06/06/11 – David Swanson – The Scott Horton Show

Alright, y'all welcome back.
It's Anti-War Radio.
Very quickly, we're going to talk to David Swanson for just a couple of minutes, and then we got to take a break, and then we'll be back with more David Swanson.
Sorry for the late start there, but I had a stupid technical problem standing in my way of doing the right thing here.
Welcome to the show, David.
How are you doing?
Good, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing great.
Hey, listen, I really appreciate you joining us.
Let me tell the people who you are in case they don't remember.
He's the author of Daybreak, Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union, and also War is a Lie.
And he's the co-founder of warisacrime.org, formerly known as After Downing Street, which was named for the Downing Street memos that proved that in July 2002, Bush and Tony Blair were talking about how exactly to lie us into war.
So you can find him at warisacrime.org and also at davidswanson.org.
And now, David, you're part of something that apparently I'm part of, too, that I don't know too much about other than I've agreed to do it, and that is a plan for this October, having the biggest anti-war rally in American history or something, hopefully since 1968 or something, on the mall in downtown Washington, D.C.
Tell us all about it.
Well, if not the biggest, the most serious and longest-lasting and least rally-like.
That is to say, we are committed to producing a Tahrir Square Cairo, Tunisia, Madison, Wisconsin, an event where people come and stay.
So we're not going to have a rally and speeches and march around on a Saturday and make home movies and get ignored by ABC and NBC and go home and pat ourselves on the back.
We're going to show up on Thursday, October 6th, which is the date on which we're in this war in Afghanistan for 10 years, and we go into year number 11.
It's also October 2011 when we start the 2012 federal budget, which cuts short everything except wars.
And Freedom Plaza is the destination rather than the mall, in part because of the nice resonance it has with Tahrir Square or Liberation Square in Cairo.
And Freedom Plaza is along Pennsylvania Avenue between the Capitol and the White House, and it has a great map of downtown D.C. built into the concrete of it around which we can conveniently plan nonviolent disruption of business as usual.
We're coming to stay, to occupy, to disrupt, to interfere, and to shut down the machine.
And people who go to October2011.org can sign up as an individual or an organization or a media outlet that they want to cover this or be part of this.
And you're committing to come on October 6th and to stay and to shut things down.
And we will help you get there if needed.
We will feed you and so forth.
But we're serious about this.
It's not theater anymore.
Alright, now here's the thing.
And I know you recognize it too.
For some reason, Easy Rider just came out from here on.
That's it.
Anti-war people are hippies and they don't know nothing about foreign policy and they're wimps.
And so they'll just have to leave it to us tough guys to know who to war against all the time.
And so forget it.
And that's the point of view of the vast majority of the American people.
And I can't get it out of my head because I was watching the Military History Channel last night, which I guess is brand new or something.
And it just reminded me how normal all of this mass killing and world empire is on TV, you know, for the average people.
So you have an incredible task ahead of you to prove that this is not just another answer rally.
And that this is really the American people against this war on a much broader base.
And of course the music means we've got to go out to this break.
But when we get back, I want to talk about the strategy of this thing as well as the tactics.
It's David Swanson.
He's helping organize a giant anti-war protest this October.
Alright y'all, welcome back to the show.
We're talking about the big murder trial of some lady killed her kid five years ago.
Oh no, that's on MSNBC.
This is anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton and I'm talking with David Swanson about things that actually matter in the world.
For example, the war in Afghanistan.
And as he says in October, to mark the 10th anniversary of America's war in Afghanistan.
He and some others are organizing a gigantic Tahir Square style shut-em-down semi-revolution type of thing in Washington D.C.
And I got to tell you David, and by the way it's warisacrime.org.
Check that out.
I got to tell you, I can see it.
I can imagine it.
But I'm not certain I can imagine how to make it happen.
How are you going to make it happen?
Well, nothing is guaranteed.
But those who don't want to come at all, unless there's a big crowd there, can go to October2011.org and click, I pledge to be there if, and only if, 50,000 others will be there with me.
We hope to have many times 50,000 there.
But with 50,000, we could affect some change in our government.
That's a good idea, having that pledge.
I hope that helps.
I mean, this is not all we're doing and not everything is happening online.
And we're reaching out to major organizations and trying to build a movement.
Some things will be beyond our control.
And this is really what's happened today is an announcement of the forming of a coalition that's not formed yet.
And so groups and individuals can still get in on the early planning of what this is going to look like and what the agenda is going to be.
