11/10/08 – Woody Powell – The Scott Horton Show

Introducing our next guest, it's Woody Powell.
He is the former Executive Director of Veterans for Peace.
Welcome to the show, Woody.
Thank you.
Thank you for having me on.
Well, I'm very happy to have you on the show today, and let's celebrate Armistice Day.
It's most commonly known as Veterans Day, where I guess we all stand around and celebrate wars.
But originally, November 11th is the celebration of the end of a war, the end of World War I.
That's right.
That's right.
And it was an especially bloody war.
There were millions of soldiers killed.
And what was interesting was that it was mostly soldiers killed in that war, and it so horrified the world that they figured that this was going to be the war to end all wars.
Right, that's what they called it.
Of course, it was just a set-up for World War II, which started very shortly thereafter, within 20-some-odd years.
And do you know how many millions of people died in that war?
I guess American casualties in World War I were a couple of hundred thousand, right?
And I think it was over two-and-a-half million, and I was looking around for a figure, and I can't remember what it was, but it was an horrific figure, considering it was all just soldiers.
We've killed a heck of a lot more civilians since then in wars.
Right, yeah, World War II, the casualties were in the tens of millions, right?
That's right.
That's right.
Fifty, sixty million, I guess, was the last I read.
Right.
In Korea, there were about two-and-a-half million.
Vietnam's a very similar number, and yet we keep on celebrating wars, and the machines that make the wars.
I was in a parade on Saturday, a small number of us veterans for peace marching behind a tank.
It's a strange juxtaposition, but it was interesting to me that our message was that it was very well-received by the audience along the sides of the parade.
We got the applause, not the tank.
Yeah.
Well, you know, it's interesting.
In the run-up to the war, if anyone was allowed to say anything critical at all, they had to burnish all their military credentials first.
The rest of us could just forget about it.
I remember Charlie Reese, the great writer, started calling himself Former Tank Gunner Charlie Reese, just to mock them, you know, of course.
Well, you know, that didn't prevent people from calling me a traitor and a wuss and some pretty nasty words that I'm not going to say on your radio.
Well, you're welcome to, but I appreciate it.
Have you fought in any wars?
Are you a veteran from peacetime?
No, I'm a veteran of the Korean War.
A veteran of the Korean War.
I enlisted in 1950.
Can you tell us about your experience there, what you learned while you were there?
Were you a committed peacenik by the time you got home?
Pretty much.
Pretty much.
I was a child of World War II.
I was nine years old when World War II started, and so I was brought up on all the jingoism, all the rah-rah-rah stuff about that.
And so I was bitterly disappointed when World War II was over, and I was only fifteen.
But in 1950, I graduated from high school.
I turned eighteen on June 24, 1950, and on June 25, 1950, the Korean War started, and I figured that was the one that was made for me.
I had bought into this whole idea that in order to become a man, you practically had to have a military experience.
I tried to enlist in the Marines and all that, but they wouldn't take me because of a football injury.
But I did manage to get into the Air Force and wound up in Korea in a canine unit doing night patrols with a dog, just being sniped at and just being immersed in the total degradation of that war.
Seeing landscapes that were completely blasted free of trees, women, mothers and daughters selling themselves as prostitutes by the hundreds to GIs just to make a buck, just to feed themselves and so forth.
I saw hundreds of children that were orphaned and just wandering around the countryside living like animals.
So at one point, I encountered a couple of Korean farmers, a farming couple, an old woman and an old lady who were taking in these children, and it really affected me.
Up until then, I'd been subjected to a lot of sniper fire from people that were supposed to be on our side but weren't.
I had developed a pretty bitter and cynical attitude toward the Koreans generally, and I was getting pretty violent in my response to that.
But then when I encountered that couple and what they were doing for those kids with absolutely nothing, it turned me around and I got involved in generating support for that and it was a good story.
We did it all with clothing.
My brother was an assistant manager in a movie house back in Berkeley, California.
I wrote a letter that appeared in the Berkeley Gazette about the orphaned children and he had the idea of having a Saturday matinee and the price of admission would be clothing for the children because that's what I was appealing for.
One day, I got called by my commanding officer down to the headquarters in the APO office and this tiny little APO office was completely overflowing with boxes of clothing.
