06/08/07 – John V. Walsh – The Scott Horton Show

All right, my friends, welcome back to Anti-War Radio for antiwar.com and Chaos Radio 95.9 in Austin, Texas.
I'm Scott Horton, and introducing our first guest today, John V. Walsh.
He's a Green Party guy, I believe, and writes regularly for Counterpunch.
Welcome to the show, John.
Yeah, it's nice to be here.
Thank you.
Good to talk with you.
And is that correct, that you're a Green Party activist?
Well, in Massachusetts, we call it the Green Rainbow Party, but it's one of a number of things I'm involved in.
My day job is as a professor, I'm a biologist, but I also do some writing for Counterpunch.
Okay.
And you know, I've actually enjoyed your articles for Counterpunch for a long time.
When I went back looking them up last night and this morning, again, I realized that you'd written some articles that I had really enjoyed in the past that I hadn't made the connection between some of them, so I'm thinking particularly the book of Rahm.
Hopefully we can get to that a little bit later in the show here.
Well, that's a really interesting point, because, you know, no one is perfect, but probably the worst president of the second half of the 20th century, in my view, was Truman.
And the best was probably Ike.
And the Democrats now, the New Democrats and the AIPAC Democrats, like Rahm Emanuel, hold up Truman as the ideal now.
And of course, he was the first one to wage an undeclared war.
And he used atomic weapons?
Atomic bombs.
Yeah.
Operation Keelhaul.
You know about that one, where they gave all the Russian prisoners back to Stalin to be executed?
Three million of them.
Geez.
Well, that's the other American holocaust after the Indian Wars.
Yeah, wow, so, well, let's go ahead and stick with that, then.
Who is this guy Rahm Emanuel, and why does it matter that he holds Truman up to be the example of what a Democrat ought to be?
Well, actually, he started out as a ballet dancer, that was his first career, and then he decided he wasn't quick on his feet, so he became a political activist in democratic circles in Chicago, and then during the first Gulf War, he volunteered for the Israeli army and served for a time there, and nobody really knows what he did, he was supposed to be repairing cars in the desert, and then he returned and he quickly became very influential as a money raiser in the Clinton campaign.
And he's sort of been around democratic circles ever since, and then he emerged as the chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in the last election, and he damn near lost the elections for the Democrats, because he was really pushing hard for pro-war candidates, and they all failed, and the candidates who won were the ones that Rahm Emanuel was not very happy with, who were, at least nominally, anti-war.
To me, he represents the APEC in the Democratic Party, he's very hawkish, he wants to, seems like every candidate is now saying, we have to increase the armed services by 100,000 troops, that's one thing he wants to do, and then, well, I think you'll find that most of them have that in their platform, on both sides of the aisle.
Not Ron Paul, not Dennis Kucinich, not Mike Grivel, but all the rest of them, they seem to be agreeing.
And then he also is calling for some kind of national service for all young people, and to me, I don't see why that's necessary, and it can easily turn into universal military service at the drop of a hat.
So basically, he's a dangerous guy, and he has a lot of influence, because he's the money raiser, and he's sort of the counterpart of Chuck Schumer in the House, and Schumer does the same in the Senate.
So I wrote three on Rahm Emanuel, first pointing out that he was picking pro-war candidates and putting a lot of money into their campaigns.
There was a famous campaign in, where was it, Christine Segalis ran against, oh geez, the name is escaping me, against the, she was the Democratic primary candidate who was very anti-war, and she ran against a woman who was a vet who had lost a leg in the war.
Hammy Duckworth, that's it, and Rahm Emanuel, and she was pro-war, Emanuel, and not a very effective spokesperson either, Emanuel poured money into her campaign and turned out every Democratic celebrity from Barack Obama to Clinton to you name it, they were, Gary Edwards, they were all out there, and with all that, she just squeaked by, she nearly didn't beat the anti-war candidate, and then of course, because she had nothing that distinguished her from her opponent in terms of war, which was the main issue, she lost the election.
And Emanuel was doing that, so I pointed out the strategy he was pursuing, and then I actually bought his book, which was a miserable little, I mean it's barely a book, it's two long essays, and there are two authors, and he lays out his vision for America in bold print.
