All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and our next guest on the show is Randall Amster.
He teaches peace studies and chairs the master's program in humanities at Prescott College.
He's the executive director of the Peace and Justice Studies Association and serves as contributing editor for New Clear Vision.
Among his recent books are Lost in Space, the Criminalization, Globalization, and Urban Ecology of Homelessness, and the co-edited volume Building Cultures of Peace, Transdisciplinary Voices of Hope and Action.
Oh, I especially like the sound of that.
Welcome to the show, Randall.
How are you?
Thanks, Scott.
Good.
I'm good.
Glad to be here.
Well, I'm very happy to have you here, and I enjoyed your article today.
I guess I really just brought you on to help me lament what's going on with not really the core of the anti-war movement, but just the sort of anti-war sentiment on the very general liberal left in America at this time with Barack Obama in power.
It's a really good piece.
It's called Looking for Mr. Goodwar?
Consider a Truth Surge Instead.
And I think that's really a good title, too, Looking for Mr. Goodwar.
Everybody really does want somehow to get back to the good old days of 1991 when we beat Vietnam Syndrome, and everybody chanted USA and Yellow Ribbon together, and wasn't it great?
Can't we have another one of those?
Yeah.
You know, war taps into a very basic sensibility, and in some ways, it's not always a bad sensibility.
It's the notion that people do want to believe in something larger than themselves.
They want to be part of something important that has a moral certitude to it, especially in times when it's hard to find any such moral certitude in the world.
So you can certainly understand the psychology of people wanting to sign on to these things.
The problem is that we live in a world of real politics, which does not match up with our heart's desires in any way, shape, or form.
Yeah, well, and that's really the outrageous thing, right, is the incongruence between the narrative and the facts, especially the wars we've had so far in the 21st century.
So, I mean, it's really a tragic historical proportion to consider that, you know, at this point, we've lost any moral high ground in terms of being able to ever use the, you know, the resources at our disposal for any positive purpose.
I mean, it doesn't, you know, it doesn't mean that there's never any case where a genocide or a massacre can be prevented by a show of force of some kind.
The problem is we've so confuted the issue morally that we have no standing to do that at this point, you know, and so we have to be so skeptical anytime those kinds of arguments are made.
Yeah, I mean, always would be.
It's not like even World War II, which is, you know, the benchmark for good war or whatever.
You know, the idea that the Americans joined that war in order to go save the Jews and the gypsies from the Holocaust or something is ridiculous.
If FDR had tried to sell the war that way, they'd have hung him, hanged him.
Right.
I mean, I mean, one like that.
So so I don't know of any example where America intervened in order really to save people.
Do you know?
I mean, we're not other than the English military, you know, or the English empire.
Right.
We'd have to go back a long ways.
No, certainly in the modern era.
And it's especially this doubly high in the modern era because of the ultimate destructiveness of warfare.
You know, we're not fighting with sticks or muskets anymore.
I mean, this is a pretty big ticket affair that we're talking about.
But, you know, it's clear that the rationale we're given for war is never the real one for what's happening.
Right.
We're always given one that's market tested.
And that's, you know, that's unfortunate because people aren't really being given the tools to make a sound judgment, let alone the fact that there is no democratic validation of the decision to go to war, not just by the people, but not even Congress itself anymore.
Whatever checks and balances might might once have existed or pretty much out the window at this point.
So the whole enterprise is so tainted that there really isn't a positive invocation of it left at this point.
There is no more good war if there ever was one.
And I'm pretty skeptical that there ever actually was a good war.
But if there ever was one, there certainly is no no chance of it happening under this context now.
Well, and, you know, you write in the article, we lack a moral compass.
And so principle is subsumed by expediency.
And that's certainly true.
But it seems to me we also lack a reality compass, too, where, you know, there was a piece in The New York Times that was titled something to the effect of the American people don't even care about this Libya war at all.
Really, they're still watching Japan news or whatever.
And yet it's full of quotes of all these people who begin.
I don't know the first thing about it, but I'm glad that we're finally the good guys fighting a good war this time.
And I, sir, I sure support my president and whatever people have.
They have no idea what's going on.
And yet that never dissuades them from being in favor by default of this kind of thing.
