02/10/10 – Murray Polner – The Scott Horton Show

Yeah, I left my wallet in El Segundo.
Alright y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio, Chaos 95.9 in Austin, Texas.
A little Tribe Called Quest for you there.
And introducing our next guest, it's Murray Polner.
He's the author of No Victory Parades, The Return of the Vietnam Veteran.
And he's the co-editor with Thomas E. Woods Jr. of We Who Dared, Say No to War.
He's written for the New York Times, the Washington Monthly, Commonweal, the Nation, Columbia, Journalism Review, the Jewish Week, among others.
And he also wrote Branch Rickey, a biography, and Disarmed and Dangerous, The Radical Lives of Daniel and Philip Berrigan.
He lives in New York and I'm sure is all snowed in today.
Welcome to the show, Murray, how are you doing?
Thank you very much, doing fine.
Well, I'm very happy to have you here on the show.
And I read this great article that you wrote in the American Conservative magazine called Left Behind, Liberals Get a War President of Their Very Own.
But before we get into the substance of this, I think it's noteworthy that Tom Woods, who I guess is really a plumb line libertarian now, but who came from the right, and you collaborated on editing this book, We Who Dared, Say No to War, this collection of anti-war speeches from throughout American history.
And it was significant because you have a very different political background than Tom.
Is that right?
Very different, very much different.
Tom came to me, oh, about two years ago and had this, I don't know how he connected with me.
I think he had taught in a college where I had once taught.
And we met on some terribly rainy day, and he said he had this idea in mind.
The fact is I have been writing articles, op-eds, urging all people who are anti-war, not necessarily pacifists, just against constant persistent warfare, to sort of find a common denominator, even if you would disagree on taxes or abortion or whatever.
And Tom and I disagree on many things, but on what I consider to be the bedrock common denominator that we have, that as opposed to America's obsession with war and our strong obsession with civil liberties, we agreed to go ahead, and it was a perfect marriage.
Well, you know, I absolutely agree about, well, first of all, the quality of the book that you guys have put out here, and I hope that we can go through it a bit, a little bit later in the interview.
But I'm also all about the idea of the realignment, and being a libertarian myself, that means that I agree and disagree with liberals and conservatives on lots of things.
But, well, as you said, civil liberties and peace are things that, well, if we really do believe in them and want them, we're going to have to figure out a way to separate those things out as our top priorities.
Forget economics, forget abortion, and all these other things, and really come together with a new coalition, a new realigned American debate, with the anti-statists on one side and the statists on the other, to a degree, at least, or the peace and Bill of Rights crowd on one side, at least.
Well, let's hope that there isn't a nascent anti-war movement that will arise before the next election.
Well, as you say in your recent article here at the American Conservative, which, again, is an example of this realignment, they're the paleo-conservatives and have always been opposed to the Iraq War over there, at the American Conservative magazine, Scott McConnell and all those guys, and oftentimes publish liberals and leftists, such as yourself, Glenn Greenwald, Philip Weiss, and others, on these issues, these most important issues we agree about.
Norman Mailer.
Yeah.
When he was still alive.
But you also do say in here that anti-militarism is very much an American tradition, but it has never been a majority position.
And I guess really, to me at least, it seems like the major reason for that is because they've been able to keep us divided on social issues and just basic kind of cultural norms, whether you tend to be a conservative Christian type or more of a liberal hippie type or whatever, like these divisions are what keeps us from getting the people who, tends to keep us from getting the people who agree on these most important issues from coming together.
It is an American, anti-militarism is an American tradition, but as I have said, it's never been a majority position for many reasons, but of course, patriotism and nationalism is instinctive in the hearts of most Americans, however they define it differently.
Wars are always cheered with flags waving.
I always look back at world, I don't look back, I read about World War I, when the British generation that was so badly wounded and killed so many of them in World War I, where they would write, the poets especially would write about the crowds cheering them off to war.
And they would ask after a while, what were they cheering?
Death?
Killing?
Pain?
Suffering?
It's our war, military tradition, it's a, it isn't a military, we're not a garrison state, at least not yet, but what we have is that it's embedded in our educational system, in our popular culture.
I love sports, especially baseball and football, and I wrote an article some years ago for The Nation, asking why Carlos Delgado, who was then a first baseman for the Toronto Blue Jays of the American League, was booed by all the living room heroes, stay at home heroes in Yankee Stadium, because he refused to stand for God Bless America, which Steinbrenner insisted be played on the seventh inning stretch at every Yankee home game.
I mean, after all, Irving Berlin wrote a pop song.