And then the third piece was written to show actually how he had nearly, you know, he nearly lost the elections for the anti-war Democrats, which would have been, you know, you would have to work very hard in the atmosphere of 2000, in the atmosphere of 2006 to do that, but he darn near did it.
Right, I mean if we just remember back, the end of last summer, it was widely acknowledged even by the Democrats that they were running on nothing, except that they weren't the Republicans, they didn't want to even, Pelosi or any of them, didn't even want to open their mouth really about anything, because they were hoping to just win by default, and it was really kind of a groundbreaking thing, wow, the Democrats are really running on nothing except that they're not the Republicans, and that's how they won both houses of Congress, but what you're telling me is that, the way the fights all worked out in the primaries earlier in 2006, that this guy Rahm Emanuel, who's in charge of the fundraising for the Democratic Party, was doing everything he could to undermine the anti-war Democrats, support the pro-war Democrats, and you say that in every case where he succeeded in doing that, the pro-war Democrat ended up losing in the general election to the Republican.
Oh yeah, he was a disaster, and, well, was he removed from his post?
For almost costing the Democrats both houses of Congress?
He still has access to all the money, however that's done, so I, no, of course not.
And I guess the thing is, you know, the Democrats, well, I want to stick to the issue of war and peace and the police state, and the Democrats ran on the platform that they were not Republicans, but on those issues, once they got elected, they were Republicans.
So to me, and I don't draw any major, any distinction between the two major parties now, they're both parties of war, and we're in a pickle because of that.
Yeah, Jon Stewart asked Ron Paul the other night on The Daily Show, or no, it was Tucker Carlson on MSNBC, he said, yeah, but Ron Paul, if you don't get the nomination, then what are anti-interventionists supposed to do, because, of course, all the Democrats support a preemptive nuclear war against Iran too.
And Ron Paul basically conceded, yeah, you're right, I don't know, I don't know, the American people are kind of stuck, the war party controls both parties.
I know.
So we are stuck, and I think, you know, one of the interesting things that, we talked about the Future of Freedom Foundation series of talks, meeting, conference over the last weekend.
Yeah, talks about that.
I very unfortunately missed it, I was not able to go, so I want to know all about that, and I did read your great article about it too.
Well, I guess one of the things that really came out there is that the question of what to do, you know, the libertarian movement has this philosophy of, well, you can call it what you want, you can call it non-violence, civil disobedience, you can call it withdrawal of consent from the governing parties, and that's the way that Gandhi proceeded in India, and I think we almost have to, I don't think we have any other out, and I don't know how we can do that in a way that people might accept that, I guess what happened in India is the British made it illegal to manufacture or sell any salt, except salt that was made by the Brits, and so there was this, the way they made that, and then of course they taxed the hell out of it, and so what Gandhi did was defy the salt tax, and everybody joined and they defied the salt tax, now that's, you can do that against a colonial power, but what if you're occupied by your own government, then what do you do?
So I don't know, you know, a lot of people have already sort of done something because the majority of Americans now do not belong to either the Democratic or Republican parties.
Right, that's true, although we can't, withholding taxes from them won't work though, because they'll just print the money out of thin air and borrow the rest from China.
Well they'll print it out of thin air, they'll borrow it from China, and they'll put you in jail.
Yeah.
So that is not something that most people are ready to do at this point, that's a big big big big step, so maybe there are smaller steps that can be done, I haven't thought of them, but I was very impressed, Robert Higgs who was one of the speakers of the conference pointed me to, you know, I said to him, as I mentioned in the article, I don't know how your listeners will receive this, but I said, your theory of the state, the libertarian theory of the state is like Marx's theory of the state, I said it's pretty much the same thing.
And he said, yeah, he said Marx had a great theory of the state, just a lousy view of economics.
Yeah, I pretty much agree with that.
And so, and he pointed me way back to, he said if you want to see some common roots, there's a book by a guy who wrote in France in the middle 1500s, La Boitie, and his book, he has this famous essay, it's in a book form, you can find it on Amazon.com, Murray Rothbard wrote the preface to it, very nice preface.
And this is the first discussion of how, really a discussion of why people, why the majority consents to the government by a tyrannical view.
And he talks about withholding consent, and various ways you might do that.
