10/22/09 – Tim Wise – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
And I'm happy to welcome my next guest to the show.
It's Tim Wise.
He's the director of the movie Soldiers of Peace.
The good news is, peace is breaking out.
It's narrated by Michael Douglas.
It's won, let's see, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 awards at least on the front here.
And it has Desmond Tutu and that billionaire guy Richard Branson from Virgin Airlines.
And, of course, Hans Blix is in there.
And the Iraq veterans against the war.
As well as people who've been taking part in peace breaking out in former hotspots all over the world.
Excellent movie and welcome to the show, Tim.
How are you doing?
Good thanks, Scott.
How are things in Texas?
Actually, I'm in Los Angeles.
Oh, you're in LA.
Broadcasting in Texas, but everything's great here.
I don't know how things are in Texas.
Well, Rick Perry's still the governor there, so that's pretty bad.
Okay.
Anyway, I appreciate you getting up before the sun.
Tim is talking to us from the other side of the world this morning, as you might be able to tell from his accent.
Nice and early, but no problem.
All right.
Now, hey, what a great movie that you made here.
Peace is breaking out all over.
You know, I'm trying to remember, I read one time years ago that there were, I think, was it 199 years in all of human history where there actually wasn't a war going on anywhere or something.
Wow, that's amazing, isn't it, considering how long humans have been on the planet for.
That's not very long, is it?
Right, yeah, a couple hundred thousand years, I guess, you know, real civilization for about 10,000.
Anyway, a lot of recorded history there, pretty hard to find peacetime.
But, you know, despite Iraq and Afghanistan and Somalia and the wars America is waging around the world right now, which I guess no longer take headlines, but used to anyway.
In other places around the world, as you show in this documentary, peace really is breaking out all over.
It is just like John Mueller, the author of Overblown, told me on this show that there is a severe lack of peacekeeping troops.
There are too many ceasefires for the peacekeepers to come and verify.
There's a real lack and they're trying to gain new recruits for peacekeepers because there's so many wars that are now over and that are coming to an end all around the world.
Exactly, it's fantastic, isn't it?
It is, it's fantastic.
But the problem is, as most people do, if most people watch the mainstream news and read the mainstream press, you would think there's this massive war on terror and that it's going to be with us forever and ever.
And it's just not the case.
If you actually do a thing called a Google search, which everyone does every day of their lives, I think, and you Google peace workers globally, you'll find and you'll be able to contact millions and millions and millions of people that are actively involved in making peace every day of their lives.
It's just a very, very small percentage of people that are doing war.
But God, if you watch the news every night, you'd think the opposite, wouldn't you?
Well, actually, they don't even show anything.
I don't know about in Australia, they might still cover the news there, but here they don't.
But anyway, you were saying peace workers globally.
Tell me more about this now.
Well, when I was researching the film, when I was trying to find these peace activists, part of them came from my contacts as a journalist.
I actually filmed in war zones for ten years of my life.
I've been to Bosnia, I went to northern Iraq, I've been to Somalia, Sri Lanka with the Tamil Tigers and doing a lot of war coverage.
So I was very, very well connected into peace activists working in war zones.
But to find different stories, I got on the Google search engine, I typed in peace activists and peace workers, and you press return on your computer and you'll come up page after page, millions of hits about people doing this amazing stuff for peace, and then you can contact them straight away.
There's websites everywhere.
So technology is in fact changing how humans can make peace, and there's a section on the film about that.
All right, now, I guess start off telling us about the conflict in Nigeria that the movie starts off with here, where I guess there have been a lot of blood feuds and religious gangs, or at least gangs divided by religion, that have been fighting back and forth for I'm not sure what period of time before these major steps were taken and breakthroughs made in getting these people to finally put down their guns.
In fact, in this case, create a debating society.
Instead, they put down their guns and picked up some podiums and microphones.
Yes, exactly, yes.
It's an area of Nigeria called Kaduna.
It's in northern Nigeria.
And as you just said, there has been literally decades and decades of very, very bloody violence for a long, long time and many, many people dying.
Now, two main characters in the film, there's the pastor and an imam.
Now, you'd normally think that these type of religious leaders would be never talking, and they normally don't.
But the pastor and the imam were actually in local militia groups, and they were at one stage trying to kill each other in their early 20s.
The pastor actually got his hand blown off by a hand grenade, and his bodyguard was killed in one of the attacks.
And what happened over a couple of years is the pastor's mother took fairly ill in hospital, so the imam decided to come and meet them in hospital, and they started talking.
