All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I'm the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and the brand new Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism, and I've recorded more than 5,500 interviews since 2003, almost all on foreign policy, and all available for you at scotthorton.org.
You can sign up for the podcast feed there, and the full interview archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthortonshow.
All right, you guys, introducing Russell Ray, and he's from Elworth, Maine, and I got a friend of mine sent me a picture.
I guess he was there visiting, and he met Russell with his sign, where he's been standing every Sunday since 2002 in the run-up to Iraq War II.
This time his sign says, Defund the Pentagon, and my friend was telling me he had a really good conversation and recommended an interview, so I decided to go for it.
So welcome to the show, Russell.
How are you doing, sir?
Thank you very much, Scott.
I'm doing fine, thanks.
Happy to have you here.
So you've been standing out there protesting ever since 2002.
Were you always an anti-war activist before that?
Well, I have been, yeah.
I mean, going back to my time in high school when I became aware of what war was about somewhat, and this was back during the conscription lottery, and the Vietnam War was still going on, and I had a very low number, and I had applied for conscientious objector status and was rejected, and a few months after I was rejected, the conscription lottery ended, but I never intended on going.
So I'm not sure exactly where that came from.
I think it had a lot to do with just the feelings, the mood at the time.
People were really, the anti-war movement was alive and well at that time, and I had no intention of going.
And so that would have been, what, in the early 70s?
I was in 73, yeah.
And then, luckily, that war finally ended a couple years later, a year or so later there.
And then, so in 2002, I imagine you weren't standing alone out there.
You must have had some friends, and I know all across this country, and including in Austin where I'm from, there are people of all kinds of political descriptions who were coming together to try to oppose that war.
That's right, yeah.
In Ellsworth, we actually, which is not a big town, we had some really good turnouts for some of our vigils and protests, and those were more on particularly national protest days.
But otherwise, we had our ongoing weekly vigil, and at that time, yeah, I wasn't alone.
There was other people there with me.
Yeah, and I mean, I went to the big ones myself, otherwise, I haven't always been very big on the street protesting stuff.
But there were, I don't know when this stopped, but there were in Austin, the women in black would stand out there, and they were essentially like Code Pink-type ladies, and that lasted at least through the Bush years.
I don't know if they kept it up into Obama or not.
Yeah.
Well, unfortunately, I think the Obama years really, things, he was perfect for the powers that be in terms of kind of making people feel like things were going to be okay, and they weren't.
So I kept my protests going through the Obama years.
Yeah, well, that's very good to hear.
He certainly kept the wars going through his years, so.
Oh, he did.
Yeah, and it's just on every facet of American life now, everything is so politicized, and then on top of that, you know, ultra-partisan, where if conservatives start to get good on war, liberals start wondering whether maybe they should get worse on it, rather than agree with people that they hate on anything, even if it's people that they hate actually getting good on something after too long, you know?
Right.
Right.
It is strange times.
Difficult times right now.
Yeah, it sure is.
All right, so now, defund the Pentagon.
I see in the picture here that my friend took, that's a pretty new-looking sign.
Do you change the slogan on the sign very often?
That's, I mean, the sign I had before that just said, bring all the troops home now, or something like that.
That was after, during the height of the Black Lives Matter movement, when that whole defund the police, you know, was big, and people understood the meaning of it, or at least some people, many people understood what that was getting at, I thought, well, why not defund the Pentagon?
And it seemed like the time was right, and, you know, people might understand the connection there.
So that's when I made the sign.
Yeah.
You know, so you've got a few years on me, but I was born right after the Vietnam War, and I was raised in the shadow of it, and there certainly was the residual culture on the left of, you know, fear of and distaste for the CIA and the military and military-associated industries and that kind of thing.
That was, you know, the Vietnam syndrome, as the critics called it, you know, really had made an impression on them and lasted for a very long time.
But I think maybe people just, you know, it was in the movies too, right?
Hamburger Hill and Platoon and Jacob's Ladder, and there are quite a few more, right?