So that was really the first, and that apparently has affected a lot of people, and you know, there's also a great, not a very accessible, but a great novel called Seeing by this Portuguese writer Saramago, and he put one day, you know, I don't want to go on too long here, but one day the novel begins, it's a rainy day in the capital of a country, Portugal apparently, and it's very rainy, and nobody, it's the election day, and nobody's showing up.
And then towards the end of the day, all of a sudden, everybody shows up, and they vote.
And they go to count the votes, and except for 2 or 3%, they're all blank.
And so the government is thrown into complete chaos, they wall off the capital, so this doesn't spread, the government flees the capital because they're afraid of what's going on, and all people do is just withhold their vote.
It's comic, it's tragic, but what would it take here for people to, what would it take for people to say, you know, we've had enough, we can't go on destroying our lives, our country and a lot of the world in this way.
I don't know what it would take, I really don't know, but I think we're at the point where we have to begin to think about something like that.
Well, I think most people when they give up on the system in terms of, you know, their own ideas of being able to have political power, you know, is it worth it to them to go join the local party and try to have an effect and that kind of thing, I think most people when they realize just how little effect they have compared to the people who, well, for example, the corporations on the government's dole, the billions and billions of dollars at stake there, and they realize how little power they have against lobbies like that, I think they mostly just tune out rather than, it's not that they stop caring necessarily, but they just figure if they can live their lives without having to, you know, suffer over it every day and basically get on, it's better to just turn away and drop out.
So it's, you don't have them show up and vote with a blank ballot, they just don't show up at all.
Yes, well, one of the things that, you know, when you originally talked to me, we were talking about Sudan by email, and I said I had a Sudanese friend who's been a citizen here for 20 years, and she's actually a physician, and she despises her government, but she does not like the campaign that's being carried on by, again, the Democrats and Republicans both against Darfur and Sudan, but she will, I couldn't get her to come because she's afraid.
And so, you know, and if, because she's an Arab American, and she is a citizen, I suppose you call her an Arab American.
She's afraid of what?
She's afraid of the American government coming after her?
Yeah, she is.
For coming on my show?
Yeah.
Well, if you talk to a lot of Arab Americans now, they're very afraid.
They don't want to, many who used to speak up on the issue of Palestine, they're a little more quiet than they used to be.
And so, people say, well, we'll retreat to our private lives.
I suppose that's one solution, but that's on the assumption that you'll be left alone.
And you know, if they suspended habeas corpus for one American citizen, well, what will they do to the rest of us?
And you know, they used to tap people's phones.
Now they look at every piece of email, as far as I can see, that anybody writes.
So, you know, we're carefully monitored by a government, which is beyond our control.
That's really a very dangerous situation.
And I think the libertarians, and I'm speaking not necessarily the party, because the party seems to switch around, but the libertarian philosophical point of view has a stronger hold on that idea than any other group.
And so, that's a great thing about antiwar.com, that it's brought a libertarian view of the world in the war to a lot of people.
Well, and you complained in your article that even though the libertarians try to reach out to the left as often as we can, the left won't offer their hand back to us, for the most part.
Now, we get nothing but love from counterpunch, we get nothing but love from counterpunch.
Well, I think it's interesting, for example, that, I don't know, the best way, you know, this is not theology here, this is not perfection or whatever, if you're embarking on something serious, then you have to collect all the allies you can.
You might not agree with them on everything, so on other things you'll be on other sides of the aisle.
As long as we don't kill one another off or put one another in jail in the course of these political arguments, then all is well.
But if you're serious about that, you cannot have a lot of preconditions.
For example, I have a quarrel, and I work with a leftist group, anyway, United for Peace and Justice, but the justice part shouldn't be in there, because their notions of justice might not be somebody else's notions of justice.
And then you've already, by that mere word, you've divided up the anti-war movement.
And I'll tell you, it's not just against libertarians, it's against people on the, even farther on the left, a group called Answer, that they, you know, they were very militant on the question of the Middle East, and these people were excluded.
And once they were excluded, the newspapers stopped attacking this group I just mentioned, UFPJ, but they also stopped reporting on them.
Now what is better, to be reported on and attacked, or to be lost?
I think it's better to be attacked than to be lost.
So it's not a strategy that's working out, and it's a strategy that's pinned too much to the Democratic Party.
