05/19/11 – Steven Greenhut, Gene Berkman, and John Seiler – The Scott Horton Show

All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and our next guest is Stephen Greenhut.
He's here to help us send off our friend Alan Bach.
Greenhut is director of Pacific Research of the Pacific Research Institute's Journalism Center, which was launched in January 2010 to provide in-depth news coverage of California government with a focus on uncovering waste, fraud, and misuse of taxpayer dollars.
Most recently, he was senior editorial writer for the Orange County Register in Santa Ana, California.
He's a frequent contributor to LewRockwell.com.
Thanks for joining us on the show today, Stephen.
How are you doing?
Oh, good, thanks.
Thanks for having me.
Well, I'm very happy to have you here.
It's a sad occasion, but I'm happy to have the opportunity to have someone who knew Alan so well help us send him off here on anti-war radio.
I don't know if you know, but he was the first interview I ever did when I started the interview show back on the day that Baghdad fell, really, April 9, 2003.
Oh, I didn't realize that.
He got a hundred things right in that interview.
It was just great, and I interviewed him a whole lot of times after that.
Of course, he was the second longest continually writing columnist for antiwar.com beginning in the summer of 1999 and all the way through earlier this year, so he'll be sorely missed around where I'm from.
Oh, yeah, me too.
I mean, I've been very sad about hearing about his passing.
I did have a chance to talk to him for about an hour a few weeks ago, and I kind of thought maybe that might be the last time I talked to him, but he kept, you know, he kept in good spirits till the end, but Alan was a rock on the Orange County Register editorial page.
As far as when the war started, there was no wavering.
I mean, Alan and, of course, the Register editorial board.
It was Alan, me, and John Seiler.
We were the editorial writers.
John works for me now on our Cowatch Talk site, and Kathy Taylor, the editorial page editor.
At the time, in fact, we got into a big fight with Bill O'Reilly at the time, who was saying that we shouldn't criticize the government when the bombs are dropping and war is going on.
I guess if we did that, we would never criticize the government because there's always a war going on.
Right.
But I do remember Alan.
You know, Alan was a strong, principled libertarian, always against coercion, always against the war.
He also did, he was a happy warrior.
I did a little bit for him.
I published this morning just he was the ultimate happy warrior.
He never seemed to get mad at people, was never ad hominem.
He just knew that freedom was the right way to go and non-interventionism.
And as you can imagine, he took a lot of crap we all did when we were opposing the war in a very conservative area where, you know, we were in a small minority and you would never see Alan waver on anything and you'd never see him lose his temper, which isn't something I could say about myself.
I would get pretty angry.
And he just had that really kind nature about him.
And one of the most principled people I've ever known.
I would always turn to Alan whenever there were any questions of libertarian thinking.
I mean, he always just had, you know, just a solid, principled, well-read answer.
Yeah, always extremely thoughtful.
And sometimes when I was interviewing him, I would think he was done and then, oh, whoops, and stop and be quiet again because he's still going.
He just had to stop and think about exactly how to say it.
And then it always came out just right.
But yeah, you're right about what a nice guy he was.
I got a chance only a couple of times, really two or three times to hang out with him in person when I was living out there in California.
And yeah, he's just as nice in person, just as friendly in person as he always was on the radio.
Always had a silver lining and a chuckle and something funny and ironic about everything.
And it's just not my character.
But if I had it within me to be that way, I would want to be that way.
You know, he really is a good model for, you know, how a man's supposed to behave, that outlook on life that he had.
He never was mad.
He never...
Right, and he was...
You're right.
You think how easy it is to get mad, especially with the lies coming so thick and so transparent, too, if you know anything about what they're talking about.
But he never got that kind of outrage.
He always would just chuckle, slap his thigh and say, well, you know, that's how they are or whatever, you know?
Oh, exactly.
And he was a true libertarian, not just in his philosophy, but in his lifestyle.
I mean, he really was not the kind of person that would ever try to force his views on anyone or would...
His lifestyle was just live and let live.
He was very nice to people.
And, you know, I got to spend a lot of time with him.
I was on the editorial board for 11 years, and we had some debates, you know, some disagreements on the board.
You know, no matter how close in philosophy people are, they're always going to find some areas where there's a difference of opinion.
And he was always, you know, he was always gracious.
And looking back, I realized that on those points of disagreement, Alan was almost always right and I was usually wrong.
And he never would get mad.
And I just saw him in his dealings with, you know, out and about in the city.
And he was just kind to people and would never, you know, want somebody to do something that was against their will and just naturally libertarian and a good guy.
And, you know, I'm glad you brought up the interview you had during the beginning of the Iraq war, because as you know, from that time, it was a little weird being on.
That was the first time in my career that I'd been so out of sorts with what the overall philosophy was of the world.
I mean, we're always out of sorts with the philosophy of the world, but we're my neighbors and our readers were really angry at us.