Like all the Vietnam War movies, and even like the Stephen King movies, Firestarter was about this secret evil government agency that experimented on this little girl and gave her these powers.
You know what I mean?
It was all kind of felt that way.
But I think maybe a lot of that culture is missing, you know, it kind of wore off, even after Iraq should have invigorated it more, but kind of didn't.
It did invigorate it more, and yeah, I agree, it should have.
It's really interesting how, I think, well, I personally think Obama had a lot to do with really fracturing the peace movement and the anti-war movement, you know, really kind of put it to sleep to a large extent.
And it's not just Obama, of course.
The U.S. military got smart and ended the draft, and, you know, now it's, of course, some say there's now an economic draft, and there's a lot to be said for that, you know.
But that helped a lot to put people back to sleep.
I see when I'm standing out there on the bridge, I see all kinds of young people go by with no reaction.
It's like, it doesn't affect them, these wars, or at least they, I mean, it does affect it.
It affects everybody.
It affects all of life on this planet, but it doesn't, they don't feel like it affects them personally, I guess.
Yeah.
You know, one time in L.A., I was sitting in my truck, and I had an anti-war.com sticker on the back window, and a guy walked by, and I just heard him scoff to himself.
I don't think he was necessarily trying to be overheard by me.
You know, he was just kind of saying to himself, anti-war?
He just couldn't even get his head around the idea at all that why would anybody begin to bother about something like that?
Who cares at all?
You know?
It just seemed so alien to him.
Anti-war?
That's like pro-quilting on a bumper sticker or something.
It just seemed like a completely ridiculous thing to have on a bumper sticker.
Maybe more ridiculous than pro-quilting.
I don't know.
There's nothing wrong with quilting.
Yeah.
That's...
You know what I mean, though?
It just, it seemed completely bananas to him.
Like, what are you even talking about?
Yeah.
Well, it's, I'll tell you, we've heard a lot of, a lot of very strange comments coming from people driving by us on the bridge.
And, you know, some people just, I mean, we've been called communists and go back home and everything.
It's, they don't, people don't, I don't think they get it, and I'm not sure why.
Well, certainly the people driving by don't, but do you have any good stories of meeting people and talking to them and changing some minds?
You know, it's, it's interesting.
I had a young guy approach me on the bridge, this was a number of years back, and he asked me what I was doing.
He was a little bit, you know, he was slightly, what's the word, he was, he was clearly, he was angry and a little bit ruffled, but I talked to him for a while and he ended up coming back a few weeks later.
And I was a little bit shocked when he told me that he had enlisted.
So he was going off to the wars and, or I, I don't know if he was going off to the wars, but he had enlisted in the military and he may have gone off to the wars.
So that was a little surprising to me because I was trying to, you know, when I was talking to him, I was trying to get him to understand that US wars have not, they're not, they really have almost nothing to do with defending Americans anymore.
And how much damage they do to people and the environment.
And it just, it didn't, he wouldn't accept it, I guess.
So that was, that was a little surprising to me that he ended up doing that.
Yeah, that's disappointing.
Yeah.
I'd like, I'd love to know where he is now and what, you know, how he's doing and what he, what he thought, what he ended up thinking of his time in the military.
Yeah.
Well, I hope it didn't go too bad for him, but I know that, uh, in my experience, it seems like, you know, the idea of joining the military and being in the army and all that, it almost has nothing whatsoever to do with what is America's foreign policy right now, who is the president right now, or is he, and are his men making good decisions right now or not?
But it's more about like, well, my uncle was in the military.
And so, you know what I mean?
Or just, I need a job or it's the college.
I know a lot of, I've heard a lot of army guys just say, Hey, it's just a job.
Like people say, Oh, thank you for your service.
It's just a job.
Uh-huh.
Um, so it doesn't matter which country we're invading.
You know what I mean?
Doesn't matter.
That's just, it's a whole separate issue.
And I think a lot of them just, just kind of, I mean, certainly, certainly the, many of the people I think who enlisted after nine 11 did, you know, they've, they just think it's the patriotic thing to do.