People just can't get out of that.
It's very troublesome.
And as a matter of fact, we saw some of that at the Future of Freedom Congress.
There were mostly people who were much older.
Some of the discussion, people had laughed back into partisan loyalties, and I don't know, that's not working for us.
That obscures real discussion and makes us too vulnerable to the people who want to continue this empire.
Yeah, I absolutely agree with you.
The entire left-right spectrum, not even the party loyalty, but even just the basic conception of liberalism and conservatism, I think that we're going to continue to be, you know, stuck with these two supposedly opposing parties that really just aid and abet each other, as long as the American people continue to classify their politics in left and right terms.
I mean, the fact of the matter is that the left believes in freedom half the time, and boss and everybody else around the other half, and the same thing for the right.
And it's the libertarians that take the libertarian sides of both.
But I think also there are other elements in, at least I would say, you've probably had people from the Second Vermont Republic on your program, I don't know.
I haven't talked to them yet, but I know what you're talking about.
So there was a First Vermont Republic that didn't join the Union at the time of the American Revolution until late.
And now there are people up there that are calling for a Second Vermont Republic.
They want out.
And you cannot tell whether those people are left or right much of the time, because they're both strongly in favor of civil liberties.
They both feel that, whether they call themselves left or right, they're both strongly for civil liberties.
They're both anti-empire.
They both feel that the federal government is out of their control.
And they're both for doing things as locally as possible.
So what's the difference?
Sometimes there's a wonderful, very smart woman in Massachusetts, Carla Howell, who once ran for governor here.
And there's an equally smart and politically attractive woman, Jill Stein, who once ran for governor, is green.
And frankly, half the time, I can't tell their positions apart.
So it's that classical liberalism, that real liberalism, that is frankly the American tradition.
That's everybody's favorite founder.
Well, I guess there are some exceptions.
David Brooks, for example, prefers Alexander Hamilton.
But pretty much the rest of us prefer Jefferson.
Conservatives believe that Jefferson is the founder of their movement, and liberals as well.
Yeah, I know.
That's at the foundation, again, at the conference over the weekend.
And it was really very nice to see that an easel was put up in front of the hall and a portrait of Jefferson was there.
Actually that's the other great thing about the libertarian philosophy, because maybe the libertarians at this moment can't turn thousands of people out into the streets.
That's not been their mode of behavior.
But people have learned the Jeffersonian philosophy in grammar school and high school.
They know about that.
They don't have to be introduced to something brand new.
They just have to understand that it applies to foreign affairs, too.
That's where we could make some great steps forward.
I thought at the end of the Cold War, there were people like, let's see, certainly on the left there was Noam Chomsky and certainly on the right there was Murray Rothbard and others who said that the Cold War was just a big excuse for empire, that when it was over nothing would change, really.
And I thought they were wrong.
Geez, you know, the Cold War's over, everything's going to change.
A friend of mine said the Cold War's over, let the good times roll.
But no, that isn't what's happened.
And so I have to say that those analysts were right and I was wrong, that this empire is just rolling right along.
That's what Chalmers Johnson said, too.
He calls himself a former spear carrier for empire, and then when NATO didn't disband and the empire didn't end at the end of the Cold War, he said, well, he went back and studied history and changed his mind and had to admit to himself that, wow, the Cold War on this end was just an excuse.
You know, we were just as much or even more so, perhaps, the aggressors as the Soviets.
Oh, yeah.
Because both sides had fallen into, you know, a vision, an imperial vision.
And frankly, perhaps we were worse, I don't know, it's hard to say, but because our economic system was much more powerful and successful than that of the Soviet Union, we were able to do more damage just by virtue of the power we had and have at our disposal.
And of course, that whole thing, you know, to me, because I visited, I lived for three months in the Soviet Union in its final days in the Gorbachev era, and I don't see how any CIA analyst could have missed the fact that the thing was falling apart.
It was falling apart from the inside, that they could not understand that, which apparently they couldn't.
It was incredible to me, all you had to do was look, you'd say, what is this?
Well, and we know now that James Baker and Brent Scowcroft went to Europe to try to arrange some emergency loans in order to prop the Soviet Union back up to hold it together.
That's called winning the Cold War in GOP circles, those are the realists.
