All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and all the news stories say that it's a great triumph for civil liberties in America.
The end of the military policy of don't ask, don't tell.
Now, openly gay people will be allowed to serve their country.
And on the line is Jeremy Sapienza.
He's senior editor of AntiWar.com, and he's got a couple of things to say about that.
Hey, Jeremy, how you doing?
Hey, Scott.
Good, good morning.
Happy to have you here today.
Now, so tell me, what's your position on this thing?
Well, I mean, of all the things to get really excited about, especially for somebody who's against war and pro-peace and pro-justice in general, it seems odd that even before they get, like, marriage equality, gay activists are pushing for gays to be able to have the equal right to kill in the military.
So they're all very excited about the fact that they can now freely join, and I don't know, wear glitter on their eyelids while they're drone bombing Pakistani babies.
And it just seems really very annoying to me.
It's really annoying.
It's really misguided.
And yesterday on Twitter, it was just an explosion of excitement over the fact that now DAGT is over.
Don't ask, don't tell.
Yeah.
Well, you know, it's interesting to me that it seems like being part of a historically persecuted minority, I could see how there's been, like, a strong drive and motivation to be included, to go from a them to an us, and to want to join with the rest of mainstream society, to be accepted into it, that kind of thing.
But it seems like also it would come with a little bit of empathy for the other thems out there.
You know, like, say, for example, Pakistani children, like you just mentioned, you know, seems like just, you know, flipping a coin or whatever, the average gay guy would tend to be more anti-war for that reason.
No?
A little bit of more empathy for the persecuted minorities out there?
You would think.
But, um, there's, there's a different, there are levels of that.
So there, there are levels of, there are accepted minorities.
Um, so if you're, say, a white gay male in the United States, justice stops at the borders.
So random brown people that your government tells you threaten you, uh, are fair game.
You can drop bombs on them and hell, why wouldn't you want to sign up?
Yeah.
There's crazies in Texas, maybe that don't like you, but it's, uh, it's Muslims in various countries you've never heard of that want to, they want to kill you even more than the Texas Taliban.
So I think mostly you have these sort of limousine, liberal gay activists that are very excited about this kind of thing because it demonstrates a promotion of gay Americans into the elite, finally into the elite.
Uh, they are now, uh, able to join, I guess with the exception of marriage for now, um, they're able to join all the upper echelons, pull all the levers of power that everybody else can.
And so it's not so much about justice for them as it is justice for them.
Yeah.
Finally, I see what you're saying is not so much a persecuted minority these days, uh, to be gay as much as it's a protected minority.
And this is the ultimate kind of proof of that.
This is the, the, the last domino to fall, uh, for the complete mainstreaming of gay society or whatever, that kind of thing.
It's not an appeal to universal human justice.
It's an, it's an attempt to grab power for themselves, a piece of the action.
Um, obviously no, every gay person doesn't think this.
Um, and there are some out there who, who don't, who are happy.
I had some arguments yesterday on Twitter.
I was razzing people about the ADP.
Um, and some people said, I'm actually against the war and against, against American militarism, but I think that this is just at least another official wall broken down for gay people.
And I understand that concern.
I'm a slightly more sympathetic toward it.
But I think that they're missing the bigger picture, which is that there are more important things in the world than being able to wear high heels while you're machine gunning or bayoneting a bunch of babies, you know, I'm being, I'm just, that's the, that's the typical thing that I say in my razzing on Twitter and yes, I'm exaggerating, but, uh, it's perfect.
Yeah.
Well, um, and you know, it's funny because it really, you know what it is.
It's a symptom to me of just the idea of the permanence of American militarism, the unquestioned nature of it, where, you know, it's just another example of how people just think of the military and even the size it is and permanently at war the way it is as just a natural state of things.
This is how things are.
And so if we can make civil rights progress here, there, or the other place, the military is a great place to make civil rights progress.
In fact, when they desegregated the military between blacks and whites and, and Latinos or whatever, that made a big difference in the culture in general, because so many people served in the military and they basically said, no, you're all a bunch of maggots, you know, on an equal level.
Welcome to basic training kind of thing.
And so guys, you know, in the same unit together, whatever, uh, you know, it led to, uh, probably a lot of kind of progressive, um, uh, to use that word loosely, but, uh, you know what I mean?
Uh, an advancing of the American understanding of race and, and help lead to further desegregation down the line.
That's right.
So, um, and, and it, it really does.
It transcends all, um, all groups, even oppressed groups have always there.
They've always got their start at acceptance in the military.
If you can kill for the empire, maybe you are all right.
But to, to, as an example of some of the things that, you know, people stay in support of, uh, the end of the ADT, you know, I've seen, uh, people on Twitter go, you know, I don't care if you are straight, as long as you shoot straight, you know, because they're defending our, they're defending us against evil foreigners.