Well, it's hard for people to root against the home team, you know, and people want to believe in something, as I said earlier, and especially, you know, in the political landscape.
There are a lot of folks who are so, you know, fatigued coming out of the Bush-Cheney years that when Obama came in, there was this sense of, OK, finally, we have a good guy.
And, you know, maybe the things he does will kind of give him a pass on it because, you know, it can't be as bad as it was before.
And a lot of the very same people who were outraged by George Bush's decision when it came to war suddenly are signing on, you know, with Obama here because he seems to, you know, present the case in a sober light with, you know, better rhetoric and better delivery.
But at the end of the day, it's the same thing.
I mean, the moral compass is the strategic interest compass.
The two things are essentially matching up at this point.
We don't intervene based on morals.
We never have.
We do it for strategic interest.
Sometimes the strategic interest and the moral interest do match each other, but that's the exception, not the rule.
Right.
Well, you know, I interviewed a Pakistani general earlier who he said he'll be the first to say that the people of Afghanistan virtually unanimously were happy to have the Americans come and overthrow the Taliban for a short time.
But then look at what's happened since then.
We stayed, killed tens of thousands of people since then and led to the re-rise of the Taliban that we defeated.
Exactly.
I mean, that's the ultimate irony is that we wind up creating the very thing we were struggling against.
And, you know, it's what I write about in the piece.
There's this illogic towards paradoxical that in trying to win it, we ultimately become the very thing that we're fighting against.
And look what's happened in Afghanistan.
Right.
I mean, for a brief moment in time, we were seen as liberators from this, you know, repressive Taliban regime who we supported, by the way.
So that's not a little fact that we shouldn't just, you know, just omit.
We didn't support them as actively as some others did, but we supported them enough to help keep them in power.
So we come in and we sweep out.
And in short order, the people start realizing that they were just delivered from one dictator to another.
You know, they were delivered from one war zone to another.
And what do they wind up doing?
Migrating back to the Taliban, not because they like them, but because they'd rather fight with their comrades against an imperialist force, even if they don't necessarily like the, you know, the people that they're in league with.
They'd rather make that choice than have an outside power impose its will.
So, I mean, war is just fraught with these kinds of issues.
I'm not sure that we can say we've actually ever really won a war, certainly in the post World War II era.
They all seem to have these murky sorts of outcomes where the seeds of the next conflict are planted by the by the current one that we're in.
Yeah, well, and that goes for the world wars, too.
But, you know, even when they seem to be won, really, I mean, a lot of people say that the world wars themselves was really just one war with a 20 year break in between there, you know, while everybody rearmed and got ready for round two.
And then, of course, straight into the Cold War from there after saving the Soviet Union or helping to, you know.
That's right.
That's right.
I mean, and, you know, you can understand the psychology.
I mean, when you try to defeat something or someone, right, you can't annihilate something altogether.
It's the fallacy of the war on terror that we won't rest until they're all killed or, you know, hunted down.
I mean, it can't happen because you wind up creating more of the very same thing as you're fighting against.
You wind up producing others who are bitter and, you know, hopeless and have the same kind of seeds planted in their minds about launching further attacks.
So when you decimate a country like we did with Germany after World War One and kind of leave them to their own devices to, you know, basically to starve, I mean, what's going to wind up happening?
People do have the capacity to have their nationalistic instincts enflamed by a persuasive ruler, you know, and we're not immune to that either.
I mean, that's one of the other things about this is that we tend to see ourselves as somehow morally and democratically superior, but we're prone to the same kinds of persuasion here.
I mean, we tend to take the rhetoric at face value in many ways.
Yeah, I think there's a lot to be said about the mirror image going on here, a little bit of the power of nightmares kind of thing.
All right, well, we're talking with Randall Amster.
He's got this great piece at Common Dreams.
It's called Looking for Mr. Goodwar?
Consider a truth surge instead, and we'll be right back after this.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Randall Amster.
He's the executive director of the Peace and Justice Studies Association, and he co-edited a volume called Building Cultures of Peace, Transdisciplinary Voices of Hope and Action.
Hopefully, we can talk about that in just a minute here.
Remind me if I forget, Randall, but, you know, and maybe this, you know, leads into that with the whole transition type segue thing, they call it there.