They were gung-ho for this war.
And it was thanks to, you know, Alan's strong convictions and all of us were able to kind of hang in there while people were demanding that, you know, you know, the type of readers that are demanding that we change our position and complaining to the publisher and then to the register's credit.
There was never any, we never got any pressure whatsoever to change our views.
Yeah, you know, I remember he was actually hosting a radio show from California in New Orleans.
And I remember listening to it online.
And poor guy, he was just too nice for that.
I mean, this was right at the dawn of the Iraq war and everyone's calling up and calling him a commie and a traitor and whatever.
And here all his, I mean, the most sloganeering type of talk radio calls, you know.
And here all of his answers are very patient, calm explanations with history behind them and whatever.
And he would never fight back.
He would just go, well, you know, maybe this could be bad for America for the following 17 reasons or whatever, you know.
And he was just, he was so on point, but just was completely unwilling to play that AM talk radio show host game where you shouted everybody and, you know, like me.
Well, you know, and people were yelling.
I remember when we dropped O'Reilly at the time.
And I remember the voicemails.
I'm sure Alan got them too.
I got these, O'Reilly, I think made me his moron of the day or whatever for opposing the war or whatever.
And I remember the voicemails we got and Alan got and John got and Kathy got.
And Kathy took a lot of heat, you know, because that's the head of the department.
These were angry people, unbelievable.
And I remember I would get, I'd lose my cool and Alan would behave just as you described.
He just, oh, well, they just, you know, they're in his view.
And what I used to tease him about it, good naturedly that, you know, to him, everybody is just one step away from being a libertarian.
You know, if they just get shown a couple facts in a different way, every, he just had that enduring faith in human nature and the goodness of his fellow man.
And he just really believed that that, you know, that person who's screaming at us had a good heart.
And if he just would calm down and listen to his argument would become a libertarian, just like us, where I'd want to punch him out or something, you know, but not Alan, the person yelling at me.
So that's a really good nature.
And I think it's something we should all emulate in the libertarian movement, because we are on the outside.
Our views are not mainstream, you know, and what the normal debate is.
And people do get angry at us all the time and they accuse us of things that are ridiculous.
Yeah, well, you know, I played actually the first little bit of that first interview I did of Alan Bach earlier on the show.
And his first answer to me is paraphrasing Alvis Huxley, that violent and destructive means determine violent and destructive ends.
And like you said, he, you know, lived his life by that same libertarian political philosophy.
And so you can see right there that, you know, violent and destructive means, even in convincing someone, arguing with somebody is going to lead.
That's not how you win them over.
It won't work that way.
You know, whether he's talking about the Iraq war or how to argue about the Iraq war, it's the same thing.
No, that's exactly right.
So we're all, yeah, we're all kind of broken up about it.
I mean, because, you know, we knew he was very sick for a long time, but it looked like, you know, it looked like he was doing well and was beating the whole thing.
And then all of a sudden, I guess it happens a lot that way, right?
Where you look like you're doing well fighting cancer, and then all of a sudden it all comes back.
And then it's just nothing you can do.
Yeah, that's really sad.
I knew he was sick, but I didn't know he was that sick until, you know, the blog post yesterday.
I saw that he was told that it's the cancer more than the medicine now, and that it's a done deal now.
And that, I guess it was his wife Jen's email that she sent out.
So he just said a prayer asking God that it be swift.
And then, you know, then what?
Two hours later, three hours later, we find out that that was it.
There was no chance to call him and say goodbye one last time or nothing.
I know, it's true.
It's just very sad.
Yeah, Alan had strong faith too.
And he just, you know, just a good, all-around good guy.
You know, I'm very fortunate that I got to, you know, work closely with him for 11 years.
And got to, you know, the thing, Kathy and I would sometimes laugh as we all at the register, you talked about how he would always have so many arguments.
I mean, we all tended there to write longer than the average newspaper piece, you know.
And I remember when Alan did a piece on Iraq, the history of Iraq.
And it was so long and we did it in a series, which, you know, I've written those long ones too.
But I mean, he just was just a font of knowledge, you know.
He just would, these arcane things or the history of Iraq.
I mean, gosh, I knew nothing about it.
And Alan would let readers in on things that, you know, we never would have guessed.
And then we looked these years later and it was all very relevant.
And it's all, much of what he wrote ended up being prophetic.
And he was certainly, you know, a very fine person in the long line of, you know, the Orange County Register as a history.
And he really comes out of that strong, you know, Hoyle's family, the owners of the register.
And it comes to really has that same kind of ethic and a really admirable person.
Now, see, I wonder, did he write about, did he do news coverage of Ruby Ridge for the register?
Well, you know, I think his book on that, he did a book on that.
And I think it was out before I got to the register.
So I wouldn't doubt, I imagine he would have written some things for the register about it.
But I know his, what was it called?
Ambush at Ruby Ridge.
