and they don't even really care about that.
You know what I mean?
It doesn't mean that they have to, you know, flunk out of caring about the war or that they ought to be ignored or whatever.
Why should anybody be a liberal or a conservative?
Those are about the two dumbest philosophies I've ever heard of, anyway.
Like, you know, why not all of us just be each other's neighbors and insist on an end to militarism?
I think that's a really good point.
I think that, you know, one of the techniques of empires and governments throughout history has been divide and conquer or divide and rule.
And what that means is people, you know, fighting against each other rather than recognizing their commonalities and fighting with each other to accomplish the goal that they share.
And we need to not divide and rule ourselves, and be ruled ourselves.
We need to recognize that we have areas of agreement.
And too often, people on the left and people on the right will look at those from the other side of the political spectrum and point to their worst elements.
They'll point to racists on the right.
They'll point to Trotskyites or communists on the left.
They'll start to red bait, you know, and then attack the left with a red baiting terminology.
And so both sides can do that.
We can keep focusing on what we disagree on.
But instead, if we build on what we agree on, we have a real strong starting point to build a movement that can be effective.
And what's also great about it is when you start to build on what you agree on, you can then start to hear each other better on what you disagree on.
And you can talk to each other and educate each other on what you disagree on.
And I think that's a real opportunity for all of us to grow and become better citizens and become more effective advocates for ending wars, for justice, for freedom.
We can accomplish those goals much better if we listen to each other than if we fight each other.
Right.
And after all, you know, conservatism in America, at least partially or used to be anyway, I don't know what it means now, but it used to kind of always be about preserving liberalism, you know, like the whole Jeffersonian Bill of Rights kind of thing, the American Revolution and all that.
That's what the conservation was about.
I mean, at our core, we all supposedly are, we at least all embrace the Declaration of Independence, right?
You know, all the philosophy of the founders and whatever, whatever, you know, that's right.
I think if you look at the conservatism in America, I think that probably the best banner, you know, for carrying the traditional conservative message is probably the American conservative magazine.
They do.
And they're very strongly anti-war, by the way, they're an excellent output for anti-war activity from a right perspective.
And I think, you know, hearing that voice would be so much an improvement than, you know, the whole Ron Paul movement, which is kind of a more libertarian, conservative ideology that also opposes war.
But unfortunately, those two aspects of conservatism are swamped by neocons who have much more money because a lot of them are militarists and profit from the war.
And they've really taken over the Republican Party and have become the loudest voice in the conservative movement.
I see the neocons as the enemies of traditional conservatism, as the enemies of libertarian conservatism, as well as the enemies of progressives and people who oppose war from the left.
So we have a common enemy there.
And we also have a common enemy in racism.
I think that racism, I mean, I don't see traditional conservatives as being racist.
And I think that we need to recognize that, you know, we can improve conservatism, we can improve liberalism and progressivism by working together, listening to each other and becoming really more effective citizens.
Yeah.
Well, and the racism thing to me is, I mean, I'm not saying it's not real in the society or whatever, but to me, it's kind of a red herring as far as, you know, any organized, outright, you know, self-proclaimed racists are the most marginal segment of American society.
They don't have anything to do with anything.
They don't participate in anything.
They're the biggest losers of all.
I agree.
And that's one thing, you know, about the Obama election is it kind of did bring some of the racists out of the closet.
They actually got more marginalized as a result.
I think that the Tea Party has been labeled as a racist organization or having some strong racist elements or being a racist at its core.
And, you know, the attacks on the Tea Party for that has actually forced the Tea Party to look at themselves and try to, you know, reach out.
They still are primarily a white, you know, movement.
And so, you know, they have a lot of work to do on that front.
But I think by highlighting racism and by attacking it, you weaken it.
I think that's, you know, just a positive step in the right direction is to weaken racism.
I think a lot of our wars have racist elements.
You look at the language that soldiers use to, you know, when they're killing people from other countries, it's all, you know, racist labeled type names.
That's what all those words are for, is denying people's humanity.
So it's OK to oppress them or kill them.
Exactly.
Create hate and to dehumanize people.
And so I think there is a lot of racism, you know, in our wars.
And I think that's worth talking about and worth being recognized.
And I think the traditional conservatives would recognize that as well and would speak out against them.
So we have even on that issue, which is a hot button issue, we have we have more areas of agreement than we realize.
I think if we talk about it more, we'll see that.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I'm kind of bitter and I still hold a grudge against all the the red state fascists, as Lew Rockwell called them during the Bush years.
He thought, you know, the only problem with America is that we're not free to torture people enough or whatever.
And I think a lot of this Tea Party movement are people who are just sore losers.
They don't like elections when they don't win them.
And if everything was John McCain and Sarah Palin right now, they would think it was great and that kind of thing.
On the other hand, you know, the Tea Party movement especially is it's about 50 50, according to some of the surveys between the followers of Paul and Palin to, you know, put it roughly speaking.
And I think maybe there's a chance of getting some of those Palinites to, you know, adopt some of the Jacksonians to adopt a more Jeffersonian foreign policy.
Well, if they're honest about Jefferson government spending, the Tea Party will move away from war because that's our biggest deficit cause.
All right, everybody.
America come home dot us.
Thanks, Kevin.
Bye bye.
Kevin Zeese.
Y'all come home.
America dot us.