And so why not have another chunk of the country be able to join up with cannon fodder?
And Joe Lieberman tweeted, the end of DADT is a victory for our national security and our values.
And so I tweeted at him and said, now gay Americans can die for Israel.
And there's all kinds of people just so excited, all, uh, gay activists, very excited that they can now join the military.
My prediction is most of them probably won't at least not, uh, upwardly mobile, gay, white Americans.
They really have no reason to join the military, uh, unless they plan to be an officer, of course.
Right.
Um, uh, why would you sign up to be cannon fodder?
In fact, the, the, there was an article in the times last night that came out at the end that, you know, after the first day of the repeal of the ADT and the Marines are going to a gay community center, um, in some beige strip mall in Tulsa, because they're not going to go to New York city and chat up people at gay bars who have decent jobs, who don't need to join the military who are only supporting the end of the ADT for some vague, ideological reason.
What they're going to do now is do what they always do and go target people who have no prospect.
They're going to go try to recruit as the article described, you know, fat lesbians who, uh, have marks all over their arms cause they used to cut themselves and the Marines have to tell them that they're not, they need to lose weight and they'll need to get a medical waiver because they were cutting themselves.
Desperate people in poor areas of the country who think that they have no other prospect.
This opens up a whole new range for the military to suck in desperate people.
The second desperate people.
Yeah.
Whole new group of cannon fodder to be lined up and fed to the beast.
Yeah.
And then when they get kicked out for going crazy, they'll say, well, you had a personality deficit problem in the first place.
And so we don't owe you no PTSD care.
All right.
It's a Jeremy Sapienza, senior editor of antiwar.com.
We're talking about don't ask, don't tell.
And it's end.
I'll be right back.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the thing here.
It's antiwar radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Jeremy Sapienza, senior editor of antiwar.com.
And, uh, this whole thing reminds me of that great Bill Hicks skit where he said, uh, you know, I just don't get it.
I figure anyone dumb enough to want to be in the military should be allowed in.
I don't care how many pushups you can do.
Go away in the foxhole and we'll tell you when we need you to kill somebody.
Oh no, I don't want any gay guys hanging around me while I'm killing kids.
Just don't want to see it.
It's immoral.
All right.
You know, what a complete farce this entire thing is.
And just to put in DADT into Google news and read through the headlines here, the unreality where, you know, wow.
Well, this guy, um, uh, Dan Choi is now going to re enlist in the military now that it's okay, because he just can't wait to get in there and serve his country some more in, after 10 years of phony war, after 10 years of killing innocent people, nobody's learned nothing.
Not only that, they treated him like dirt is these guys that were, that were booted from the army, like I said, any of these kind of upper-class white guys with any education or officer material, they were careerists, they weren't cannon fodder.
And so this is like them not being able to apply for a job where they've held, you know, in a, in a corporation essentially.
And so they've lost years of this, this corporate advancement in the military.
And they're still like, Oh yeah, I'll jump right back in.
Even though they'll be behind their entire lives and what they, we don't, we never hear what they've been doing the last several years, but their lives have been, they've been trying to do something different than join a professional murder organization.
Apparently not, I don't know.
But yeah, I mean, in addition to that, that they've screwed, that the military has, has destroyed their, what they see as legitimate careers, have they paid no attention to what the military actually does?
I mean, I guess they don't care because like we're, the military fights enemies who are barely human.
And so to them, it's bad that they're seen as other and as evil to their own countrymen.
And they, they aim to change their own countryman's mind.
Um, and, and that's evil when, when Americans do that to them or when, when white people do that to them.
But when we're talking about the quasi people known as Muslims or whoever the U.S. designates as enemies, they're not really, that's not who we mean by justice.
That's not who we mean by equality.
We just mean us.
So if we could just turn that back in on ourselves, please.
If we could just take the concept of justice and make it about the West, that would be a lot easier for a lot of gay ink activists.
Um, the fact is that it's not quite like that and it's really intellectually dishonest.
And I just have no sympathy for these people who are so, it's, I just, I can't even get into their mindset, how they can be elated by the fact that this, that DADT is over and that gay people can now join the military.
Because it's like that they, they see that as a victory for justice and freedom and equality when it, I mean, what's the next thing they're going to fight for the mafia to accept the gays?
Like, I don't, I don't get how this is real activism.
Yeah.
For real.
And that's part of what really gets me about it too, is to me, it's all just a big red herring.
I mean, basically I agree with everything you just said, which just goes to show that this whole issue ought to be a non-issue.
And like Anthony Gregory's pointing out to me one time about how there was a giant anti-recruitment effort going on to keep the military out of the universities, to stop them from recruiting into the officer core, basically.