Yeah, well, in fact, you know, when I first, I had read antiwar.com back in 99 or something.
And I didn't have much internet until the beginnings of the March to the Iraq War.
And I remember telling my friend, oh, wow, look, Alan Bach, that's the guy that wrote the Ruby Ridge book.
And I was so excited to see that he was writing for antiwar.com, you know, and I just devoured all of his archives, you know, sat down and spent a whole night going back over them all or something.
And because that book on Ruby Ridge is just absolutely brilliant.
Of course, it's the kind of topic that maybe motivates a lot of people to write about it.
But he actually is the guy that did the very best job on it.
And that's even according to Randy Weaver told me that himself.
Oh, yeah, that doesn't surprise, I mean, Alan's stuff was always, I mean, it was always spot on accurate.
And, yeah, I, you know, I have a copy of the book and I haven't read it.
I should read it and then...
Oh, you'll finish it in one day.
You'll sit down and read the whole thing and be wowed, but you won't put it down.
It's incredible.
It's so well written.
He gave me a copy when I first started and then he did Waiting to Inhale, which was, you know, a good one on medical marijuana.
So he was kind of on the cutting edge of that whole issue, especially as we see how, you know, how things have, that issue's exploded here in California and probably elsewhere too, but certainly become a big issue here.
Yeah.
You know, I think about what a major loss this is for antiwar.com and, you know, for the Orange County Register, but really, I mean, how long had he been riding there?
This must be a real loss for the community there.
Right, right.
And yeah, cause he was there, I mean, it's gotta be like 27, 30 years.
So it was an enormous amount of time.
I'm not sure, but he was there for a really, for, you know, entire career basically.
And then, so it's, yeah, it is.
And then Alan, you know, Alan was, you know, well-known in Orange County and he lived down in Riverside County.
And so, you know, kind of a staple of Southern California libertarianism.
And so, yeah, absolutely.
It was, it's a big, a big loss for the community.
Yeah, well, geez.
And I guess probably shouldn't go too far into this topic on the radio, but, you know, I wonder if there's like any kind of memorial thing or fun, how people can get involved or send their best wishes to his widow, Jen, who's an extraordinary woman.
Yeah, I haven't heard yet.
I mean, I think it's probably a little early to hear that yet.
And, but we can certainly, I could certainly, yeah.
Well, you're on the email list from Jen and would certainly, you'll certainly hear and we'll certainly hear also.
Yeah, I feel really bad for her.
She's a really nice lady.
Absolutely, yeah.
Deserves to be liked.
Yeah, and he's got nice kids and, you know, good family.
So yeah, he's a good model for other libertarians, you know, for people in general, but as other, you know, for how, I think how to make our, how to make our case in a gracious and kind manner against what seems like long odds and still maintain a happy and kind demeanor.
Yeah, well, you know, it just isn't my nature, but I know in my head anyway that, you know, my very favorite libertarians are, you know, Harry Brown and Ron Paul and Alan Bach and the people who are the most gentlemanly, you know, they're the ones who, you know, never bitter, always are friendly, always willing.
Like, as you said about Alan, willing to see even the worst warmonger as just a little bit confused, who only needs a pat on the back and a little bit more clear explanation as to the way things are, you know, that kind of, those people are my heroes for a reason.
I know I ought to be more like them.
I don't know if I can be, but.
Oh yeah, me too.
That's not my temperament.
And I always, you know, and I have looked to Alan over the years as encouragement that, you know, of how to behave because, you know, we've all been to libertarian events and things, and man, we can be a cantankerous and annoying bunch of people.
Indeed, we can.
Because they're, I mean, everyone can, I guess, but libertarians just seem to perfect it sometimes.
You know, we have three different viewpoints for every libertarian or whatever other people would say, but, you know, there's always arguments and intrigue and, you know, I just don't, I can't imagine Alan ever being part of any of that sort of thing.
And those who, you know, I was just at a libertarian party convention in California, Tahoe, and I spoke to that and I remember I sat down with Judge Jim Gray, who's a former, a retired Orange County judge, and he's an author and another person out of that whole school of thought, a very, very mild mannered, gracious, friendly person who doesn't get involved in those nasty intrigue.
And I remember we were talking, in fact, about Alan and his condition, but there are a lot of folks out there or a number of them out there who understand that Alan's way is kind of, I think, the best way to make our ideas.
We know what we're talking about is true.
We know these principles work and then it's a lot better than being contentious and angry.
And then, of course, Alan's passing reminds us all of how short life is, so there's no sense spending our life being angry.
Yeah, well, in fact, in the obituary at the Orange County Register this morning, there's really a great quote about how, you know, he could especially see clearly at the end here that other things more important than politics are now going to have to step up.
That was, I guess, his final column, I believe.
Yeah, yeah.
And he says, there are plenty of things more important than politics, your family, your friends, and treating them right.
Search for spiritual meaning in an often confusing and ambiguous world.