So we hauled it on out to the orphanage and started opening it up and we were very dismayed to find that a lot of the clothing was adult clothing.
There were furs in there and shoes and hats and things belonging to adults.
We didn't realize it but it was really a treasure.
One of the kids there was very enterprising and he got us to go into town and on the black market we exchanged a lot of that clothing for building materials and food for the kids.
So it was a real bonanza and we got that orphanage started off in good shape.
The orphanage was necessary because of that war.
I'm interested in the view of the soldiers at the time.
Did you guys know that you were backing the government that was basically the Vichy government of the Japanese imperialists when they occupied Korea?
No, we didn't have a clue.
We just thought we were fighting some bad guys that were invading some good guys and when we got there we found we couldn't tell the difference between good guys and bad guys.
And not because of the way they looked but because the good guys were shooting at you.
Exactly.
And it's very similar to the situation that the troops are encountering in Iraq and Afghanistan now.
It's interesting too because when you talked about that, that may have been the first reference I got admitted.
It is the forgotten war.
What I know about Korea mostly is the Battle of Inchon and episodes of old reruns of MASH.
Of course we all know about the Viet Cong, the South Vietnamese who fought on the side of the North Vietnamese communists against the American occupiers in South Vietnam.
But I don't think I've ever really heard tell of South Korean resistance.
I've heard of the massacres of those who were thought to be left-leaning people and that kind of thing, which has been on Earth lately, but literally on Earth.
Those were carried out mainly by the National Police and I had many occasions to work with the National Police.
I would post them in the evenings and then later on I'd be out there with my dog and they'd be shooting at me to keep me from preventing other people from coming on base.
It was a very strange situation.
We armed and supported the National Police, which was a holdover from the Japanese Imperial occupation and actually there's a document, I can't remember the man's name, he became a general in the South Korean Army, but at the time he was a lieutenant and he was on Jeju Island with a small contingent of troops and the National Police came and they fomented a lot of unrest on the island as an excuse for actually killing an awful lot of the citizens there who were more inclined to set themselves up in little communes.
Not that they were communists in the sense that the Russians would have them be communists, but it was more or less their natural form of government, their traditional form of government, and the National Police would send in their spoilers.
He tried very hard to keep the peace under very difficult circumstances and was unsuccessful and about 30,000 people were massacred.
It's a little known story and we stood by and allowed these things and actually encouraged these things to happen according to the histories that I've read.
What happened was they had the earthquake literally unearthed some mass graves and it was the kind of thing I guess from what I read a lot of people knew about but they were sort of trying to pretend it never happened kind of thing and then here these mass graves were literally unearthed and so all this new investigation came out and there were American officers who said that yeah I sat there and watched it happen, it was more or less under my orders that it was carried out or my permission at least.
Yeah the forgotten war, that's what they call it, a lot like Afghanistan I guess.
Yeah, well we're creating very similar circumstances in Iraq.
Well how did you get involved in the peace movement?
I'm interested in how old were you and what was your view during Vietnam?
My view during Vietnam was that's your war, I've had mine, leave me alone, I'm trying to raise a family.
Yeah, so when did you become involved in the anti-war movement then?
No I didn't become, nope, nope, not at all.
Not until when, the Iraq war?
Yeah, it was the first Gulf War.
No the first Gulf War.
The first Gulf War, it set me off when I watched people killing people while doing it, watching it on a cathode ray tube, this long distance, very sanitary way of blowing people to pieces without smelling it or hearing it.
That really cuts right to the heart of it, Chris Hedges wrote that great book War is a force that gives us meaning and a lot of the book is about not necessarily even the people participating in it but the people watching back home, it's sort of the Straussian view right, it gives us all something to rally around and out of many one and all that kind of thing.
Exercising the war power is the surest way to get people to rally around the state.
Yeah, well, hooray for all that.
Yeah, well, but it is different isn't it when you've actually had people shooting at you, when you've actually been there and heard the screams and smelled the burning bodies, it's a totally different thing than watching it from, you know, watching it on TV at home on your couch.
It certainly is, it certainly is.
Is that basically the hardest part of your job is trying to get through to people that are like, hey, you know, killing people is not a video game, seriously, think about it, you know, your best friend right next to you has got torn out, that kind of thing?