We might as well stand for I Love Christmas, or something of that sort.
And he was booed.
And my article was that there always have been an association of the military with sports, for example, F-16s flying over the Super Bowl and things of that nature.
Opening games where the flag is carried by a detachment of American Marines.
I have nothing against Marines.
I served in the Naval Reserve and in the Army, both.
But I must say, it has nothing to do with sports.
But it's associated.
The love of America equals to them the beginning of all wars, until the body bags come back, until their children don't come back or come back with various diseases damaged in body and mind.
And it's very difficult to point out that in every war we've had, except for the good war, which was probably the only reasonable war we had, World War II, every war we had has begun for questionable reasons, been saluted and cheered, and then where the population ultimately turned against them.
One of the things Tom Woods and I turned out in our book, people were shocked that Abraham Lincoln was a bitter critic of the Mexican War, and he denigrated President James Polk in a way that one would think almost an insult if we were against an American president.
So it's never been a majority position, but at times when the wars get very badly, are going on very badly, as in that failed war, that war that should never have been fought in Vietnam, where roughly 58,000 men died immediately, and many more have died since the various ailments.
When that was happening, people turned against it.
And then eventually the Americans seemed to have a very short memory, and sometimes I think, as one writer once wrote, we're amusing ourselves to death.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's Neil Postman's.
Right, famous remark.
I read it once, and I said, Neil, that's the best remark I've heard since then.
Well, I don't think I read that one.
I think I read the Technopoly, the other one.
But anyways, this goes along with the whole neoconservative Leo Strauss thing, where you talk about sporting events and militarism and all that, where this is what makes us Americans.
This becomes the thing that we can all identify with, that we all believe in at the same time, that makes us the same as each other or something.
This is why they call it national greatness conservatism over at the Weekly Standard, because it gets everybody saluting the same thing at the same time.
As long as their kids don't go into service.
Yeah, right, of course.
Now, Michael Ledeen sent his son, but that guy, he's a true believer.
Well, of course, there will always be an exception to the rule.
But in Vietnam, for example, according to the Congressional Weekly, as I remember, only 14 members of the United States Congress had children or grandchildren on active duty, and only one or two had served in Southeast Asia, in Vietnam.
Yeah, so these are some of the problems.
We have, I would say, a curse of neoconservatives and assorted liberal hawks.
And this is one of the serious problems that we have many of us, such as myself, who supported Barack Obama with great enthusiasm, who despised the previous vice president and the president and their policies, and thought that the invasion of Iraq, and even I wrote as very much a minority, going into Afghanistan, were all a serious mistake.
And yet, people accepted it.
And we who thought and believed and hoped that Obama would be different in foreign policy, I don't want to discuss domestic policy ever, because it's irrelevant at this point, unless you want to raise it, I don't care.
Well, yeah, my only problem is we...
I even gave, I think, 25 bucks to one of the campaign people that came around.
Well, I have to admit that I opposed McCain more, because I think that he's just too erratic.
I never believed that Obama was really any better, other than he's not completely insane, which I wonder about John McCain sometimes.
We hope and pray, you know, as my father used to say to the last great president, Calvin Coolidge.
I replied, because I liked my father-in-law very much, because there was no war at the time, which was a nice thing to do.
Yeah, that's why historians don't like Calvin Coolidge.
He just sat around all day.
Yeah, well, you know.
Well, let me ask you this, because, you know, as we do have this left-right divide, which seems pretty much all-encompassing in all of our political debates, and certainly it drowns out the common ground that we oftentimes do have on civil liberties and foreign policy.
Why don't you tell us a little bit about some of these speeches in this book, We Who Dared Say No to War, or maybe some of your favorites, and how well this book illustrates the wide and varied and proud tradition of anti-militarism in this society, because you really don't have to fit into any particular category to oppose American interventionism.
You could cite any number of American heroes, you know, like from Mark Twain to even Abraham Lincoln, to back up your peace position if you need to.
Well, there is an awful lot in the book, and if you want me to talk about it, but we started with the War of 1812.
It's just that there were more documentations and there was a limit to how many pages.
And we have Daniel Webster, a famous person, who opposed the Warhawks.
And that was the first time the Warhawks were given the name of Warhawks, because they wanted to conquer Canada.
And they made an argument that it would be a piece of cake, and Canadians would, like the Iraqis, welcome us, you know, and it would be a very simple and easy war.
Turns out the Canadians did not want to be part of the United States, and they also came in and burned Washington and did a lot of other damage.
It was Webster, when the Hawks, in 1812, tried to get the Federalists to support a draft law, Webster made his famous speech saying the draft is unconstitutional, which I would hope it would always be.