And then the whole movement to keep the, uh, you know, uh, because it was because of the Iraq war in the first place.
But then the whole thing got changed into because they're unfair to gays and it's a violation of civil rights.
And so that's actually, that's a really old thing.
Like I think it was Yale or Harvard had banned ROTC since Vietnam.
And they wanted to make it later on after Vietnam was over and years later, they wanted to make it about the ADT.
It was totally co-opted by the, by the gay liberal agenda to sound like Rush Limbaugh right now, but to make it as if it were about, about gays in the military, about the fact that the military doesn't accept gays when originally it was about the military being a fundamentally unjust organization.
It was an institution that human beings, educated human beings should never, ever join.
And that is why ROTC and recruiting was banned from these institutions of higher learning.
It had absolutely nothing to do with homosexuality.
Well, I mean, so now the recruiters are allowed in, right?
Now they're allowed in because they've redefined, because now even these bastions of liberal thought, these progressive campuses that are, that have been totally and utterly infiltrated by Marxists over the years are now embracing the American empire.
They're totally okay with the mass death rain down upon benighted foreigners, as long as you can sleep with a dude and still do it and still participate.
It's just totally has absolutely nothing.
It's the opposite of morality.
It's the opposite of principle.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I was wondering if it counts as an abortion, if a Republican drops a bomb on a pregnant woman, I guess the question is, you know, does it count as gay rights if a Democrat shoots a helipad missile at a gay guy, you know, in Pakistan?
It's two birds with one stone.
Oh, I'm sorry.
I was talking about that.
I do want to get back to the point that I was making before about the, you know, depressed middle American people going to gay centers and strip malls and being attacked by recruiters.
They, as usual, the military, I mean, the military is a poverty draft.
Again, aside from the officer corps, it's a poverty draft.
And, you know, loosely, I'm not going to say that troops don't have any responsibility.
Of course they do.
But the fact is that none of the wealthier liberal types are going to be joining the military now because of the APT.
They're going to go after the vulnerable types who have been killing themselves over bullying.
So they're going to go, oh, you can't bully me.
I'm going to go into the military and then I'm going to be able to kick your ass.
And you're going to, you're going to fet me as a hero when I get back from killing Paki.
And so that, that's the kind of people that are being targeted.
Ignorant people with no prospect.
That's what the military does is they go into disadvantaged areas.
They go into black neighborhoods.
They go into poor neighborhoods all around the country.
Desperate areas.
And they, they lie as we've known recruiters to do.
They lie about how fabulous military service is.
And now they're going to do it in another way with desperate gay people in places like Tulsa.
Imagine how difficult it is to be a lesbian in Tulsa and have to go to a gay center in a beige strip mall.
How miserable that must be.
And so this will be an escape for them.
And then they'll start to die.
But it won't matter because they're already thrown away people in our society.
That's who the military targets.
Yeah.
Well, and you're right about what you said earlier before too, about the dehumanization of the others over there.
How, uh, you know, the declaration of independence only applies to us for some reason and not anybody else.
Uh, on frontline last night, they had some guys from, I think Fort Carson or whatever on there saying, yeah, killing an innocent person or, or a guy with a gun, which means he's automatically guilty, uh, is the same thing.
Cause they're all just Hodges to me.
We're us and they're them.
It's as simple as that.
Like in the plainest language you could possibly have my racism.
It makes it easier for me to kill people, which is my job.
And now we're going to take, uh, you know, people who've been on the receiving end of that and say, now you can be that bully instead of the bullied.
Yeah.
Well, and I mean, and I imagine that will appeal to a lot of these people who were formerly victims.
I mean, they were, they were bullied their entire lives.
Maybe they thought about killing themselves.
Like I was saying, there was this woman who had cuts all up and down her arm because she cut herself when she was a teenager.
I imagine for how difficult it was to be, to live in a society that hated her just because she liked other women.
And now instead of fighting for justice, she's going to fight for the empire, fight for the very people who did that to her.
At least she thinks she's doing that and she's not going to take it out on them.
She's going to take it out on a totally innocent third party.
Yeah.
Well, and I love it.
You know, you know, it's Rick Perry and them who come into power next, uh, it's going to be those exact people who hate her guts for no reason are going to be the ones in charge of sending her around instead of somebody that maybe now she can empathize with a little easier.
Well, we'll see.
Yeah, boy, I hope it ain't right.
But he just seems like just the right kind of full of ignorance and hate for the American people these days.
All right.
Well, thanks very much, Jeremy.
Appreciate it.
That's all.
Jeremy Sapiens, everybody.
Senior editor at antiwar.com.
Check him out on Twitter too.