And that talking opened up more dialogue, and that was quite a few years ago.
Now what they do, they're best mates, and they actually go around.
They travel around Kaduna and also a lot of parts of the world, and they hold peace and reconciliation conferences.
And it's just fantastic.
And what they did find out through just talking, just sitting down having a coffee or having a tea and talking and having the Qur'an there and having the Bible there, and they went through page after page after page, and they actually found out that about 180 or about 152 verses were similar in the Qur'an as they were in the Bible, and that got them thinking to doing this.
And what they do now is there's still parts in northern Kaduna where there's a lot of violence, and when there was quite a few years ago, there was a Danish cartoon depicting the Prophet Muhammad in the wrong way, and there were riots all over the world.
They went out in the streets with all their groups and started talking to people and calming the situation down, and no blood was spilt in Kaduna.
Yet about 150 kilometers away, about 400 or 500 people died.
So it just shows that the simple thing of talking to people and understanding other people can change.
Yeah, well, and it also goes to show, and I think even the way you introduce this is, in the movie, it's Michael Douglas doing the narrating, but he says, you know, this clash of civilizations that we're told is on, you know, is the West versus Islam in perpetuity or what have you, and this goes to show that that whole construct, again, is exactly what we're told, but doesn't have to be that way at all, does it?
Exactly.
It doesn't.
It doesn't at all.
And another part of the film which we can lead into this is, in Israel, there's a school called Nev Shalom, and actually there's Palestinian children and Jewish children at the age of like 10, 11, 12, living in this one community and going to school together.
And they're best mates.
They don't hate each other.
It's only the parents that kind of hate each other, and this school is absolutely amazing.
It just shows if you can educate kids at a young age who have got these most amazing brains, break up everything you tell them, if you tell them that you can actually talk to an Israeli or you can talk to a Palestinian and they're actually nice kids, then you can grow and you can develop like that.
I think the older you get without this education behind you, you get very, very cynical and you believe what you read, and that's just totally wrong.
Yeah, that's an interesting point.
Well, and you know, especially in these two cases where you have, obviously, the kind of penultimate cycles of violence that precede them, where just around and around and around people are killing each other, it is possible, despite the difference in religions or ethnicities or whatever, for people to just kind of stop this.
I mean, I hope it doesn't take, you know, the kids working out the peace deal every time in order to make it stick or what have you, but we're just going to show the possibility is there for people to...
And, you know, I think kind of especially all the fear about terrorism, people...
I mean, even I find myself saying, you know, there's probably going to be more severe terrorist attacks because our government keeps killing people and creating many more enemies.
But the fact is, out of all the people our government has killed in Iraq, in Afghanistan, we have helped... all that killing has helped recruit more resistance to our occupations.
But it's not really likely, is it, that very many of those people, anyway, would really be so determined that they want to spend the rest of their life trying to come here to kill us.
Most, you know, people are people, and really what they want is peace and security and be able to go back to work and put food on their family, as George Bush said.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But there is parts of... if you take Afghanistan, for instance, and where the big push is with the Pakistani military, there's areas there that's extremely tribal.
And if someone kills your... one of your bloodlines, you have to kill someone back, and you have to kill that person.
So if an American soldier, for instance, which is what's happening in Afghanistan, kills or accidentally bombs a village, all the people living in that village will, for the rest of their lives, make sure that they join the Taliban or whatever force and kill an American or a British or an Australian soldier.
Well, that is dependent, though, on Americans and Brits occupying their country.
I mean, the Taliban are not going to come here.
They're not going to go to Britain.
They're not going to go to the United States and kill people.
No, they won't.
They will kill any foreigner that they see in their area, and that's the problem.
I mean, it's a tough one to get over.
My point of view, I think we should just pull out.
Just leave them.
It's their country.
What are we there for?
We're spending trillions of dollars.
I think the fiscal year for 2008 to 2009, the American military or the American government is spending close to $580 billion on the arms industry.
Now, I thought there was a global credit crisis.
Isn't Barack Obama trying to find, I think, almost $1 trillion for the next 10 years to fix health care?
Well, there's five of it in one go.
Or even if Obama took out 10% of the military per year, that is $580 billion a year.
I mean, you can do it, but why does the American government seem so fixated on war?
I mean, it combines forces of the next 10 countries on the list to be equal to the American forces.
So what on earth have I got to be scared about?
Yeah.
Well, I'm with you there.
You sound just like me.
We should get out of there yesterday.
We've got no right to be there.