Those aren't the crazies, those are the good guys in the Republican Party.
So, at any point, if we did more damage, it's because we have more power.
So here we are, and now a whole new enemy that has been created.
So in any event, one of the groups that I work with here is called the Anti-War League.
I'm just giving it a plug, antiwarleague.com.
Sure, I'm a member of that too.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
So, in any event, I think it's great because it brought, you know, someone named Doug Fuda founded it, and the slogan is, all antiwar, all the time.
And the person I work most closely with there, and who I agree most closely with, is another fellow, a libertarian, Richard O'Koyne, who was the lieutenant gubernatorial candidate for governor, I think it was, let's see, it must have been 2002.
And I find him, he and I can get along much better and do things together that we cannot get the conventional, or as I like to call it, official peace movement to do.
And we disagree about almost, you know, we can get to fighting if we start to talk about national or state health insurance.
But I don't care, because I know that he and I can argue about that.
And we're never going to put one another in jail over it or shut one another up.
And so people like that, I regard as ideal for working on things when we are in agreement.
Well, one thing that has got to be worked on is, as you say, withholding consent.
And this is my whole plan, basically, toward the state, is to just give them no legitimacy whatsoever.
To not take their word for it, ever.
To refuse to ask them for help with anything, ever.
It's one of the reasons I didn't finish college.
I didn't want to owe the federal government money.
I don't want to owe them anything.
And one of the things that's happening now, particularly on the left, but as you pointed out, among some Republicans in Congress and so forth as well, is not just giving consent to Dick Cheney, but begging Dick Cheney to expand America's war on terror, if you'll accept that terminology, to the Sudan.
And I just want to remind the audience, I have here from The Washington Post from last April 24th, 2006, about Osama bin Laden, as far as I know, this was the last podcast that Osama bin Laden did.
This is in April of 2006.
And according to the Post here, it says, in the new remarks, bin Laden complained about Western interference in shattered Muslim regions around the world.
He urged Muslims to go to the war-torn Darfur region of Western Sudan to fight international peacekeepers, saying their real mission was to occupy the region and steal its oil under the cover of maintaining security there, according to a translation of the audio tape by the BBC.
So, a couple of things there, first of all, what did he tell his followers?
That the heathens who watch MTV are coming?
No, he said they're coming to steal oil, is what he said.
And he predicted that where we would be going to steal that oil is the Sudan.
How can it be?
How can it be that the American left wants Dick Cheney to expand the war to the next place on Osama bin Laden's list?
Well actually, there's a famous sign at one of the anti-war rallies, and I see this every now and then, out of Iraq and into Darfur.
That is not a non-interventionist foreign policy, and I'm afraid that's another point where a lot of the left, well, a lot of people in general, don't really have at their heart the idea of a non-interventionist foreign policy.
The Cold War period has really weakened that idea, and I think Justin Raimondo's book is really great for showing that.
So the intervention in the Balkans is crazy.
The intervention in Iraq is disastrous.
The intervention that's shaping up now in Darfur, I don't know, could be equally disastrous.
The aid workers there are already complaining that the no-fly plans are going to prevent them from getting aid in.
And as I understand it, the situation in Darfur, now, it's improved, is not much different from the situation in Gaza.
So maybe we should have a no-fly zone over Gaza.
I don't know, it's a, and, and, and, well, this is what Joe Biden said in the debate.
He got all emotional and pointing his finger in the audience's face and everything.
We absolutely have to do at least a no-fly zone if not put 19-year-olds with M4s on the ground.
Yes.
Well, my friend from Sudan, as I said, she's a physician and she still has family there.
She mentioned that last year, because now the fighting is debated, actually most of the fighting now, according to the BBC, is between different factions in Darfur.
The main fighting is no longer with the central government, but that aside, she said more people died in Darfur and in Sudan of malaria last year than died in the war.
And of course, the reason is they can't afford, anti-malarials are now very expensive there.
And the reason is that Bill Clinton bombed their only pharmaceutical plant.
Oh, thank you so much for not calling it an aspirin factory.
Oh, I get it.
You're not a right-wing idiot.
That's why you didn't call it an aspirin factory.
Let's, let's review the facts of that case again.