And I think a lot of them actually honestly believe that they're, they're doing the right thing and they're defending the country, but I think there's, they're very badly misinformed.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, Ed told me that you brought up, uh, and I saw actually that you have this group, the citizens opposing, uh, active sonar threats, and this is something I heard about the first time a long time ago.
And I very rarely hear about it, but I guess first time I heard about it was probably 20, 25 years ago in the nineties, about new, more powerful sonar on submarines, creating major problems for sea life and causing whales and dolphins to be beached and all this kind of thing.
So I was wondering if you could tell us about your group and any progress you made there.
Um, well, I actually didn't know anything about it until 2000, the year 2000.
And, um, I had, uh, I I'm an artist and, uh, um, that's what I do, um, when I'm not doing my activism, I, and at the time I was running a gallery, I had a woman stop in and a lot of my artwork, um, involved, you know, I've, I've done a lot of work that is about whales and dolphins.
Cause I just grew up loving them.
Um, and I was lucky because this woman happened to be, um, somebody by the name of Marsha green, who runs the ocean mammal Institute, and she has filed a number of lawsuits against the Navy and for their sonar use.
And she told me about it.
And at the time she was organizing a conference on the sonar, um, right in the, in college of the Atlantic, which is very close to where I live.
And she invited me to go.
So I went to the college, I went to the conference, learned a lot.
And shortly right afterwards, I said, I got to do something about this.
And I, I started, uh, citizens opposing after sonar threats.
Um, and, um, you know, being a, being an artist, I'm, I'm not a sign.
I'm not from a scientific background or anything.
And sonar is very technologically oriented.
I'm I'm not so, but basically, as I've said in some of my comments on Navy sonar projects, um, you don't have to be a rocket scientist to understand when you're blasting this extremely loud noise into the oceans, it's going to impact the, the creatures that live there.
And, um, and it's, it's having, you know, it's, it's really having a serious impact.
Um, unfortunately, because these animals are at sea and many of the Navy exercises are, you know, far from our shores, we don't see the impacts very often.
Sometimes we do see them, but most of the impacts we never, we never see.
And we, we really don't know.
Um, but I believe there's a lot of dead, uh, animals on the bottom of the ocean that people never know about, never seen.
And, um, I think it's having very serious and not, and this is not just affecting whales and dolphins.
Um, it's, it affects fish and some, some types of fish and other sea life.
Um, you know, you're blasting this extremely loud, um, uh, sound energy through the, through the water and water is a, is a great conductor of that noise, especially the low frequency sonar, which can travel for very great distances for literally for thousands of miles.
Um, and it's, um, it's affecting a lot of creatures in the, in the oceans.
One of the reasons that I, I decided to focus in on this, on that, on that particular issue of Navy sonar was because it's so beautifully combined.
My love of whales and dolphins in the oceans and nature, um, with my strong feelings against war making.
Yeah.
Hold on just one second.
Be right back.
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Well, and I would just like to point out, you know, for their audience sake too, that conservation is not just a partisan issue and not all environmental concerns are global warming laws and taxes being inflicted or whatever.
And, uh, we may need submarines if we need a standing army at all.
Maybe we need a couple of good submarines as Ron Paul said, but there's got to be a way to do it where we're not waging war against the basic ecosystems of the planet that we all are going to need to survive for the longterm.
So.
Absolutely.
Um, you know, one of the things that various organizations that have been working on this issue have been trying to get the U.S. Navy to do, and some other foreign navies are actually much more reasonable than the U.S. Navy when it comes to attempting to protect marine life.
But the U.S. Navy, like they insist they have to train, even if it's just for practice or training, they have to do it.
They have to have the sonar at full, full blast and they don't want to ramp up the sonar.
In other words, started at a low level and slowly raised the level to give marine mammals and other life that's near time to, you know, try to move away from the sound.
Um, they, they just refuse most reasonable, uh, mitigation measures that could really lessen the, uh, impacts on, on ocean life.
