All right, Sean, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
Our first guest on the show today is John V. Walsh.
He writes for Counterpunch and for Antiwar.com, teaches microbiology and physiological systems and all kinds of complicated stuff like that at the University of Massachusetts.
Welcome back to the show.
John, how's it going?
Nice to talk to you, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing good.
And I'm sorry, because I'm just looking at the web address, umassmed.edu.
So that's the University of Massachusetts, right?
That's right.
OK, I want to make sure I got that right.
Wow, it looks like a complicated home page you got here.
I won't ask you about all that.
I wouldn't even know what to ask.
It's my day job, so we won't talk about it.
Yeah, there you go.
But I just heard the news on the children's names who were killed in Tucson, or one who was killed, I guess, anyway.
Yeah.
But I think that that, you know, the recent piece I had on antiwar.com, I think bears on that.
Yeah, Sarah Palin's crosshairs and Obama's.
And Obama's.
And for those who haven't seen it, and maybe that's most, I happen to be watching a pretty good documentary on Swedish TV.
It's in English, but it's on YouTube.
And it was a documentary on WikiLeaks.
And at the beginning of that, they showed the helicopter gunship, the famous helicopter gunship, gunning down the Reuters reporters.
The collateral murder video.
Collateral murder video.
That was one of the videos they showed.
And it struck me, although that was in Iraq, and those were operating at Bush's orders, the same thing is happening right now at Obama's orders.
And so those are real crosshairs.
And for the president, then, to go out and bemoan, or for people to attack Sarah Palin for her cartoon crosshairs, when there are real crosshairs focused on real people covered very little by the media, it struck me the height of hypocrisy, and actually absurdity.
And lots of the mainstream media have latched onto that and won't let it go.
And I'm neutral on gun control, but I think it's pretty clear that that's one of the things they're pushing.
And even if you go back to the old Michael Moore movie, what was it, Bowling for Columbine?
He came to the conclusion, this is Michael Moore, that guns were not the problem.
Per capita gun ownership in Canada was pretty much the same as it is here.
The problem is the culture, he said.
Maybe that culture comes from a culture of empire.
After all, this fellow who did the shooting was about to enroll in the military.
So the whole take on it, and the little kids who were wounded or killed, I don't know what.
We won't know what in that video, collateral murder.
We don't know what happened to them.
Nobody cares.
They're anonymous, just like so many war dead are anonymous.
As a matter of fact, just like the American war dead are pretty anonymous.
Yeah.
Well, it really is amazing how the doublethink works on this.
Because another part of Bowling for Columbine is he talks about how the day of the Columbine massacre was the single bloodiest day of Bill Clinton's air war against Serbia for the independence of Kosovo.
Oh my god.
And he actually interviewed somebody at, I forget if it's Loral or Lockheed or something, because there are a lot of defense, so-called defense contractors there in the Denver area.
And he went and apparently, like a lot of those kids at Columbine High School, their dads work at the missile manufacturer down the road and that kind of thing.
And Michael Moore went and asked one of the vice presidents or something at one of these companies.
They're standing there in front of this giant missile that's on display at the company there.
And he's saying, well, what about all the violence that you guys are about?
Isn't it a little bit ironic that you have all this violence at this school and it's horrible, and yet that's what this whole community is really based around, is mass violence?
And the guy simply says, yeah, but that's defending America.
That's totally different.
And really no different from my understanding as like a seven or a nine-year-old kid or something, John, that killing people is wrong.
Even God does not allow killing people.
But if you're wearing green and you're doing it for your country, then it's just fine.
It doesn't matter who the people are on the receiving end whatsoever.
Even Walter Jones, who's now a really good anti-war Republican, came on the show last week to condemn the wars.
No word from him, not one word about the lives of the innocent people on the other end of our war machine.
Only the American soldier's lives have any meaning for Walter Jones.
No matter how good he is on the war, it can never be about the people on the receiving end.
And it really is just amazing how you can have Barack Obama, who we all know for a fact, with no exceptions, every single one of us knows, that this guy kills people every day.