Art, music, science, simple enjoyment of the good things in life.
Struggling to make good choices rather than destructive ones.
Supporting your children in their intellectual endeavors and at soccer and softball games.
All of these challenges, however, can be handled better, not necessarily easily, but better in an atmosphere of personal liberty and freedom to make one's own choices than in a repressive regime that makes choices for you and forces them on you.
That's exactly right.
That captures him to a T.
And he always was very involved, I remember, with his kids.
And he always had broader interests.
You know, music was, he was a real connoisseur of music and, you know, the arts.
And that's, you know, really as libertarians, it's a shame in a way that so many of us get so sucked into the whole political world all the time.
When really our philosophy is about depoliticizing life so that we can all pursue our dreams without having to fight with the authorities and, you know, where we can have a business without having to, you know, pay off and kiss up to any number of officials and we could pursue the arts and music on our own.
And unfortunately, a lot of us, myself included, I mean, I write about politics for a living.
We get so drawn into political battles when really our philosophy is about not having politics as the driving force of our life.
And I don't think that Alan, from me watching him, I never got the sense that he would, was all that caught up in politics.
I mean, he really did have a, seemed to have a full set of interests and, you know, that revolved around a lot of the greater things in life.
And he had a deep interest in religion and all sorts of things that were non-political.
Yeah, which just goes to speak all the more to his brilliance when it came to political issues, too, that he still was on top of his game as well as anybody better.
Yeah, yeah, and he wouldn't vote, which we used to have fun talking about.
He's like, it only encourages them, you know, and that was his, you know, he'd kind of say that with a laugh, you know.
And so those of us who were always trying to see some change in the political process, you know, no change ever comes in the political process.
I mean, he was right.
Why encourage him?
Right, well, I'm happy to see here that that's orangepunch.ocregister.com/alan-bach.
People can find right there his bio and a link to all of his blog posts and columns there at the Orange County Register.
I sure hope that they, well, it says recent columns and blog posts, but hopefully they'll keep the entire archive up there for people to read.
Of course, antiwar.com/Bach will take you right to his archive at antiwar.com.
Hundreds and hundreds of great articles there.
And, you know, I know he'll be missed at the OC Register and in y'all's entire political circle down there in Orange County, you know, for a long time.
I know he's really important and he certainly was that way to us at antiwar.com.
I really appreciate you, Stephen, joining us on the show today to help give Alan a send-off he deserves.
Appreciate it.
Well, thanks.
Thanks for having me and all the best to you.
All right, everybody.
That is Stephen Greenhut.
He's the director of Pacific, of the Pacific Research Institute's Journalism Center and formerly was senior editorial writer for the Orange County Register.
He also is a contributor to luerockwell.com.
And Alan Bach was a member of the Orange County Register's opinion and commentary staff since 1980 and held a variety of positions.
Before joining the Register, he was executive director of the Libertarian Advocate in Washington, D.C.
Oh, yeah, I remember him telling me about that.
A Washington correspondent for Reason Magazine, a press aide to Representative Earl Ruth, Republican of North Carolina, and Representative Robert Bauman, Republican of Maryland, and editor of Prospect House in Falls Church, Virginia.
He published four books, Ecology Action Guide, 1970, The Gospel Life of Hank Williams, 1976, Ambush at Ruby Ridge, 1995, and Waiting to Inhale the Politics of Medical Marijuana in the year 2000.
He attended UCLA as a National Merit Scholar and majored in political science and journalism.
He wrote articles for Reason, Freeman National Review, Harvard Business Review, Liberty, National Educator, Chronicles of Culture, and many others.
Of course, Antiwar.com.
He won a number of awards, including from the California Newspaper Publishers Association.
And he will be greatly missed.
And we will be right back.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
And we're going to continue our send-off this week for Alan Bach.
Alan W. Bach, great writer for Antiwar.com and the Orange County Register, author of Ambush at Ruby Ridge and Waiting to Inhale the Politics of Medical Marijuana.
And we go now to his very good friend of many years, Gene Berkman.
And I'm sorry, if you give me one second, I've got the bio here.
Gene Berkman is the owner of the legendary Renaissance Bookstore in Riverside, California, which is the biggest, best, most successful libertarian bookstore in the history of mankind.
And in 1972, he helped found the Libertarian Party in California.
And I was talking a little bit, Gene, with Eric Garris about how you and Alan Bach go all the way back to the Young Americans for Freedom and the big split with the conservatives way back in the days.
Is that right?
Welcome to the show.
Is that right?
Thank you for having me on, Scott.
Yes, I met Alan in Young Americans for Freedom and we worked together quite closely for 1969 and 1970, promoting first the Libertarian Caucus of Young Americans for Freedom and then its offshoot, the California Libertarian Alliance, the first large libertarian organization on the West Coast.
And so how old were y'all back then?
I was 19.
And I actually, I was 18 when I met him.