So it's, I think the U.S. Navy is incredibly arrogant in its approach to, you know, to using this sonar, which they know is harmful and they, they just won't take reasonable measures.
And now, is there anybody in Congress who cares about this, makes much of a big deal about it or any kind of real movement to stop them?
You know, um, there have been Congress people in the past who've expressed concern, certainly, but not, there hasn't been any real reining in, I mean, the reining in of the Navy, whatever little has occurred has been through court action.
It's not through legislative action.
And, um, uh, and usually in many cases, the Navy just, you know, appeals, they'll, they they'll, if they lose the case, they'll appeal and they'll say, Hey, we need this for national security and that's it.
I mean, it went one case when, during the Bush years, went up to the Supreme court and that was about a sonar, uh, sonar, um, training off of, off of California.
And it went up to the Supreme court and, and, uh, they ruled in favor of the Navy, um, because then, because the Navy screamed, Hey, we need it for, uh, national security.
And that was it.
Yeah.
The courts will always defer to the executive branch on stuff like that.
Unfortunately.
Yeah.
So, um, so really it's, it is ongoing.
Um, I think we don't really know the full extent of the harm that's been done by it, but I believe it's, it's large.
I mean, we do know that there's been numerous whale strandings, um, following, uh, Navy sonar exercises where injuries are consistent with, uh, a couple of different types of injuries are consistent with, uh, acoustic impacts.
And, you know, there's no doubt that it is causing problems.
Um, one of the problems is that, you know, other countries don't necessarily, uh, don't necessarily have protocols in place to find all the whales.
I mean, there are remote stretches of beach where whales can wash up, uh, where there won't be found until it's too late.
They're just, uh, you know, they're rotting on the beach.
And at that point, you can't really do a necropsy that's going to be successful, successfully able to find out what, what may have caused the death.
Um, so anyways, it's, it's, I think it's a big problem right now.
You know, what I've been working on mostly, um, aside from my anti-war work is, um, I live in Maine and as you mentioned, and, um, there's, we have a whale here that, um, migrates up and down the East coast.
It's called the North Atlantic right whale.
And it's one of the most critically endangered of all the whale species.
There's only, um, there's only 336 estimated to be still alive.
And these are incredible creatures.
They're, they're, you know, they get up to like over 50 feet long.
They're massive.
They're, they're just amazing.
And they keep getting entangled in fishing gear and, um, and struck by ships.
And the reason I brought this up was because, um, there is a Navy sonar base, sonar range.
It's a, uh, a range that was, it's called the, uh, undersea warfare training range.
And it's off the, uh, it's about 50 miles off the shore between, um, Florida and Georgia, and this, even though the Navy was very much aware of the fact that this is the area where the right whales go to have their calving ground, it's their calving grounds, their only known calving grounds.
And they were told that they know they were very much aware of it, but, um, they insisted it's got to be there.
And we took them to court on it.
I was part of a lawsuit on that and, um, we lost the lawsuit.
We appealed it.
We lost the appeal, even though the, um, the law was clearly on our side.
I mean, for a number of reasons, but, but again, you're fighting the Navy and it was, um, you know, the, the, the courts just, uh, it just wouldn't have it.
So they, so we lost that case, but why I brought this up is because here's this sonar range right next to the calving grounds of the, of this critically endangered whale and this whale.
One of the big problems is they're, they're because of all the stress they're under, they're having, they're calving less frequently than they used to like females used to in their, in their, um, in their years of their reproductive years, they would sometimes give birth like every three years, but now it's, now it's much slower than that.
It's like more like once every eight or nine or 10 years.
And they're, they're very stressed out from various things.
One of which is entanglements, but I'm wondering, and I'm sure I'm not alone in how much that sonar range, which this range is, is, um, they're engaging in these sonar exercises, uh, what was the figure I'm really bad at remembering figures, but it was like, you know, more than ever, more than once a day.
Um, and you blasting the sonar and it's like 50 miles or it's, it's, I mean, the whales don't have, uh, you know, they don't say this inside this circle is our calving grounds.
