10/16/09 – Cindy Sheehan – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
Alright y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio, Chaos 95.9 in Austin, Texas.
We're joined on the phone by the peace mom, Cindy Sheehan.
She's also a radio show host, did you know that?
Check out cindysheehanssoapbox.blogspot.com.
Welcome back to the show, Cindy, how are you?
Oh, thanks Scott.
It's really nice to talk to you.
Yeah, I'm happy to have you here.
Let me turn up your volume a little bit so I can hear what you say.
A piece of the action.
Oh boy, I love it when people do the, what do you call those again?
Which kind of nymns is it?
Where it's two totally different words and meanings and spellings, but they sound the same and you...
It's, I don't know.
Oh, homonyms, right?
Is that homonyms?
That's the least used of the nymns.
Anyway, a piece of the action, P-E-A-C-E, piece of the action.
What is that?
Well, it's going to be some direct action in Washington, D.C. starting, we hope, around the, let's see, what is this, the seventh anniversary of the needless tragic invasion of Iraq on March 19th, March 20th.
We're hoping to begin then, but what we are going to do is do sustained direct action.
We're hoping to have about 5,000 people and have 1,000 people every day in 10 different locations, just shutting down intersections, shutting down buildings in Washington, D.C., and our demands are very simple, troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan, mercenary soldiers out of Iraq and Afghanistan, no drone bombings, close all the permanent bases and the torture facilities and reparations for those countries.
And the thing about piece of the action, we're not going to fail this time because we're not going to stop until our demands are met.
All right, well, who's we?
You and what army, Cindy?
Well, so far we're putting together a coalition of people in Washington, D.C., and organizations that are still actually working for peace, you know, working against the wars, even though Obama's president.
We're looking at, you know, World Count Way, Voters for Peace after Downing Street, and, you know, some other organizations.
You know, the big ones, of course, aren't in it because the big ones have been co-opted by the Democratic Party.
But what I'm hoping is, you know, we'll get the – there's thousands of homeless vets in Washington, D.C.
We're going to set up a tent city.
We're hoping to be able to feed and house people and give people services, and, you know, we're hoping that they'll help us with this action.
There's people all over the country that are losing their jobs and losing their homes or who have just been struggling against these wars for a long time that are going to join us.
And I'm not going to start until we have 5,000 people, so we want just as many people as we can to come for as long as you can.
If you can only come for a day or a week or a month or if you come for the entire time, you know, we promise that everybody will be taken care of if they can get there.
All right, now, well, I guess we've got to talk about the whole left-right liberal conservative thing like this.
If you're going to do this, Cindy, you're going to need Ron Paulian revolutionaries on your side, aren't you?
Well, we certainly, you know, of course I have always worked with those people when our interests intersect, and our interests do intersect in bringing the troops home and ending the U.S. Empire.
You know, ending the U.S. Empire is not one of the goals of Peace for the Action, but we do think that bringing the troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan and, you know, Pakistan and, you know, the other demands will go a long way towards that and to showing the power of the people.
So, you know, I have always worked very well with libertarians and people like that, you know, because most of the time our interests and our philosophy do coincide.
You know, where they differ, you know, that's something for after the short-term goal.
Yeah.
Well, so what do you say to them?
I mean, now's your chance.
They're listening.
You know, come out and help us end these wars.
I know that that is one of your goals and it's one of my goals, too.
And you'll be welcomed with open arms, you know, in Washington, D.C. to help us.
I mean, like you said, we're going to need everybody.
This is a very big endeavor here.
I want to go.
I want to shut down Washington, D.C.
I think I want to shut it down permanently.
But I understand, like you're saying, with the empire thing, it's not like you're for empire.
You just have to have a narrower list than, you know, include everything.
But I'd love to see everybody who's sick and tired of this imperial warmongering show up in D.C. and help shut it down.
Wouldn't that be fun?
I mean, they'd probably.
Absolutely.
I don't know how they'd react to that.
I think it'd look probably a lot like Tehran in June.