And as you mentioned there and as you point out and really do a great job of covering and explaining in the movie, we just can't afford it.
This empire costs the United States a trillion dollars a year.
Yeah.
And that's a lot of money.
But my question to everyone there who's listening, why aren't you doing something about it?
Why aren't there hundreds of thousands of people in the streets of America telling their point of view?
I just don't understand it.
Yeah, I don't know.
It seems like, I was going to say, because they're all at work just trying to keep the one job they got and all that.
But then again, that's not even true.
A fifth of us are out of work.
Yeah, yeah.
I think I've been following a report.
Isn't there an area of L.A. that there's a whole tent city coming up with people who have been forced out of their jobs?
Well, I don't know.
I guess I should go drive around more.
I don't really know my way around yet that well.
But anyway, yeah, no, and we're certainly bankrupt.
And as you point out also in the movie, the technology to save the lives of wounded soldiers has increased, which is great.
But what it does is it changes the game so that such a higher percentage of American soldiers are coming home so wounded that they'll be dependent on the rest of us forever.
And yet their life was saved.
And so this is just I don't know exactly what the numbers are, but this is the kind of thing where we're talking about hundreds of thousands of people basically on the permanent dole for the rest of their lives.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, that's a huge cost, absolutely huge cost.
And some of the young Iraqi vets against the war group that we met while we were filming in New York, they've had it tough.
They actually want to go out and campaign against the government.
And they're basically told, well, if you campaign against us, we'll cut your war pension.
So these poor kids can't even say how bad it was out there.
It's just absolutely disgusting.
Yeah, well, and they also just make up as many lies as they can to avoid providing the benefits, too, because I guess this is how it works with central planning and rationing and so forth, is that, well, we just got too many people this year.
So start telling people with brain injuries that instead they have a personality disorder and it's their fault.
In fact, they defrauded the army by joining it with a personality disorder and not disclosing it.
And so now they don't get anything, things like that, which is despicable.
That's as bad as bombing a wedding in Afghanistan.
There's a guy in the film called Leonard Shelton, who's a U.S. military guy.
He fought for 20 years for the American government.
They're saying that he's got post-traumatic stress syndrome, which he probably does, seeing he saw a lot of death in Afghanistan and Iraq.
And they're basically told him, if you don't take all these tablets, we won't give you your pension.
And he doesn't want to take the tablets because he's done a tour of some of the veteran hospitals from the Vietnam War and they're just almost brain dead from taking too much chemicals to supposedly calm them down.
So he doesn't want to turn out like them in 30 years.
And if he doesn't, he doesn't get the pension and he's broke.
And that's why he joined the Iraqi Vets Against the War.
They're a great group of guys and they've been traveling across America.
If anyone sees them, support them.
It's great.
Well, economics do play a big part in this movie.
Again, I'm talking with Tim Wise, the director of Soldiers of Peace.
And you have James Galbraith in there making the very libertarian point, I think, that war is not stimulative.
War is a net loss, big time.
I don't think he says this explicitly, but basically I think his point is, if you have a vested interest in the war industries, even if you make buttons for army jackets or whatever, then you might make profit as the money goes out.
You're putting your hand in the stream and making money off of that.
But we're not gaining from the occupations of these other countries.
All the money goes out and nothing comes back.
And there's an illusion because, I don't know, Halliburton and Exxon stockholders make money.
Lockheed stockholders make money.
But that's our money that they're making.
It's just being taken and destroyed.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And American life's going with it.
Yeah, indeed.
It's like in George Orwell, they talk about the only reason that they're building the floating fortress and all their rocket ships is so that they can take the excess wealth of the people and sink it into the ocean, blast it off into space so we can't have it.
That became the end in itself.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
It's very, very interesting.
But one of the things we wanted to do in the film was we didn't want to attack any government.
We're not anti-military.
Countries do need a military.
But when and where they need it should really be discussed.
Part of the film is we're showing how modern military can help out, especially in peacekeeping and setting up possible rules in flood zones and hurricane zones and things like that.
But it's, yeah, it's interesting.
Well, you know, I think, I forget which interviewee it is in the movie, on the economic thing, talks about how people are too interdependent to go to war now because so much trade, the division of labor has become so fine around the world in a global economy and so forth that there's just too much at stake when it comes to, you know, having wars between states.
And, you know, that's the old saying of Frederick Bastiat is that where goods do not cross borders, armies will.
But then, of course, you know, the inverse of that is if you can open up trade relations between countries, then you make war less likely.