I didn't ask his age.
I now know how old he is.
So he was 25 at the time.
And I was 18.
I was one of the younger people in the group and he was one of the older people at 25.
I thought he was in his 50s.
We hung out a few times when I lived out in Southern California.
And I couldn't believe that he was 67 years old.
I know.
I was surprised at that myself.
He always seemed so vibrant.
And so engaged.
And so healthy.
I could hardly believe he was as old as he was, but I friended him on Facebook.
So I got an announcement of his birthday coming up.
So that's how I know how old he is now.
I see.
Yeah, well, I guess they had it in a couple of blog entries.
I guess Jen had sent out, his widow had sent out a thing about it.
Or it got written up at antiwar.com that way.
Anyway, that he was 67 years old.
But so, yeah, I guess tell us, it's so great to have someone who knew him so well and for so long.
Tell us about Alan Bach.
Tell us about his life.
Oh, he's one of the true treasures of the human race.
He is one of the few people I've worked in politics where I have never had any kind of negative interaction.
He was always a gentleman and always a scholar.
He was part of our group in Young Americans for Freedom.
We had a libertarian caucus on the West Coast, which included William B. Steele, Dana Rohrabacher, Dennis Turner, Ron Kimberling, and about a couple dozen other activists.
And Alan was probably one of the intellectual leaders of the group.
And when we split from Young Americans for Freedom and formed the California Libertarian Alliance, Alan Bach wrote the statement we issued at our press conference.
So he was a major intellectual influence on our group.
And with his experience in politics in many years, he also was one of the people who was more rational and respectful when many people were trying to go off in all directions.
He was a good center.
Yeah, I mean, he really did have a very friendly personality.
Always a smile.
Always.
I can't even imagine what it would have looked like for him to be actually really mad, you know, lose his temper about something.
I have never seen him mad, ever.
And yes, he always did have a smile.
He was always friendly.
He was always joking.
And we could always communicate and know each other's references.
So I became a friend of his early on in the early part of 1969.
And I saw him fairly regularly.
We would have meetings and parties in Los Angeles and Orange County on a fairly regular basis.
And his house in West Los Angeles was one of the venues for many of the libertarian parties that helped get the libertarian movement off the ground in Southern California.
Yeah, I mean, thinking going back to 1969 with this and back to 72 and also considering that, you know, maybe I can ask you some more about his career in the 70s.
But I guess he's been writing for the Orange County Register.
He wrote for the Orange County Register from 1980 on.
I mean, that's a lot of plumb line libertarianism in print out there.
It certainly is.
The Register has been the flagship for promoting libertarianism in Southern California.
And many of us, when we became involved in the libertarian movement in 68, 69 and 70, decided to devote our careers to promoting liberty.
And Alan was already a journalist at the time I met him.
He was editor of a magazine put out by Ed Butler in Westwood Village, the Westwood Village Square magazine.
And as offbeat as it was and sensationalistic, sort of tabloid journalism in a magazine format, Alan was always putting in information and promotions of freedom in the context of contemporary affairs and contemporary events.
So he started early.
And then as the libertarian movement grew, his journalism and his writing grew with it.
He edited the first pamphlet on the issue of free market environmentalism.
I wrote a contribution for it and it had contributions from Dennis Turner and Ron Kimberling.
And Alan Bach wrote a piece in it.
But he edited it and he got it published.
And this was long before any of the major think tanks were looking at the issue of environmentalism from a free market perspective.
So he was a pioneer as well.
Yeah, look how far we've come.
RFK Jr. came out yesterday talking about free market capitalism as the solution to our environmental problems, as opposed to crony capitalism.
Wow.
Shocked a lot of Democrats.
It was all over the Huffington, whatever the hell.
That's great.
Anyway, so tell us more about Alan personally.
You know, Stephen Greenhut yesterday on the show talked about how into religion he was.
Not that he was some kind of fundamentalist who beat people over the head by any means, but a very religious guy, very interested in art and music and the good things in life.
When I first visited his house, I was impressed, indeed overwhelmed, by the collection of books he had.
I've always collected books myself and I am a bookseller, but he had the largest personal library of anybody I had met up to that time.
And they were serious books, mostly on history and current affairs.
And so his opinions and his writings were always well informed by understanding of history and understanding of what was going on at the present time.
And yes, he was a Christian, which was fairly unusual among the libertarian group that we had.
There were a few others, including Dana Rohrabacher.
And he never pushed it on anybody.
He would just let you know so that you would know that not everybody who was involved in the libertarian movement was an atheist.
But he didn't wear his religion on his sleeve and he certainly didn't use it to lord over anybody.
He was tolerant and gentlemanly in his interactions with people, regardless of their beliefs.
He was the true mark of a gentleman, one who can disagree without being disagreeable.
Yeah, absolutely.
And it's funny, I think about what little experience I had just reading all his antiwar.com articles and interviewing him the few times I did and hanging out with him the few times I did in Southern California while I was there.