Something you said caught my attention about the Bush and war fatigue of the first decade of the century, how everybody was just so glad to be rid of them, the Bush-Cheney crew, and to have a new guy in there.
And I was just thinking how, you know, I can read a book, and I can read a book, and I can really identify with that.
In fact, and for that matter, with being, you know, I'm almost as enthused that McCain didn't win, because I think, you know, he might have got us in a nuclear war with Russia or something, because he's got the same stupidity and arrogance of George Bush, but he's just such a mean guy.
I think he's a little too off his rocker, a little more crazy than Bush Jr., you know?
I can't trust his judgment whatsoever.
So I'm so glad to not have the Republicans in power.
I'm as happy about it as anyone.
But I don't know why any of us have to be so lazy as to let that transfer into, so the new guy must be great, since he's tall and black and has a D by his name, when the policy is what we all hated about George Bush, right?
He was waging war on the whole world, and we wanted him to stop.
Yeah, I mean, well, without commenting on John McCain, he is a fellow Arizonan, and I'll try to respect the Arizona network in this moment, but it's clear that, you know, that he might have had a worse situation if he were elected, in terms of continuing the policies of the past.
But I mean, why are we still settling for the least worst?
I mean, it's possible that Barack Obama is a fine human being.
I don't know him personally.
People who do, you know, rave about him, and it's entirely possible that that's the case.
For that matter, I mean, who knows what was in George Bush's heart, right?
We can't make those kinds of speculations.
It isn't personal.
It's political.
I mean, we have a system that's dominated by, you know, this kind of corporate feudalistic model, where, you know, you and I, as regular folks, I mean, we're lucky to have voices, you know, on the radio, and that's even small potatoes compared to what's happening at much bigger levels.
Decisions are taken without much regard to what people actually want and need in their lives, you know?
I mean, Obama has done a pretty thorough job of continuing most of the George Bush-era policies economically and in terms of the military.
Could there be worse outcomes?
Yes.
But that's not saving grace.
I mean, if people are saying, well, you know, thank goodness we only have smaller wars or we only escalated in Afghanistan, you know, to me, that's really not a winning strategy here.
We need a much more radical pick in terms of envisioning how we use our resources.
War is such an enormously costly enterprise in terms of its environmental and its political impacts, you know?
It's half of the federal budget every year.
We wind up having to bankrupt ourselves in order to wage it, you know?
We're seeing that happen now with our economy.
We're all footing the bill while we're still waging these wars of adventurism.
It's not a winning strategy.
And the sooner we get over it and figure out ways to rechannel those resources, the better off we're all going to be.
It doesn't really matter what initial you put after a leader's name, you know?
It's not going to change the equation that most of these wars, if not all of them, have this very strong economic and resource impact.
You know, peeling back those layers and getting down to the root of it would be something worthy for all of us to consider.
Yeah, absolutely.
All right.
Yeah, well, and you know, this is what I've always thought was the most important thing since I started on the radio back in 1999.
And that was, or 98, whatever, I guess, end of 98.
And that was this realignment where I think that, you know, the average American people, I don't mean to sound too much like a Marxist or something because I'm not, but it does sort of seem like a class war thing where it's the people who have billions and billions of dollars versus all the rest of us.
And it seems like whether culturally you're a little bit right wing or a little bit left wing or you work for a living or own a business for a living or believe in Christianity or don't or, you know, all these kinds of divisions seem to me so beside the point.
It seems like the good right wing, the good left wing and the average American people can all sort of rally around that libertarian center that, you know, that live and let live thing that we used to say we believed in around here, you know, and by all means, save that money and let let people, you know, spend it how they want.
Or for that matter, you know, I'm willing to like leave that point aside, let the government spend it on building schools or whatever here instead of there.
You know, that's the idea of the libertarian and communitarian impulses, right?
I mean, you have to have both.
If you go too far in one direction or the other, you become oppressive or hard hearted, you know, so we need a balance.
I mean, there is a role for a social infrastructure.
Unfortunately, in addition to having the wars escalate in our midst, we're seeing the erosion of the public infrastructure right now.
I mean, the attempt to take away any opportunities for public education, to privatize health care.