Was it not Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter, who documented beyond any doubt that this was a pharmaceutical plant, that there was no chemical weapons there, and that was it tens or hundreds of thousands or millions of people who died of easily curable diseases because the main antibiotics factory for Sub-Saharan Africa was destroyed by Bill Clinton that day?
Absolutely.
And the striking thing is, you would think that once that came out, that the United States would have apologized.
And if we want to do something for the people of Darfur and Sudan, you'd think we might pay reparations to rebuild that factory.
But that's never happened, and to me, that's really quite amazing.
It's probably far worse than anything Gaddafi ever did blowing up airplanes.
So you know, that's a sore spot.
And I can imagine how people, you know, we don't, how do the people of the Sudan feel about that?
I mean, how can they...
Oh, I'm sure they've forgotten it a long time ago.
Oh, yes.
And of course, you know, you really can see that this policy of the United States has some consistency.
And because of two factors, because of the strength of the military industrial complex, and I think the industrial side is the worst part of it, the military actually seemed to be a little wiser than the industrial and the philosophers of war that inhabit the upper reaches of the Pentagon.
The military industrial complex and APEC, two things running together, are making it very, very difficult for us to extract ourselves from the position we're in.
And maybe, I don't know, maybe the empire will fall apart because it'll just fall, collapse out of indebtedness.
But I don't think anybody wants to see that.
No, certainly not.
I mean, the best way to end an empire, I think, is to just bring your troops home and, you know, hope that you don't lose your republic at the same time you're giving up your empire.
Try to keep everything cool.
I don't want revolution, I want repeal and decentralization in a slow and peaceful manner.
Same here.
Until we can get back to the Articles of Confederation, at least.
Well, I'm happy with the original Constitution.
I'll settle for it.
I'll go with that.
I'll settle for the Constitution, Hamilton's plot.
And let's talk about the Iraq War, too, in the last few minutes here.
Is it not the case that Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid and the Democrats in Congress now own this war?
That this is their war?
Oh, they've owned it from the very beginning.
I mean, I think people forget, and I think we always need...
The history of this is, okay, Bush, clearly the impetus for this is the neoconservative cabal.
They've called themselves that.
This was their design.
We all know that from the beginning.
But in October 2002, the Senate was controlled by the Democrats, and it was the Democrats that voted...
Well, there were 23 votes, I believe, against the war.
But the really chilling thing, and I think it was two Republicans in the Senate voted against the war, and 21 Democrats, whatever it was.
But if you look at that, and actually, at that time, Senator Byrd tried to filibuster against the war, something that people have forgotten.
And he managed to get 26 votes.
You need 40, 41, actually, so that...
Just as on the immigration bill last night, they got 41 votes, and the bill was dead.
All you need in the Senate to kill something that's 41 votes.
So what you're telling me, then, is that Tom Daschle, if he had made a decision and put his managers on the floor to start twisting arms and bossing people around, he could've stopped this war in October of 2002?
Sure.
Sure.
But that isn't how the decisions were being made.
If you look at every...
So Bush and Rove were very clever.
They brought this up, you know, weeks before the election.
The election of 2002 was coming in weeks.
And the Democratic senators who either, A, had presidential ambitions, or B, were facing a close election, like Daschle, like Cleland, like Hillary Clinton, like John Edwards, like John Kerry, if they had Joe Biden, presidential ambitions, or were facing a close race, the only exception I know of is the late Paul Wellstone.
He was facing a very close election, and he voted no.
And so, in any event, they could've filibustered against the war, then it would've only taken 41 votes.
As a matter of fact, each and every appropriation, they could've filibustered, and it would've only taken 41 votes.
And now, for a long while, the last appropriation, the supplemental, all they would've had to do is...
As a matter of fact, it doesn't even take 41 votes.
It just takes 41 abstentions.
You need 60 votes to break a filibuster, or essentially to get cloture.
And if you don't get cloture, if you don't stop debate, then the bill is dead.
So in 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, the Democratic Party had the votes in the Senate plus to end the war, and they still do.
And so, it is their war, and you can't tell me that...
Now, Joe Biden and Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are saying, well, you gotta give us more senators.
We can't get anything done unless we have two-thirds.
Well, two-thirds, the last vote, all they could get to vote against the funding was 14.
Two of them Republicans.