And I just hope I can hang on to all that.
Remember the anecdotes, we're stuck in traffic forever.
And he told me all these stories about when he worked in Washington, D.C. and all these things.
And I really do treasure it because he is an example to live up to.
He really is the greatest kind of person, I think.
Indeed he is.
And let me throw an anti-war angle into this.
When we had our Libertarian Caucus in Young Americans for Freedom, one of our principal disagreements with the more traditional leadership of Young Americans for Freedom was our opposition to the Vietnam War, which Alan Bach certainly agreed with.
He opposed the Vietnam War as he opposed the Iraq War and he's opposed the most recent wars.
But it was a defining moment for our generation and many young conservatives found it as one issue that separated them from the rest of the conservative movement.
When we founded the California Libertarian Alliance, he wrote the statement at our press conference and it stressed that we were inspired by the principles of Barry Goldwater who advocated ending government intervention into domestic affairs and the principles of Senator Robert Taft who advocated ending American government intervention into foreign countries.
That's how Alan put it together and it was certainly an inspired document.
The war was one of the issues where we saw government as growing and benefiting from war and freedom as suffering.
Yeah.
Well, you know, his life is a very important part of our libertarian heritage, especially our anti-imperialist heritage.
And, you know, there's no measuring the immeasurable value of his columns for antiwar.com that he wrote since 1999, Eye on the Empire.
I learned so much.
It's, you know, the context that I have for the way I analyze the world now is in great part due to his effort.
Yes.
And another important point, of course, so many people when we first became involved in the antiwar movement during the Vietnam War, and it was true again during the first Iraq war and the second Iraq war, so many people have identified opposition to war with some kind of anti-Americanism.
But Alan was within a strongly pro-American tradition of loving this country and loving the principles it's based on.
And those principles include respecting the rights of other nations to live in peace and respecting the desire of the American people to live in peace.
So Alan never attacked America, even as he attacked the policies of the American government.
Right.
All right.
Well, listen, I know you have to go and we're actually over time already, so I'll let you go now.
But I want to thank you very much for your time on the show today, Gene.
Well, it's certainly a pleasure paying tribute to Alan Bach, and I wish we could have done it when he was alive rather than now.
He will be missed, but it's important to remember that our friends and our loved ones live on in our memories of them and in the effects of what they have done.
And Alan has left a legacy of promotion of freedom and of opposition to war, and we can all be inspired by that.
Absolutely.
All right.
Well, thank you very much for that.
Thank you.
Have a nice day.
All right, everybody.
That is Gene Berkman, owner of the legendary Renaissance bookstore in Riverside.
Hope found the Libertarian Party of California with Alan W. Bach way back in the day.
Anti-war radio, and we'll be right back.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and our next guest is John Seiler.
He's an editorial writer with the Orange County Register, has been for 19 years, and is also the managing editor of cow watchdog.com here to conclude our send off this week of our friend Alan W. Bach, who died two days ago.
Welcome to the show, John.
How are you?
Thank you.
Well, I'm okay, but I'm still mourning the loss of Alan Bach, a great, great friend.
And I worked next to him at the Register for 19 years.
He had the desk next to mine, and really well, just truly great friend of liberty, defender of liberty for at least 45 years, I think he's been, he was a libertarian and wrote for many, many publications, not just the Register.
I wrote a book called Waiting to Inhale about legalizing medical marijuana.
And a really good book he wrote was called Ambush at Ruby Ridge about when the federal government killed Randy Reaver's wife and son up there in Idaho.
Alan went up there.
I remember him going up several times and doing original research up there.
You can get that book and his other books on Amazon for a couple of dollars, I think.
Well, and look, I couldn't give praise high enough for that book.
And that's the first thing I ever read by Alan Bach was that book.
And it's amazing.
And I remember because so much had been written about Ruby Ridge at the time.
And what was so exciting to me was, hey, this is some real journalism here where no punches pulled on behalf of the government and no just crazy leaps to conclusions by message board types or whatever.
This is a real solid, the real solid piece of work on what happened there.
The definitive account of what happened there, at least for the time.
I don't know.
I guess more information came out after the book was published, that kind of thing.
But it's an excellent work.
And when I first saw that he wrote for Antiwar.com, I said, hey, that's the guy that wrote the Ruby Ridge book.
Awesome.
That's another thing he prolonged for, I think, at least 10 years.
He wrote a column for Antiwar.com.
We'd be calm.
It's still up there.
People want to read it until you got too sick to do it anymore.
And he wrote for OCRegister, of course, go to our site, OCRegister.com, and click on opinion and many of his articles in there or just type his name in a search for anything.
You know, one of the main things about Alan is that he was tremendously prolific.
He's just a great writer.
If you're in journalism nowadays, you have to write a lot.
Anybody does.
But he just wrote a tremendous amount.