Yeah, well, you know, people respond to that and say, well, that's war, you know, and we got to have these wars and the hardest thing is to convince them that we don't have to have these wars, that there are alternatives that are much better.
So many people are convinced that force is the only way to, well, that you have to exert your will and you do it by force and they're not open to compromise and they've kind of drunk the Kool-Aid, they buy the propaganda and very unquestioningly they just will respond without thinking about what other people are thinking and doing.
They are very successful at dehumanizing people, you know, ragheads and sand niggers and everybody with an Arabic name is a terrorist and so forth and calling people that are defending their country terrorists is kind of a ridiculous thing, too.
Well, I'm kind of going off there, but...
Well, it's okay.
I mean, this is the kind of thing where, you know, the topic is sort of, well, what's the best way, how do you get through to somebody who's got a million excuses, right?
On one hand, you can tell that they have a very cavalier attitude about it and when you explain how deadly serious it all really is, then they resort to, oh, well, yeah, but that's war, kind of, I mean, which is just a circular kind of argument.
That one always annoys the hell out of me.
Well, that's war.
Well, yeah, that's why I'm saying we ought to not have one if we, you know, can help it.
That's the point, right, is killing people is wrong, isn't it?
Yes, I certainly subscribe to that.
Yes, of course, it's wrong.
I think the times that I've had some success in talking with people is when I've tried to draw them out about their point of view and get them to explain it to me in very thorough terms and that's when some of that jingoism tends to break down or slough off and we often find that we can find some common ground and then start a dialogue and move slowly away from some of that conditioned thinking and into some more creative thinking.
Yeah.
Tell me about what's been happening with Veterans for Peace over these past seven, eight years.
Has your organization grown?
Yes, we've grown.
Well, actually, at the time of 9-1-1, we were kind of moribund and we had about 550 paid up members at that time and now we're up around 8,500 members.
But actually, our database has got more than that in it, but people come and go.
But about 8,500 paid members at this point with over 120 chapters around the country.
Well, when they had those giant rallies all over the world on February and March 15th of 2003, I went to both of them here in Austin, Texas and they were huge and I forget which one it was.
It must have been the first one, I guess.
A guy from Veterans for Peace, and to this day I don't know who he is.
I'd like to interview him.
He gave the best speech, probably the best anti-war speech I've ever heard given, actually.
I never did get to catch up with him and figure out who it was.
But that was when I first heard you all and I thought, wow, that guy sure has his act together.
Well, we speak from the heart.
We speak from the seat of conviction and experience.
Are you worried that some of your support is going to slack off and people are going to conclude that everything's okay now because the Democrat's been elected and that they don't need to be quite so agitated about the war issue anymore?
I don't think so.
I think the kinds of people that would be inclined to join Veterans for Peace still have very, very strong concerns about our position in the world.
Our posturing.
We realize that Mr. Obama needs our help in moving this immense military machine backed by a huge industry off the course that it's been on for so long.
You guys are perfect for making that case.
The whole thing about you have to, especially before, you really even had to be a veteran to say anything at all or to be taken seriously by anyone.
But right now the narrative is that Barack Obama has to resist the push from the far left.
Of course, the far left, the people who talk like that, they have no idea what they're even talking about.
But what's really important is that your message of ending this empire and bringing our troops home can be put forward as not a far left argument at all, but simply a red, white, and blue patriotic, centrist, liberal, conservative, and everybody else argument.
And also an economic imperative now of all times with this three quarters of a trillion dollar annual expenditure on a defense budget in the face of this economic disaster that we're experiencing, realizing that so much of that goes into 800 bases around the world and 140 countries that most people are not aware of.
Most people don't realize just how huge our military footprint is on the neck of the world.
Yep.
All right.
Well, best of luck to you and thank you for all your efforts.
Well, you're very welcome and I thank you for the opportunity.
All right, everybody.
That's Woody Powell, former executive director of Veterans for Peace.
And I'm sorry, I don't have the site in front of me.
I'm sure it's Veterans for Peace.
Are you still there, Woody?
That's right.
It's www.veteransforpeace.org.
All right.
Thank you very much for your time, sir.
You're welcome.