Well, we were in Pittsburgh, too.
And, you know, we saw how the police state reacted to those protests.
But what we made a mistake in Pittsburgh about is that we always got like thousands of us together in one place.
And then we would get surrounded by the police state.
Well, here in Peace of the Action, we're not going to tell them where we're going to be.
And we're going to be in 10 different locations every day.
And I think it's going to be a blast.
I think that they will come down heavily on us.
But I think that'll just energize more people to come and show up and to help us with this action.
And the beauty of it is, for the last five years that I've been in this movement since Casey was killed, every action we've done has been symbolic.
Well, this is not symbolic.
This is something that we hope is going to be very effective for once.
For once, we'll be able to meet our goals because, like I said, we're not going to stop until our goals are met.
Right on.
Well, and, you know, for the first time, really, for just in the last couple of months, the majority of this country is against not just escalating Afghanistan, but they're against the war in Afghanistan either way.
This is not – it's funny.
Glenn Greenwald's going to be on the show later.
And he always does such a great job of writing about how whatever 70 percent of the American people are for or 60 percent or something of the American people are for, that's the position of the far left.
Oh, yeah, you're against the war in Iraq.
That's the position of the far left.
And meanwhile, the poll just came out that day that said that it's virtually unanimous in the society that we want out.
So either we're all a bunch of pinkos in America in the Cold War.
We lost the Cold War after all.
Or actually, that's just a pejorative term for what the people want when it's the establishment that decides what's the middle of the road between the Republican and the Democratic parties in D.C.
That's the moderate position, not what the super majority of Americans may be demanding at the top of their lungs or even, you know, out loud at all.
Well, absolutely, Scott.
And that's why I want to work with everybody who is on.
Because we're almost all on the same side of the divide.
You know, I think it's a class struggle.
And there's a robber class and the Roth class.
And until people wake up to the fact that the robber class, they don't care about left or right or Democrat or Republican or Christian, Muslim or Jew.
They care about money.
They care about power.
And they care about oppressing us.
And so until we all figure that out and really have a true revolution that is a grassroots, broad-based revolution, then nothing is ever going to change in this country.
All right, everybody.
It's Cindy Sheehan.
She's the peace mom.
You might remember her siege of George Bush's pretend ranch down there in Crawford, Texas, back in 2005.
Did you ever get an answer to your question, what noble cause, Cindy?
You know, George Bush didn't answer me directly, but he tried to answer it through the media.
And, of course, he didn't do anything that approached to my satisfaction about freedom and democracy and all that blah, blah, blah.
So, in other words, he gave you a bunch of hype.
And one thing that really bothered me about that, and lots of things really bothered me about it, but the thing that bothered me the most is that he had plenty of time to go riding around the track with Lance Armstrong, who, by the way, thought it was perfectly okay to go ride around with George Bush while at the same time he was ignoring you.
I thought that said a lot of things about both of their characters.
But it's kind of amazing to me that the American population in general weren't outraged about, oh, you can go bicycle riding with the guy from the mailman team or whatever, but you can't meet with the dead soldier's mother.
Nobody even minded, really, did they?
Like two weeks ago, almost two weeks ago, I changed myself to the White House fence and demanded that Obama meet with the peace movement, not just with his war council about ratcheting up Afghanistan.
And, of course, I was immediately cut off the fence and arrested, and there was no meeting.
And then just a few days after that, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
So I'm just thinking, what does that make us?
You know, hundreds of us out in front of the White House, 62 of us got arrested.
Does that make us anti-peace now?
So this whole entire planet is upside down.
Yeah, well, it's true.
You know, it's funny, too, because it's not just where it's a bizarre world upside down.
There's kind of a nuance there where what peace means is complete and total, mostly American, but Western hegemony over the planet Earth.
And when no one else will dare to resist our influence and power anymore, then we will have peace.
And so if Barack Obama is putting a nicer face on the American-slash-European empire, then he's actually helping advance all that collective security and all the nonsense that goes with it.