He's just a guy who wrote a lot of work and went home and wrote all really high quality stuff.
You know, I really like we've been talking with other guests as well this week about Alan and one of the subjects that keeps coming up is just how kind he was, just what an optimist he was, no matter how bad the times were.
And it's interesting that, well, I don't want to say contrast isn't the right word, but just the partnership of that kind of personal way of life with his, you know, hardcore plumb line anarchist libertarianism.
I mean, he was as anti-state as you could come.
That's for sure.
Yeah, Alan wasn't an anarcho-capitalist.
We've been no government at all.
It used to be voluntary contracts.
And you're right.
I always call him the cheerful libertarian because something would happen like the government would invade some country or bomb somebody and I'd be kind of depressed.
And Alan would say, well, this is a teaching moment, as libertarians say.
And then he'd start writing something about it, let people know about some of the principles about libertarianism, about nonviolence, not attacking people that don't attack you, that kind of thing.
Yeah, you know, he was the first guy I interviewed when I started the interview show back in 2003.
And at one point in the interview, I asked him, so are you an anarchist?
Or, you know, was it because it was taken from the context of what he'd written, but it wasn't explicit.
And he just said, well, you know, I think if you just look at who's responsible for the most violence in the society, it's pretty much the state.
So, you know, I guess I kind of have to be.
You know, that kind of answer is just great.
It's a great memory of mine that I have of him, you know.
Yeah, he was really good about it.
He wasn't pushy about it, of course.
He was a very kind person.
And if he had something, he'd give it to you.
And he wrote a lot.
But he didn't go out and hit you over the head with it.
So it was a kind of gentle persuasion, I think, for, you know, he wrote a lot about Orange County as well, where I still live and where he wrote for 30 years for the Orange County Register.
And just a tremendous help here in keeping Orange County more free than other places in California, especially.
And so that was very important, just from a local level.
But then he also wrote, I think, primarily about national defense and national issues.
So he's very influential there as well.
Well, yeah, I mean, certainly there's a gigantic antiwar.com archive of hundreds and hundreds of articles there.
And yes, and Stephen Greenhut was saying on the show yesterday that, yeah, he'd written quite a bit about foreign policy for the Orange County Register.
But I'm interested in the more local stuff.
You know, the other side of Allen's journalism opinion, writing in Orange County on local issues.
In what ways do you think he helped influence Orange County to be freer, perhaps, in other places?
And how exactly do you measure that?
Well, the Register is one of the few papers in the country that's libertarian.
It has been since R.C. Oylsby, the founder of the company, bought it in 1935.
So he and the rest of us, too, just wrote about local issues, always against taxes, always against new bonds, new spending.
But Allen had a special hope for local people that were kind of crushed by the government.
So I remember there was a local religious group called Peacemakers, I think it's called.
And they had like a local restaurant.
And they violated some petty, anti-stupid regulation by the local county health authorities.
And they were saying, well, you know, we're religious people.
We don't want to follow this.
And Allen said, you know, these people haven't hurt anybody.
Nobody's suffering from any of this stuff at the voluntary place.
If you don't like the place, don't go there.
And so in the end, they still had to do some minor thing to make the government happy, but basically help them get a much lesser, by giving them publicity, get them a much lesser punishment by the government.
So that's just one case right there.
And a lot of people sometimes are attacked by the government for instance, tax people.
You read about people harassed by the IRS.
And I know in a couple of instances that helped.
Taking up the cases of individual victims.
Yes, yes, exactly.
They give them a little publicity because the government doesn't like light shined on all its dark actions.
When they do it, they usually make a deal with the people and let up a little bit.
Well, I know that his book, Waiting to Inhale the Politics of Medical Marijuana was among one of the first.
And it's said to be very influential in policymaking there.
Is that your experience that that book really had an impact in California at the time?
Yes, it came out a couple of years after the medical marijuana was legalized.
I think it was 1996.
And I can't remember the proposition number.
Of course, we remembered it.
But he really, that was his biggest issue over the years.
And he really helped push that into law in California with many, many editorials.
And then he wrote his book a little bit after that.
And then that was used by many local people to say, hey, we can do this.
We can help these sick people, you know, like some terminal cancer patient supposed to go to the government and say, well, you know, if you use marijuana, you're going to end up a heroin addict.
They say, well, you know, I'm going to be dead in two months.
What's the difference to make it so idiotic?
So his book and his many other writings on medical marijuana helped push them in a good direction here in Nashville, moving in the right direction still.
Well, and of course, he's such a brilliant guy.
You could always argue the natural rights case as well as any pragmatic utilitarian angle on how things ought to work to make them work better.
You know?
Yes.
And also, you know, Alan wrote a great deal about foreign affairs, especially for Interwork.com.
But also he was the main one that wrote about that stuff for us at The Register.
And we were, I think, the only paper, the only major paper in the country, more than, say, 200,000 circulation that was against the Iraq war back in 2001.