For example, World War I, I think, was a lot about occupying the land where the coal mines were and that kind of thing where if there was just free trade and people, private interests in one country can invest in the supply in the other country, then it doesn't matter who occupies it.
And we saw the best news of this along these lines that I saw recently was Turkey and Armenia have opened up trade relations.
And so now we're going to have all the business people of both countries investing with each other and hopefully that will give them the incentive to pressure their governments to, you know, keep the rhetoric cool.
Yes, exactly.
Yeah.
And, you know, that's another part of the film we covered.
You know, business is good for peace.
And even though it might sound really, really obvious, but it's true.
And you've got a lot of businessmen now pushing into peace issues.
An example of that, Ireland, you know, had 30 years of civil war.
And through a certain group of events, they decided to look, it's probably best if we stick to peace.
And then Ireland now is so much better off than what it was 10 years ago.
There's a lot of foreign investment in there now.
They've got a massive IT industry starting up.
And if they carried on along the way with the IRA, they would have been broke as well.
So it just proves that business is good for peace.
But having said that, that's only going to last as long as both countries are financially stable and they've got fresh water.
You know, we're touching on global warming in the film as well.
But I think the main push of the film is a simple equation.
The more peace we have in the world, the more time and the more resources we will have to tackle the real threat facing humanity.
It's not the war on terror.
It is global warming, ever shrinking biodiversity, all that stuff.
And that's what we're going to focus on.
And we will have the money to do it.
I mean, just imagine if the world put in what they're doing with the military each year.
I mean, we're happy enough to sign deals for $80 billion through Congress.
But wow, imagine if we had that 80 billion to put into developing panels or hydrogen cars.
And, you know, we can do it.
Or even if it was just left in the pockets of the American taxpayer to invest in whatever they want.
Yeah, sure.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, even when it comes to, you know, water shortages, things like that, well, the only way to overcome that, I mean, say, for example, in places where the desert is overtaking formerly good farming land, that kind of thing.
It's the division of labor in markets that allow people in deserts to get water, you know, by buying it.
Things like that.
I mean, it's all it all is still part of the same argument to me, I think.
And that brings me to Sudan, which you cover in the article.
And that is one of the major problems there.
Right.
It's nomads versus farmers and the nomads are being pushed onto the farmland by the encroaching Sahara Desert.
Yes.
Yes, that's right.
Yeah.
And that was also in Sudan and also in northern Kenya, where part of the film we've got a young woman who's a lawyer and she gets, you know, there's been hundreds of years of tribal violence and pretty much over the ever shrinking biodiversity and no water and cattle.
So the elders get the kids to actually go and wage the war, not them.
And she started up a peace football tournament.
And as you know, all over the world, kids love a good game of football.
And so what she did, she got both the fighting sides to join together and she just divvied up the kids.
And instead of fighting your enemy, you're next to him and he's on your side playing football together.
And these kids love it and they're best mates and they're playing football tournaments instead of killing each other.
You know, it's just another example of what people are doing around the world for peace and changing these kids forever.
They're going home telling the elders, you know, great, we play football together.
And the elders actually aren't doing it.
And they actually have given a couple of death threats to the young woman who's organizing these tournaments.
Well, now, is it basically the case that the worst of the fighting in the Darfur region of western Sudan is at an end and that things are getting better there?
Is still war going on, only a little bit less bloody than before?
Do you know?
Look, it's definitely calmed down a little.
But, you know, look, it's been going on for nearly seven years now.
What normally happens in areas like Darfur, you know, the west loses interest.
The militias start up again.
They've got different avenues of funding.
They get their arms and the cycle continues.
If you pull out, it will probably start up again.
You know, they've got to go to the source of the problem and that is the environment there.
You know, these people don't have water.
That's why they had to move land.
The cattle don't have water to drink.
They're dying.
They've got to move.
You know, it's a really simple problem, but to fix it, it's going to be a huge effort and a lot of money involved and a lot of time.
But, yeah, it's a lot more stable at the moment.
Well, that's good at least.
But do you know about what's going on in the south of Sudan?
Because it seems like, you know, the American government is trying to get a foothold in the south, which is where the, I think, Chinese-run oil fields are.
And there's a war there that's over that has had a ceasefire since 2005.
But there are reports here and there, I guess, saying it's starting to heat back up again.
It worries me that the Pentagon is behind that press.
Well, look, it's such a deep history, that area.
You know, the north is the Islamic regime, the south is the Christians.
They've been fighting for almost 25 years.
Over 3 million people have been killed and displaced.