And then he can go and give this speech and cry all these crocodile tears about, oh my god, an employee of the state was on the receiving end of some violence one day.
And according to all the polls and TV and the newspapers and whatever, they're saying this is really done good for him and given him a good bump in the polls.
And he needs to exploit this tragedy the way Bill Clinton did the Oklahoma City bombing, a Democratic strategist told the Politico.
And apparently it's working.
In fact, I'll say one more thing before I turn it back over to you, John.
I only heard a small bit of Obama's speech in Arizona.
And the small bit I heard, all I heard from him was blah, blah, blah, whatever.
But what was interesting to me was the audience.
They were whooping and cheering and whistling and celebrating and clapping and acting like it was a campaign appearance.
Oh my god, there he is in real life, like he's a TV star or whatever.
And here he is trying to eulogize the dead and exploit this tragedy.
And they're sitting there literally like whistling and yelling woo and things at him.
Well, actually, I would also say that in the anti-war sentiment that we see on the left and the right, I have been impressed by the fact that there is much, if I read antiwar.com or the Future Freedom Foundation or Lou Rockwell, there is much more concern about the loss of human life in war than I see very often on the left, I'm sad to say.
Because very often, the left is talking about the cost of the war and how we could have more if only we weren't killing people over there.
But that's true.
We're a pretty wealthy country to begin with.
That's true.
But it certainly is not as important, though it may be, as the loss of innocent life, the loss of life in general.
Probably a million in Iraq alone.
Certainly hundreds of thousands.
There's no question about it.
And people displaced by the millions.
Four million in Iraq alone.
Who knows what else is going on?
So there has to be some morality and concern for life attached to this.
And it's kind of outside the discourse of the mainstream media.
And it really almost has to be, if we're going to continue waging war, because too much attention on that is going to disturb the average person.
And so it's almost that we've fallen into a culture of irreverence for human life.
It almost follows from having an empire.
And that's very sad.
It's of our own doing.
In the Boston area, there's a syndicated NPR program called On Point.
And it's a talk show.
And the host, Tom Ashcroft, has been all over the story and the concern about guns and the congresswoman's life.
Yes, all that is terrible.
But it took him, I think, until something like 2006 before he ever had on his program anybody who was against the war.
He had experts that were for it in various ways, but not until well after there was a majority against the war did you ever hear one voice.
And you rarely hear it anymore.
All right, I'm sorry.
We've got to hold it right there and go out to this break.
When we get back, we'll talk about making things better somehow, if we can.
It's John V. Walsh from Counterpunch and Antiwar.com.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
Talking with John V. Walsh from Counterpunch and Antiwar.com about the permanent crisis and, I guess, the partisanship that is at the root of why we can't seem to get anything about it done.
I mean, you think back, John, to the anti-war, anti-Bush rhetoric of the last decade.
And it wasn't just that, well, jeez, we don't like this guy because he pretends to be a hick, even though he's from Connecticut, and we want power, not him.
The criticism was that he's tapping our phones, he's murdering people, he tells lies all day, he's spending way too much money, and breaking the dollar, and real criticisms.
And yet, when Barack Obama does all of these exact same things, including killing kids, like, I don't know, right this minute, oh, no, we still love him.
We whoop, and cheer, and whistle, just like the idiots who love George Bush.
Yes, well, actually, that brings me to another thing I wanted to mention while I was here.
And that is, one of the guarantees to make sure that this does not become a partisan issue, that backing Obama, or backing Bush, or whatever, doesn't take precedence over opposing war, is to have, as antiwar.com has been pushing for a long time, to have a right-left coalition against war.
And I just wanted to mention, I don't know whether you've had this on yet or not, but you know that a year ago, there was the conference in Washington, DC.
There were about 40 of us, people who write, and talk, and do some organizing with respect to war, to oppose war.
And we came from left and right.
And there is now a book out called Come Home America.
And it's a book of essays by the people who participated from the right and from the left.
I have a piece in there.
Justin Raimondo has a piece in there.
Ralph Nader has a piece in there.
The editor of The Nation, who was not as enthusiastic as the people on the right about this project, but nevertheless, she came.