Everybody else said, you know, we need to take out Saddam.
And Alan wrote many, many editorials saying, oh, this is a bad idea.
Don't do it.
And then when it happened, just pointing out what it was going to be.
And of course, you're absolutely right on that.
And it's really good for The Register and Kathy Taylor, our editor, to stand up for that as well and give Alan that opportunity and all of us that opportunity to do it.
But Alan was the point man in everything.
Kathy wrote something about it on The Register, if you go there.
She said he was the touchstone for libertarianism at The Register.
And all of us turned to him and said, you know, with a libertarian perspective on this very often.
And, you know, it's just great to think of him like under all that so-called pressure or whatever to all you guys that, you know, you got to be for the Iraq war.
Everybody's for the Iraq war kind of thing.
And he didn't take the opposite position out of some kind of defiance.
He just, I'm sure, laughed and shrugged and said, well, you know, the pro-war people, they're going to say the things that they say, but we're going to go ahead and write this article.
He's just like, it's not defiance, it's just ducks back.
He just, that's all right.
You know, probably if we write a good editorial, we can change all their minds.
Right, exactly.
And, you know, of course, the war happened and it's still going on, but I think Allen's editorials and his other writings for interwar.com helped pave the way for a lot of people nowadays are questioning.
I read some stuff on interwar.com about how some Republicans are now saying, you know, maybe the Afghan war isn't a good idea.
Maybe the Iraq war isn't a good idea.
So it's just a kind of leavening effect over many years and he was up to it.
That's for sure.
He did the work.
Yeah, well, and even just the name of the column, Eye on the Empire, means that, you know, it's, I mean, I guess my experience really, there are a few exceptions, but very few exceptions.
You know, most people think when they hear someone talk about America as an empire, this and that, they figure that whoever that person is, they're basically from, you know, left of Michael Moore or something like that.
And so when someone like Alan Bach calls it empire, he's just being frank and honest.
And that is what it is.
And so let's put our eye on it and talk about it a little bit.
And it's, it's very fair.
And you get the gist real quick.
It's not about, you know, some class war, some free Mumia Abu Jamal or some side issue.
This is just basically honesty and fearless realism in the face of, especially when we talk about the kind of pressure that existed back in 02 and 03 and that kind of thing.
Right, exactly.
And Alan also was incredibly well read, maybe one of the best red men I've ever met.
And he also was in a lot of great contact.
He called people up from the country.
Like, yeah, I remember he used to talk to General Odom, who also died a couple of years ago.
He was the retired head of the NSA, National Security Agency, you know, and he was, and Odom would give a lot of insight into how all these wars have been, you know, and put that in his, in his columns and in his editorials and stuff like that.
It's up there somewhere.
Yeah, yeah.
You could tell he did the legwork in his columns.
It would have, well, I spoke to this expert and that expert, and these are what they told me.
And then what about this and that?
Yep.
Always.
Yeah, like he read all of Chalmers Johnson's books and talked to him very frequently and about, I forget the names of his books, but one of them is called Blowback, about, it was even written before 9-11, about how our interventions in foreign countries will come back to bite us and they won't learn about that a lot, plus Chalmers Johnson and got some great quotes and insight.
Now, I saw on the OC Register website yesterday that the links say, at least, partial blog archive and partial article archive.
And I wonder whether there'll be a single page that will have all of Alan Bach's writings for the OC Register, at least, you know, since the advent of the internet or what have you, available for the long term.
I'm not sure what they're going to do with that.
Best thing is just do a search on Google.
Because I know they've had some different systems over the years.
But there's a tremendous amount up there right now that's for Alan.
And I mean, he did so much, it would probably take a, you know, like a whole year to kind of gather everything together.
Ah, just go down to UCLA and get an intern.
Yeah, yeah, that's a good idea.
All right, well, listen, thanks so much for joining us and helping us give Alan the send-off he deserved.
Best I could do.
And I think you did a great job contributing to it, John.
Yeah, for your listeners, just go and read Alan's stuff.
That's what I'd recommend.
It's all really great stuff.
Right on.
That's what I'm saying too.
And that's at ocregister.com and antiwar.com/Bach.
And hundreds and hundreds, maybe thousands of articles for you all to read from a guy who has been a major part of the libertarian movement from the beginning.
And his contribution to our libertarian heritage can't be overstated, I don't think.
That's for sure.
He's a great man.
Right on.
Okay, well, thanks very much, John.
Appreciate it.
You're welcome.
Thank you, bye.
All right, everybody.
That is John Seiler from the Orange County Register.
And he's also the managing editor of cowatchdog.com.
And again, we're sending off the late, great, heroic Alan W. Bach, who wrote for the Orange County Register for I think 30 years or something for antiwar.com for about 12 and wrote the book Ambush at Ruby Ridge and Waiting to Inhale the Politics of Medical Marijuana and did a lot of other great things as well.