But I wanted to, at the risk of defending the vast majority of the American people, I wanted to question a little what you said right before the break.
Because we do have a strong majority that says get out of Afghanistan, get out of Iraq, defund the military, fund useful things, and so forth.
Now maybe all those people are also thinking at the same time, well, please ignore my opinion and it's really up to the generals and so forth.
But that is public opinion in the polls for what it's worth.
Yeah, that's true.
I guess the thing that gets me is it's the depth of feeling about it.
I interviewed a guy who did a study at, I forget which university, where they did a real in-depth survey of anti-war liberals.
And what they found was not that their opinion on the war had changed, now that they're warmongers because Obama's the president, but that what motivated them to get out into the street and protest was fear of Bush and what he was doing to America.
And the fact that Obama's doing the very same things doesn't strike the same fear into them.
So that's why they stay home.
And in a way, though, that could work to your advantage.
If you could get a lot of anti-war right-wingers out here, I think that that sends a real powerful message because as far as the base, the other 40% in that poll who are still for all these wars, they're the people who vote Republican typically, call themselves conservatives like Sarah Palin and that kind of thing.
And they're the ones who still remain to be won over.
To have a bunch of guys in camouflage with signs that say right-wing, anti-war on them and that kind of thing, I think, could be beneficial, huh?
Well, it couldn't hurt.
I mean, it's not going to be a right-wing movement, except in the sense of being libertarian, in the sense of being anti-war.
Back when right-wing meant liberal.
Right, right.
I mean, if you go full circle, then we're in place.
But I think that there is a huge problem that you identify in that people who were anti-war are now not so much anti-war.
It's kind of okay because the president has a different party after his name.
I mean, this is part of what's wrong with this whole country, people giving their loyalty to one or the other of these two monstrosities called political parties.
And so there is a need for people on the left who are willing to go against a party to reach out to people on the right who are willing to do the same.
And yet we still are going to have to reach huge numbers of people who up until this point have been bowing down before a party.
And so, you know, moveon.org and these types that used to pretend they didn't like wars because the president was a Republican and now email me about going to a school board meeting to talk about sugar in the lunches are going to have to be brought around or their members are going to have to be taken to organizations that are not so subservient.
Well, now I know you're working with Kevin Zeese and I guess you're part of that big conference, right?
Of the big left-right Bring America Home.us and the book and all that, right?
Absolutely, yeah.
I mean, I think that's definitely a good place to go to get started to try to bring in as many of the American conservative magazine types as possible, as many libertarians and others.
And not only that, but all the different professions represented at that Come Home America conference, all the professors and all the different people of all different persuasions.
I think if, you know, somehow we don't have Ross Perot money behind this thing or anything like that.
Something's got to click in order to really get people to say, yeah, Tahir Square, we can do it here too.
We will take the week or two off that it takes to get to D.C. and participate in this and actually make it happen.
We got to make people believe to get them to go, you know?
Well, yeah, and people are doing that.
And organizations across the country are making plans for this already.
And we just sort of announced the beginning of efforts to form a coalition to plan it.
Well, tell us all about who you have already and how good it looks already, David.
Well, you go to October2011.org and, you know, there's a long list of names posted, of individuals and of organizations posted, which includes much, if not all, of the big peace movement groups.
And there's also a page listing media outlets.
I hope this one is listed there.
We'll make sure it is, if it isn't, that are covering this.
And, you know, there's activist groups, there's blogs, there's, you know, there's the Green Party, and there's been interest as well from Democratic groups and hopefully Republican groups.
But this is not going to be about party.
And we're going to be bringing in financial justice groups and environmental groups and anyone who understands that the money is being flushed into the wars and could be better used.
And so there's an array of interests that ought to line up, just as they have in other countries where people have said enough is enough.
I don't know if you saw the New York Times story today on Afghanistan and how long it's going to drag on.
And the last sentence is, the Pentagon says the war in Afghanistan costs about $2 billion a week.
Well, you know, there's a lot of things I could do with $2 billion a week.
Can you imagine?
And, you know, this is the thing too, whether you're, you know, a liberal would tend to think, well, just think of how that tax money could be spent other ways, where a conservative or a libertarian might think, well, just think how the American people could spend that money if it never was taxed in the first place or whatever.
Wouldn't that be great if that was the argument we could have about what we're going to do with all the money we're saving from the $1.2 trillion we spend a year on this empire?
Absolutely.
Alright, everybody, check out October2011.org.
That's David Swanson.
October2011.org.
Bring our war money home.
Thanks.