And the editor of The American Conservative, and so on, and so on.
Is David Beto's piece in there?
I'm not sure.
I don't recall.
I don't recall.
I need to get a copy of that book soon.
But it is available.
And if people want to get it, you can find it.
Well, you can find it on Amazon.
But I would recommend that you buy it from another source.
Right.
Agreed.
But if you write the title, it's a little tricky to get the title.
It's Come Home America, all one word.
Or if you write it in three words, it's comehomeamerica.us.
And there are the rationales and the ideas of people who want to do this.
And I think it's right on.
There are people who blame Bush.
And I would say that's the anti-war people who blame Bush and cannot bring themselves to utter a word against Obama.
Or if they do, it is so gentle and so muted and so in the vein of, well, he really means, well, he just can't do anything about it, which is baloney.
He has the power to stop the conflict at once, just like Dwight Eisenhower had the power to stop the Korean War and was elected to do that and did it.
So you can't say that you can't, which, by the way, was the first undeclared war.
And you can't say that it's impossible.
It is quite possible.
As a matter of fact, that was the reason that a lot of people, not myself, because I never believed it, went out and worked for Obama because they thought they would get peace.
You know, it's like the old cartoon, this old cartoon of Richard Nixon as a magician.
And he's reaching into a hat, and he's pulling out, and he says, and now, his hand is raised, he says, we have a dove.
And in his hand is this hawk.
It's vicious.
Well, you know, everyone points out Nixon actually got elected on the lie that he had a secret plan to end the war in Vietnam.
That was how he got it, was pretending to be Eisenhower, his former president that he was vice president for.
But to Nixon's credit, he did Engineer Detente, which made us a little safer.
And he did the opening to China, which got rid of some friction there.
So I don't know what we're seeing under Bush and Obama.
All we're seeing is more friction, more conflict.
And it's now leading us into a situation which I think, we are turning a corner here, I think, where it could be very dangerous.
And that's the other thing I just wanted to mention briefly, is the president of China, Hu Jintao, comes to Washington Wednesday.
And I think the United States is creating a very dangerous situation.
And the situation is this, that we have proclaimed since the end of the Cold War, since Clinton time, actually, that our military will be so powerful that no other nation in the world will be allowed to challenge it, not even come close.
Right.
Well, you have to consider what that means.
For example, our gross domestic product now is $15 trillion.
China's is about $5 trillion.
They're number two.
And wealth is what leads to military power.
Once you have wealth, I mean, we've known that since Thucydides.
Once you have wealth, you can have a grand military.
And so let's consider, if China was to have a GDP like ours, what would that mean per capita in China?
It would mean, even if they came up to our GDP, it would only give the people there an annual income on average of $10,000.
That's not first world standards.
That's not good enough if people want to have a decent life.
But if they came up to our GDP, then they would pose a military threat.
So what is the United States saying?
They're saying, we won't let you develop.
We won't let you get out of poverty.
That's our policy.
Right.
Well, and it was Eisenhower who was in charge when people were proposing a preemptive war on China to prevent them from getting atomic weapons.
And he said, hell no, I won't do it.
But it seems like the people in charge now would be willing.
So we're really, yes.
Push issues like that.
A collapsing empire, it'll always lash out in the worst way at the end of the way down there.
And China is the obvious target.
We can hear more and more talk like that from the right.
But I wanted to work one thing in here before the end, which is about the comehomeamerica.us project, this book, and the website, and the thing.
The push for the realignment, as all this stuff gets more and more horrible and more and more absurd, and as the parties switch back and forth in power and people see the policies not changing, more and more people are waking up and becoming counterpunchers and antiwar.com types, and seeing through the partisanship and the left right ideology.
And there is this movement, which I guess it really is certainly, as far as I know, the best thing we have going for us, which is comehomeamerica.us and this push for the realignment.
So I want to thank you for your part in that.
Sorry, I guess we're out of time now.
But there's a lot of great stuff in here.
I hope people check it out.
And also check out John Walsh's work at counterpunch and at antiwar.com.
Thanks very much, John.
OK, thank you.
All right, bye.