We deal, as I said, with the Mexican War, with Lincoln, who called James Polk, a pro-slavery, incompetent president, his speech he called it the half-insane mumbling of a fever dream.
My favorite is, I had written about William Graham Summer, a rather irascible former Methodist, I think, minister, who gave up the ministry, gave up religion, became a professor of sociology, probably one of the early founders of modern American sociology.
He was a social Darwinist, and wrote a book, The Conquest of the United States.
He pointed out, I don't have it in front of me, but he pointed out, paraphrasing, that if we support a war against a third or fourth-rate country like Spain, he wrote this book, The Conquest of the United States by Spain, what we will be doing is we will be handing on to the 20th century Americans a bloody, expensive heritage.
And he was absolutely right.
Yeah, that one's really my favorite, the William Graham Sumner piece.
Yeah, and World War I is also exciting.
Of course, we have Randolph Bourne.
Unfortunately, he was born ill, and he died a very young man.
His famous remark was, war is the health of the state.
And it is the health of the state.
World War II helped the United States recover from the serious depression of the 30s.
It has helped maintain a great deal of the post-World War II prosperity in the United States, and certainly now with Obama's new budget, which now cuts almost everybody except the military, because we believe that we're surrounded by the most dangerous enemies everywhere in the world.
And therefore, lots of money, lots of people are working.
I always laugh at some of these congressmen, it's not even funny, who always want to cut everybody else's budget or everybody else's program except the one in their district.
A good example is John Mercer, who died, but also the senator from Kentucky.
And they all do the same thing.
Helen Keller, of course, is in our book, and she was unknown to many Americans who studied and see the film, the wonderful film with Anne Bancroft.
Helen Keller was a socialist, and a great admirer of Jack London, also a socialist.
Eugene V. Debs, the great socialist labor leader, is in the book on World War I.
He was sentenced to jail for 10 years for opposing the draft and making a speech saying that working men and their families and their children are the ones who have to suffer from wars.
They go to war, and the rich stay home.
And so forth and so on.
World War II, we quote Jeanette Rankin, and that was certainly a war that had to be won, but she was the only one, first woman ever elected to Congress from Montana, and Ms. Rankin, Jeanette Rankin, voted against war, the only one, in 1917 and again in 1941.
And we have David Dellinger, who lived on until the 90s, a pacifist, and we have a good deal on the Coast War.
We have a favorite of mine by Bill Kauffman, Real Conservatives Don't Start Wars, and Murray Rothbard, War, Peace, and the State.
He is somebody who I don't agree with economically, but certainly I agree with every other thing that he says in foreign policy, and for a long time he and, oh, I forget his name, tried to start a journal that would marry the new left with the right, with the libertarian right, opposed to America's constant addiction to war.
The Vietnam War, we have many.
Of course, we have Bill Earhart, who was a Marine and an 18-year-old, learned the hard way that war is no joke, and has written about it in many, many books, memoirs, and poetry.
George McGovern introduced a piece of legislation, and when it was turned down, he stood on the floor of the Senate, George McGovern, who I supported passionately in 1972 against Nixon, and George McGovern said, this chamber reeks of blood.
Here was a man who had been a pilot in, like, 40 missions, bombing missions in World War II.
Of course, we also put in Country Joe and the Fish, and David Shoup was the commandant of the Marines, and in 1966 I think he made a speech in a college, which we quote, in California, that said the best thing that would happen for us, to happen for us and save our young, would be to let's mind our own business.
We also have Barbara Lee, the Democratic-Liberal congressman from California, and she warned against going to war in Afghanistan, in a country that is largely illiterate, grows for its own sake because it has to make a living, opium, has terribly corrupt government, tribal rivalries, and she said we're going into something with no beginning and we have no idea what the ending is.
Well, I'm going to have to stop you there because we're right up against the time wall here, but I just wanted to mention here at the end, especially you feature lots of conservatives and libertarians, and the final essay here is by our friend John Basil Utley, Left-Right Alliance Against War, and this book, We Who Dared Say No to War, is a great resource for anybody who, well, agrees with us, who agrees with the premise that we've got to put peace and liberty first, and so I thank you for it.
It really is a great book.
It's published by Basic Books, if anybody wants it.
Yeah, right on.
On all these things.
Yeah, yeah, that's fine.
And again, it's We Who Dared Say No to War, American Anti-War Writing from 1812 to now, co-edited by Murray Polner and Thomas E. Woods.
Thanks very much for your time on the show today, Murray.
Appreciate it.
Thank you.