No, actually...
Well, I don't know.
There may have been a Republican, but that's all we have in the whole Senate right now.
So we're in a pickle.
And I'll tell you, there was a case...
I don't know.
Your listeners might not be crazy about this, but in January 2005, Teddy Kennedy came out against the war and said, we should be out of that right away.
And he was trashed by the other Democrats.
We were in Washington lobbying for him to come out, actually wanted him to start a filibuster.
And I said, we realize that when Teddy Kennedy came out, and for this in January 2005, he was shunned by his party.
And this woman, very nice woman, she says, he still is.
So the powers that be won't let you do that.
And so as I say, we're in a pickle.
We're in a terrible state here.
And I think it's a very dangerous state.
And...
Do you think that the Democrats have any excuse that they can't defund the war because that'll be termed abandoning the troops?
I mean, I know Joe Biden specifically has come out and completely and totally accepted the Bush premise, that it's abandoning the troops to not continue to pass.
No, I think that's very convenient.
That's their excuse, clearly.
If somebody makes a contrary argument and loses it, in other words, if they went out there and fought fiercely for that argument, and you could see in the polls that the people that they couldn't win the argument, that would be one thing.
But when you don't try to make the argument, you just repeat Bush's argument and say, there's nothing we can do it.
I don't believe that.
That's not a good faith effort, that's an excuse.
And so we're just, you know, I hope we can figure out something to do in terms of what La Boettie suggested back in the 1500s.
But I think that's where we are.
I don't think there's, I don't think right now there's any way out.
We could try to build a long-term movement, but I'm not sure we have time for that.
Some massive act of non-violent civil disobedience is necessary here.
What it is, I don't know.
Well, here's a little something to rally around, at least.
Neil Amber Crombie and Ron Paul have co-authored legislation to put an expiration date on the authorization to keep troops in Iraq.
The authorization would expire 180 days from enactment of the bill.
See, that's great, just like, you know, the resolutions that Paul or Kucinich have put before the House.
Those are all great things, but again, they won't happen because the war parties are not going to pass those things, given the amount of pressure they're under right now.
Right.
Why do you think it is that people aren't protesting in the street?
I mean, I'd like to say, well, it's because everybody's staying home blogging or something like this or that.
But, you know, in February and March, on the 15th of February and March 2002, tens of thousands of people turned out at the Texas State Capitol to oppose this war, and, you know, millions and millions of people all over the world.
Where is this visual anti-war movement?
I think people, first of all, it's been fractured and splintered and sold out, and people are, I think, either in, I think a lot of people are just, unfortunately, they're very much against it, but they've kind of given up.
They've tried all these things and nothing happened.
So I think a lot of them have just given up, unfortunately.
And somehow all these people have to be re-engaged and brought together, and we can only bring people together, and, you know, it used to be called a patriotic front or a united front.
People of very different persuasions on many matters would come together to basically save their country and their way of life.
And we'd better think a lot about that, because maybe I'm too pessimistic, but I think it's slipping away, and the technology is so powerful now that if it slips too far, we will have an awful lot of trouble getting it back.
No, I absolutely agree with you, and share your very same frustration.
All the information is there, all the leadership is there, but there's no mass.
Well, that's true.
So it was, I don't know whether our time is up.
Yeah, it's about up.
I just wanted to echo what good advice I think that is, that people have got to put aside some differences and bring the best of the left and the right together against empire.
This is America, this isn't the land of empire, this is the limited republic that declared its independence from an empire.
It's the one thing we're all most proud of about our country.
Yes, and again, that's a very good thing in our history, that we are an ex-colony.
And actually, we share that with some of the up-and-coming powers.
We have more in common, historically, in that way anyway.
Sure, and with the people we're dominating now.
We have that in common with the people of Iraq.
Right.
Right.
Former British colonies.
All right.
Well, I really appreciate you, John Walsh.
Left, right, and prospects for peace.
Well, I think you run a great program, and another arm of antiwar.com is always welcome.
It's wonderful what you guys are doing.
Oh, well, thank you very much.
We're especially glad to have you guys around at Counterpunch.
Okay, take care.
All right.
Thanks again.
Have a good one.
Bye-bye.
This is John Walsh from Alexander Coburn's site, Counterpunch.