2005, you're right, you know, both sides signed a comprehensive peace agreement, which has been pretty stable.
It still is stable.
I was actually over there a couple of months ago in Juba, which is capital of the south.
There's a lot of foreign investment coming in again.
The fighting that you're probably reading about is more inter-tribal fighting between the Christians as opposed to a lot of fighting between the Muslims and the Christians in the north.
Sudan is a massive country.
It's like the issues there is like an onion layer.
You peel off one layer and there's another.
It's just so complex.
But look, I've been going in and out of Sudan since 1992.
And speaking with the former rebels there who I met during the wartime and to where they are today, they're confident there's going to be peace.
They've got elections coming up in February 2010.
They've got a big referendum in 2011 where they're going to try and break away from the north.
They're getting, I think, about $2 billion a year into their country for the first time ever from getting the oil concessions from the Chinese.
The northern government is still getting their oil concessions, so they're kind of happy.
Everyone's earning some money.
Everyone's growing.
There's development.
I think, personally, I think it's going to hold.
They just need to sort out the little issues of all the little tribal pockets.
It's just, man, it's an unbelievable country.
Unbelievable.
Wow, that's really interesting.
It's really great news to hear, too, that that's one of these places where peace is breaking out and really taking hold there.
Okay, so before I let you go here, can you tell me about the GPI?
What's the GPI, Tim?
The GPI is the Global Peace Index.
Now, this was founded by an Australian therapist named Steve Killalay, who is actually the executive producer of the film Soldiers of Peace.
He's a bit of a futurist, and he put a lot of time and resources into developing the GPI.
It's an index.
What the GPI does is measure 192 countries by their peacefulness, and this is decided by 23 key indicators.
You've got internal indicators for a country and external indicators.
An internal indicator would be how big is your army, how many times your army has invaded another country, how many people you have in jail, your gross domestic product, all these three key indicators.
An external indicator is your foreign investments in other countries, do you fund other wars, your history of fighting other wars in other countries, do you have a peacekeeping force, all these key indicators.
It was developed by the Economist Intelligence Unit in London, and they had, I think, about 80 analysts getting all the data from all the UN databases and every country's database, putting it together in a massive, complex spreadsheet.
Out comes a rating, and it's a peace rating, so companies and individuals can log on to the Global Peace Index site, or it's called visionofhumanity.com, and you can find out where America is in the world today with peace.
You can find out where Russia is, and it's an amazing, amazing tool.
Well, what does America look like on that thing?
Pretty bad, huh?
Yes, yes, yes.
Yeah, pretty much down there, yeah.
America has, I think, one of the indicators I mentioned was how many people in prison.
America has, I think, the highest percentage, which is 2.3 million people in prison.
That's right, a quarter of the prisoners on Earth are in American jails.
Yeah, it's just amazing.
Is it right that the American prison system is price?
A lot to do with it.
Well, but then again, we have the word free embedded in all of our slogans, so none of those things count.
We don't need to hear about your indices anymore, sir.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I watch a show, an American show on my cable TV in Australia, and it's called Cops.
Do you watch that?
I'm afraid so.
I watch it occasionally just to have a look what's going on.
There's a lot of black people being arrested for having a little bit of marijuana or smoking a joint, and a lot of white people getting away with nothing.
Well, I think the real thing, the way I look at it is that for black people in this country, it's always been that way, and now it's like that for everybody too.
Basically, we're all blacks living in Jim Crow America now, which if I believed in collective responsibility, I guess I'd say that's only fair, except that the people who are suffering, the white people who are suffering under it aren't the ones who are responsible for Jim Crow.
We're just having to feel what it was like.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, it's way out of control.
I don't know.
Where can we look up and see actually where America ranks by these quantitative measures, where we rank compared to the Sudan's and Zimbabwe's of the world, in terms of freedom and peace on this index?
Yeah, okay.
It's www.visionofhumanity.com.www.visionofhumanity.com.
Yeah, yeah.
And if anyone wants to get filmed, they can go to www.soldiersofpeacemovie.com.
Soldiers of Peace.www.soldiersofpeacemovie.com.
Oh, www.soldiersofpeacemovie.com.
Okay, great.
And we'll make sure to put a link in the radio entry on antiwar.com later too.
Yeah, that's great.
Listen, I really appreciate your time on the show today, Tim.
No problem at all, Scott, and have a great day.
All right, take care.
Cheers, bye-bye.
All right, everybody, that's Tim Wise, director of Soldiers of Peace.
Really good documentary.
I highly recommend that you go check it out.