You know, Matt Taibbi, I guess, had a great article about this, too, where Bush's problem wasn't that he wanted to mass murder everybody from the point of view of the American establishment.
He was so crass about it.
He wanted to do it by himself.
And it was unseemly, you know, the way he joked around with the Queen or whatever.
He was a bumbling doofus.
And what we need is a calm and suave and sophisticated imperialist who can make the French and the Germans and the sophisticated people of Europe feel good about being satellites in our empire, basically.
And to them, that's what peace means, a monopoly on all power on Earth.
Right.
And Obama is definitely a gift to the world's ruling class.
That's for sure.
I saw that.
I was just in Sweden.
I saw that exhibited in Sweden.
But I saw the horror, you know, the people in Europe were horrified that Obama received the Nobel Peace Prize.
Even if they supported him, they just thought, what has he done?
He hasn't done anything for peace.
But it's just an establishment prize.
It's just so the establishment can reinforce its wars.
I mean, the prize is named after somebody who invented dynamite.
So, you know, it's just something where I think they just try to confuse us and keep us really, you know, just not knowing what ends up around here.
Yeah.
Well, and I guess this kind of goes to the question of the larger American population's view of this.
I mentioned on the show the other day I saw Patton Oswald, who I really like.
I think he's a funny comedian.
And he was doing his little comedy thing.
And just part of it was how great Obama is and how wonderful everything is now that Dufus is gone.
And, you know, well-spoken black intellectual guy is in charge instead.
And it's the Democrats, not the Republicans and that kind of thing.
And it seems like that really has worked.
In fact, it's even worked worldwide.
I mean, I'm sure you saw the poll where America's the most popular country in the world again.
The whole not the whole, you know, last eight years, not with standing or whatever, just because of the person, the character of Obama.
And you understand how that is.
I mean, the relief, the weight lifted off of my shoulders when Bush and Cheney were gone is almost immeasurable.
Right.
But so it's easy to see how people could default into that view.
But so how do you reach these people who maybe are only kind of half informed and they're not really paying close attention as close of attention as you and I are to the details of what all of Obama's policies are?
But they've just kind of fallen into that thing where at least he's not Bush and he seems like he's smart.
And let's give him a chance.
Bush, after all, caused terrible problems in the world.
We've got to give Obama a chance to try to work him out.
He can't fix everything in six months.
That kind of thing.
I'm trying to to paint this view as not being, you know, something to condemn, but something that's very understandable.
But how do you how do you reach these people?
How do you tell them?
Well, actually, you know, I understand your heart's in the right place, but here's what you need to understand.
Tell them, Cindy.
Well, you know, I I like half of these battles on a daily basis.
I have have lost a lot of friends since Obama's been president, because I point out the inconvenient truth that, yes, he's he's been in office for, what, eight months now.
But he hasn't done anything to turn the and I'm just talking about his foreign policy.
He hasn't done one made one positive step in the right direction.
So how can he be trying to to change things and make things better when he's in fact making things worse?
And I've been all over the country since March.
I've been in 40, 45 different cities talking about this.
When I first started and at the end of March, people would actually walk out of my talks because I would point out these inconvenient truths to them.
But now people are waking up to the fact that that and but these are people that pay attention.
Scott, now people that don't pay attention.
Some of them don't even know that there's still wars going on, unfortunately.
So how do we reach them?
How do we reach them with the corporate media that is in bed with the establishment?
I just found out today that I was, you know, named the fourth least powerful person in Washington, D.C. by ABC News.
The fourth least powerful?
Yeah.
First of all, I don't live in Washington, D.C., you know.
What an honor to get from them.
I know.
And they're saying it's because if you have a protest and it doesn't get covered, does it still happen?
Well, what's that saying about the corporate media?
It's not my fault that I've been working my brains out since Casey died and the media, the corporate media, establishment media stops covering me.
So it's designed to keep us stupid, to keep us ignorant of what's really happening.
And Obama is a kinder, gentler face on the empire, but it's about the system.
And I keep trying to enforce that to people.