They'll give birth in and around that area.
And some, and they have photographed a whale giving birth.
I think it was just outside of that area of the, uh, the defined location of this particular range sonar range.
So, um, how much is that, is that sonar noise, um, impacting these critically endangered whales ability to give, give birth and to raise and to bring up their young, you know, because they, after they give birth, they, they stay down there for a while and nurture, to nurture the newborn calves.
So what's all this sonar noise doing to them?
Right.
Well, and the thing is too, like, let's say that your take on it is overblown.
The reality is there's no accountability and the Navy can just do whatever they want.
And so it's clear that regardless of how bad this is for the whales, they're going to do whatever they want.
And as you say, what can you do?
Sue them?
The courts won't intervene.
And so it's going to take, you know, some kind of popular pressure that makes it, you know, an important issue for politicians to get on board with and that kind of thing.
And speaking of which, I wonder if, uh, you're familiar with the journalist Darja Mayo?
Yes.
I know.
I don't know him, but I, yes, I know of him.
Yes.
So my understanding is that, uh, he's an old friend of mine from the Iraq war two days where he did great reporting there.
Um, and I know that this is his beat is, you know, militarism and environmentalism where they intersect there.
And I, I I'm under the impression.
I, I think I'm right that he's making a documentary now with Abby Martin about this.
And I wonder if you're in contact with them or if your group is in contact with them.
No, I haven't been.
And I, I don't think I knew that.
Are you saying he's making a film about, about, um, sonar in particular?
Uh, no, about militarism and environmentalism.
So I'm sure this will be part of it.
I know that DAR has written about this in the past, but there, you know, this is going to tackle all different kinds of pollution and all their fossil fuel use and all the rest of that, I'm sure.
Right.
But just, yeah, I was thinking, you know, you should make sure that your group is in contact with them and you put your best scientist forward or whatever to, to be interviewed and that kind of thing, if you can.
Well, like I said, I'm, you know, we don't, my group is a very small group and actually recently, you know, honesty, it's, it's been me alone, but, um, and I'm not a scientist, but there are, there are other groups that are working on this that, um, that have really very knowledgeable people who understand the sonar technically, et cetera.
Yeah.
Well, you need to get your recruitment up.
I'm going to talk though.
Um, but yeah, I'll tell you, um, I mean, I, I, you did mention though earlier about, uh, the expert opinion of, of some specialist lady, didn't you?
Uh, Marsha Green, are you talking about?
Yeah, I think so.
The woman who, who told me about, uh, the sonar.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
So yeah, I will, I will let her know.
Yeah.
Okay, cool.
Just want to make sure that they got all the best people to, uh, to represent the case there when they, when they put their thing out.
I know they're doing some fundraising for it and that kind of thing.
Mm-hmm.
And, and, you know, environmentalism in general and all its little parts have all been, uh, very much politicized too.
Um, between left and right, but you know, conservation is the old term for environmentalism and it was the kind of word that conservatives could agree with.
Yeah.
Conservation.
That's the kind of thing that hunters are into, you know, that's environmentalism for Marlboro men.
It's okay to be against environmental devastation.
Doesn't make you a commie or a hippie to be worried about the Navy killing whales unnecessarily.
Uh, or, or any of these things.
So, um, you know, despite all the hype about global warming one way or the other, uh, there are a lot of issues here that people of all persuasions ought to be able to agree on, you know?
I agree.
Yeah.
Absolutely.
All right.
Well, listen, I really appreciate you coming on the show.
It's been a very interesting and I wish you the best of luck up there getting people's heads straight.
Well, thank you, Scott.
I appreciate it.
And I really appreciate you inviting me on.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, have a great day.
Okay.
You too.
Thanks.
Aren't you guys, that is Russell Ray in Ellsworth, Maine.
And, uh, you'll find him out there protesting every Sunday against the war.
And, uh, he is the director of citizens opposing active sonar threats as well.
The Scott Horton show and anti-war radio can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA.
APS radio.com antiwar.com scotthorton.org and libertarianinstitute.org.
