12/15/10 – Kevin Zeese – The Scott Horton Show

Hey y'all, welcome back to the show, it's Anti-War Radio, I'm Scott Horton and our next guest on the show is Kevin B. Zese and if you go to original.antiwar.com/Kevin B. Zese you will find his latest article, Join Peace Vet-Led Protest at White House on December 16th and unfortunately I don't have your bio right in front of you, right in front of me, Kevin, but Voters for Peace, I know they can find you there.
That's right, votersforpeace.us.
And Come Home America too, right?
Come Home America and we've actually started a project on WikiLeaks, which I'd love people to join in on, which is wikileaksisdemocracy.org, please go there and sign up and get involved so we can run a campaign to prevent the United States from prosecuting and extraditing WikiLeaks, so please join us at wikileaksisdemocracy.org.
Great.
Yeah, I'm actually on my way down right now to the first event related to tomorrow's demonstration, which is being led by the Peace Vets at Veterans for Peace and the event I'm going to is a press conference, actually, and we'll start to kick it off and then we have a planning meeting tonight and then tomorrow at 10 a.m. at the White House people should join us and you'll see some really great people, Daniel Ellsberg will be there, Chris Hedges, the great author, you know, who was a fantastic war correspondent for the New York Times and has written some amazing books opposed to war.
In fact, Chris Hedges tomorrow will be, for the first time, risking arrest in a civil resistance action, so it's a big step for him.
So tomorrow is kind of an effort by Vets for Peace to kick off, you know, renew the anti-war movement, to really get us active again in the streets and telling Obama and the Congress to end these wars that are so counterproductive.
All right, now, you know, it's funny, because I was raised in the middle of Texas and it's hard for me to really wrap my head around it, but I've seen the map and I've been around there a few times, and if I really got this right in my imagination, those states up in the Northeast are really small, and if you're from anywhere around there, it's really not too far to get to this peace protest tomorrow, huh?
Exactly right, and people should put their West Coast brain on, because on the West Coast there's no distance at all from, you know, Massachusetts to D.C., but the East Coast has a different perspective of distance, but yeah, please, come down, we need every person we can to begin...
Everybody counts.
Everybody counts.
We need as many people as possible down there to, you know, show the President and the Congress that we're serious, that the anti-war movement is coming back and it's going to hold people accountable, and, you know, if you look at the midterm election, the Democrats should have learned that they need to excite their base.
Their base, the people that helped to get Obama in office, especially in the primary, is anti-war, and they're sitting down right now, they didn't show up in the midterm elections, and they won't show up in 2012 if these wars are continuing, so Democrats need to hear the message, end these wars, and end them now.
All right, everybody, it's Kevin Zese from votersforpeace.org and...
Dot US, votersforpeace.org.
Dot US, and comehomeamericans also dot US, right?
That's right, that's right.
And then the new one is wikileaksisdemocracy.org.
They're having a giant protest in Washington, D.C. tomorrow, and now you mentioned that Veterans for Peace is going to be leading this thing, is that correct?
That's right.
And tell people a little bit more about Veterans for Peace.
Veterans for Peace has been around for a long time, it's a pretty mature organization with some really good leadership, and they are people who served in various wars and who have learned a lesson from those wars, that war is not the answer, and they're doing all they can to end war.
So Google Veterans for Peace and you can find them quite easily on the web.
So they're a great organization, if you have any military history at all, please join them.
Even civilians who have no military history can join them.
They deserve our support, they're really great leaders, and we're really happy that they took the initiative to get this kicked off.
Well, you know, one thing that can be said about their web presence, too, is that they have the spreadsheet broken down where they have contact information for Veterans for Peace leaders in your neighborhood, and it's a very, you know, kind of personable site, you know, you don't have to join some giant national organization that's kind of far removed from you, there's very localized chapters of Vets for Peace all over this country.
And they are taking action.
They are not people who just make speeches and write articles, they actually get out there and put their bodies on the line, they've done some of the greatest demonstrations in Washington in the last year, there's tremendous banner drops that have made strong points at key times, so they are really a group that deserves the anti-war folks' support.
Not that my group, Voters for Peace, doesn't deserve it either, Voters for Peace.us, we could use your support as well, so if at the end of the year you're trying to decide what to do with your Christmas donations, please keep the peace in your mind, we all need your help.
Well now, it seems to me, you and I have talked for years and years now, wrapping up this decade, Kevin, looking back, we've been talking about this realignment, and trying to get the message out to the best of the left, the right, and all the libertarians and the greens, and all kinds of political persuasions in this society, that we've got to all agree on first principles and put those priorities first.
Peace and the Bill of Rights, those are the most important things, right?
Exactly right.
If we can come together around the issue of opposition to war and empire, that we are a country of laws, that obeys laws, that we're not one that abuses the laws around the world, then we can make a tremendous difference, because there will be Americans across the political spectrum who hold these views, who recognize that war is counterproductive to really having an effective foreign policy, and the recent WikiLeaks cables show that even the State Department has become a nest of spies, and we are acting almost as a rogue state around the world, and the mirror being held up by WikiLeaks should really ignite everybody to get more active in working to end wars.
Yeah, I mean, one thing you never see anywhere in those WikiLeaks is, we've got to do this in order to expand freedom in this, or that country you're talking about.
It's the dog that didn't bark in those WikiLeaks, right?
How much our government really cares for all the people of the world so much.
Exactly, and protecting, you know, the oil companies in Niger, and doing the dirty work of empire, which is really the work of transnational corporations who our military's been fighting for really since the time of Smedley Butler, who described war as a racket, and he was right then, and it's even more obvious now.
War is a racket that a few profit from, and many people pay for, and we're the ones paying, and a small percentage is profiting.
Well, you know, I've always thought, and I could be wrong, that a powerful way to change people's minds, to really get through to them a new way of thinking, is to attack the right from the right, and the left from the left, or to have someone who's right-wing and anti-war up there saying, you know, not only am I a veteran, but I'm a Christian and I'm a constitutionalist and I'm a capitalist, and I'm for family and whatever, and man, am I anti-war.
That's powerful.
If the caricature is everybody who's anti-war is Michael Moore, no offense to him, but that excludes more than half the population from wanting to be like him.
That was what was so powerful about Ron Paul's campaign in 2007 and 8, was he said, oh, look, you can be a Texas Republican and be against Empire, and everybody went, oh, thank you, finally, they took this permission slip from him, in a way, to say, okay, now I can be patriotic and be against this terrible policy.
Yeah, and I'll go a little further on that.
I think we really learned a lesson, we should learn a lesson from Iraq.
When millions of people demonstrated in advance of the war to stop the war from happening, Bush didn't have to listen, because the people who were demonstrating would never vote for him anyway.
They were on the left.
And if we had people in the leadership of that movement at the time who were Republicans and notable ones, we could have gotten Bush's attention, because he would have recognized that even his voting base was opposed to this war.
But if it's just the Democrat voting base, hey, go to war and make it tough on the Democrats.
It's a good political move.
But if we have an across-the-board anti-war movement, we can affect both parties and make them both pay a political price when they send us into these senseless wars.
Unfortunately, I have to get going, Scott.
I know you, you know, I'd love to talk longer, but I'm at this press conference that I get going to, and I've got to wrap it up pretty shortly here, so...
Oh, okay, no, I understand.
No problem.
Well, listen, I hope everybody will come out.
Where are they to meet you?
Tomorrow, in D.C.?
In the White House at 10 a.m.
In the White House at 10 a.m.
At the White House at 10 a.m.
All right, give them hell, Kevin.