You know, I mean, we're just seeing the erosion of any any meaningful public sphere at the same time as we're seeing the wars escalate, which is draining the economy further.
So we're getting the worst of both worlds.
We're getting either a libertarian or communitarian response to the powers right now.
Yeah, yeah.
It's like, you know, we have John McCain and Joe Lieberman, a liberal Republican, supposedly, and a conservative Democrat.
They are, you know, the the essence of the war party's point of view, basically on every single issue.
And they're considered the moderate center instead of somebody like Ron Paul or Dennis Kucinich, who agree on many things, who are mostly against things, not for a bunch of bad things to happen, you know.
Right.
Now, we certainly have, you know, two parties that are both pro-war, pro-corporate parties, which, you know, begs the question of, you know, where are different interests being represented in the spectrum?
It certainly seems like we have a center right party and a far right party or something along those lines.
There's not much of a viable alternative presenting itself electorally.
But having said that, there's certainly a lot among, you know, a lot of dissent among people themselves, various communities in the demographic sphere.
I mean, there are a lot of folks who are voicing alternatives.
The question is how we pull those energies together to, you know, to make another narrative that moves us away from having our feet on the trigger all the time.
Yeah.
Well, and unfortunately, it really does come down to political leadership, because if, you know, the Tea Party movement wants to make, you know, illegal Mexican immigration or abortion or something their number one issue instead of economics, which they could be made to to make that bad choice pretty quickly.
Well, anyway, you know where I'm getting at, where people focus on the issues that divide us fighting over things that aren't going to be resolved anytime soon anyway, when we really could all presumably, it seems, come to a consensus around the majority poll numbers that say people really want to end these wars, you know?
Yeah.
I mean, at this point, divide and conquer isn't going to get us where we need to go anymore.
You know, these kind of strategies of pitting working class people one against the other, people against each other based on race and ethnicity, it's not going to cut it.
I mean, the problems that we face, whether it's the nuclear meltdown in Japan or the, you know, you know, environmental crisis, ongoing warfare, bankrupt economy.
These are, you know, generationally, you know, huge issues.
We need all hands on deck here.
Dividing people up and having them fight over scraps isn't getting us where we need to go.
I would say, you know, it's kind of a final thought here that or more close to a final thought that for me, peace is one of those concepts.
I mean, I tend to be kind of one of these radical peaceniks, but understanding not everybody shares that view.
I do think it's pretty universally true that most people desire peace in their lives.
We may disagree on the path to get there and what it actually means, but overall, it's something that by and large, most people share, wanting to live their lives and be let alone for the most part.
Have, you know, positive relationships with people in their community, you know, not be in conflict and violent situations.
People desire this.
It's a beginning point of a conversation, and we can move away from the war moment and embrace, you know, possible path to peace, then maybe we're starting to get somewhere in terms of establishing our common interest.
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, hey, that's how they sell the wars, right, is we're bringing you peace.
You know, that's what George Bush, that's what all of them say, is that, you know, we have to do this so that you can have that security that you demand.
We got to get to the realization that this is, you know, the number one threat to our security, to our liberty, is not the people our government is warring against, but the government waging the war itself.
Well, there's a reason why the U.S. has been at war continuously for over 200 years.
You know, I mean, literally, historians have shown that with every, with an exception of maybe two years, two total years out of over 200, we've been at war in one way, shape, or form.
So obviously, it's not working.
You know, if that's the means that we're taking to get to the ends of peace, it's not getting us there.
The means and ends have to agree.
If you want peace, you have to act peacefully.
Yeah, well, you know, they never should have created the Constitution.
I'm for going back to the Articles of Confederation, because once you give the Congress and the President the quote-unquote legitimate authority to conspire to get us into a war, then that's exactly what you get, just like you said.
Now, they don't even have to conspire together.
Now, the President can do it all himself.
They've come a long way.
Yeah, well, hey, Scott, thanks for having me on the program.
I really appreciate it.
I really appreciate you joining us, everybody.
That's Randall Amster.
He's the Executive Director of the Peace and Justice Studies Association and teaches peace studies and chairs the Master's Program in Humanities at Prescott College.
The Peace at Common Dreams is looking for Mr. Goodwar.
Consider a truth surge instead.
Thanks again.
We'll see y'all tomorrow.