It doesn't matter if it's a Democrat or Republican in office, that Bush has very little power.
Obama has very little power.
It's the system and the people behind them that are pulling their strings.
Right.
Well, and you just hit on exactly what people don't want to admit.
Right.
It's a lifelong struggle.
Yeah.
Well, and that really is the deal.
And you can see why people would want so badly, whether they're, you know, whether they lean right or lean left, they would want so badly to think that the problem is the guy in power now, not the system itself.
Because if it's the system itself, well, then what are we supposed to do?
You know, now all of a sudden there's a lot of responsibility.
Well, wouldn't you think the so-called conservative or not conservative Republicans or the so-called people on the right would be supporting Obama right now?
Because his foreign policy is a twin to George Bush and that McCain wouldn't be doing anything differently in foreign policy.
So you would think that Obama would be getting their support and the people on the so-called left would not be supporting his policies.
Yeah.
Well, the thing is, they do support his war policies.
If anything, they attack him because they got to look like they're anti-Obama.
So they attack him and call him a peacenik and say that, you know, he doesn't he's not man enough to kill all the people he needs to kill.
That's the dissent in D.C.
But that also is not, that's not being honest, because Obama is killing people as fast as George Bush was.
And, you know, in fact, he's going to announce next week a significant increase in troops to Afghanistan.
So that should make these people just like ecstatic.
But it should make people on the left like come out and join me at Peace of the Action.
What they're afraid of, you know, some some of the people in the anti-war movement.
What they're afraid of is an action like this when Democrats are in power will expose the fraud of the system.
Right.
Because if we have a Democratic president and an overwhelming majority in both houses of Congress and nothing gets done, what does that say about about the system, except that it's fraudulent?
Well, that's what I'm saying right now.
Listen, I have a question here from the make a request line at Chaos Radio's Web site.
And it says, why can't left wingers ever come up with a better promotional idea than blocking traffic and making people mad?
Seems like that can be counterproductive, right?
If it looks like just a bunch of, you know, rich white kids with no jobs hanging out, blocking traffic in the street and being spoiled rotten.
How do we how do we do the piece of the action and shut down D.C. without it appearing like that?
That almost sounds like I was called something a pejorative term.
But a lefty left winger.
Well, I don't I don't know if it was directed.
I don't like to write only at you, but it was sort of a reference to this is what we see a lot of times.
Like white kids with dreadlocks who ought to be at work, but they don't have to because they're from the suburbs and they're just fine without a job.
And they're sitting in the street blocking traffic.
And what seems to most working people like fine, you're against the war.
But why does your temper tantrum have to ruin my trip home from work?
You know.
Well, first of all, we want to shut down business as usual in Washington, D.C.
And we're going to restrict our activities to the area between the White House and Congress.
And, you know, it's time to ramp it up.
It's time to do civil resistance.
It's time to stop doing symbolic protests where you symbolically get arrested and then you go out and, you know, go to Best Boys and Poets and have a beer or something.
It's time to really start sacrificing.
And, you know, the people that I belong to within the Peace Movement, we're mostly, you know, not young people with dreadlocks.
We're mostly people like me who are just entirely fed up with the killing.
And so what?
So we're going to inconvenience some people when people are being drone bombed in Pakistan.
Where there's somebody sitting in Nevada at Creech Air Force Base using a joystick and dropping bombs on innocent people.
So some people are going to be inconvenienced.
You know what?
Then put pressure.
Put pressure on your government to stop us.
Because, you know what?
We're not the violent ones.
We're not the ones that are doing anything wrong.
It's our government that is.
And somebody has to step out there and stop it once and for all.
Alright, everybody.
That is the Peace Mom, Cindy Sheehan.
You can check out her blogs and her radio show at cindysheehanssoapbox.blogspot.com.
And you can also find out there how to get involved with this protest coming up in March, the anniversary of the invasion of Iraq.
A Peace of the Action.
Thanks very much for your time on the show today, Cindy.
Oh, thanks for having me on, Scott.