Rob: Well let me...let me take a step back and ask you this. What do you see in the U.S. that is working now?
DS: (Laughs) Is this a trick question?
Rob: No.
DS: Well, I see good decisions and policies being made and implemented at the personal level, at the local level, occasionally at the state level. I think that the state of Connecticut setting up a commission to work on conversion from weapons industries to peaceful industries is a great model. For other states, I think states refusing to cooperate with illegal activities of the NSA and of federal law enforcement is a great model. I think that steps by Oregon and Maryland and other states, partial as they are, to move toward an affordable education system where everybody can go to college is very useful. I think the Occupy Movement was a huge step forward that needs to be built on and continued as it has been continuing off the radar. I think that the growth of independent media outlets including this one is extremely important, probably the most important, although thus far altogether insufficient change that we've seen. And I think people's attitudes on war are hugely to the good at this point.
I mean for the past...you look at the past ten or fifteen years and we had this invasion of Afghanistan with, arguably by some polls, a majority in favor of it, and in favor of it for the first year and a half, or so, and then turning against it, "Oops! We shouldn't have done that" and unable to this day to end it. You have the invasion of Iraq with, again, the arguably, not as clearly, but a slim majority perhaps, willing to attack Iraq; and then a year or two goes by before the polls start saying we shouldn't have done that.
For many years, a lot of us wanted to get people to find the wisdom, the resistance to propaganda, to be able to oppose a war before it started. Well, that's where we've been on several efforts to get hostilities going with Iran the public has been overwhelmingly against. The public was against attacking Libya. It didn't do any good. They went ahead and attacked Libya, but they got done with it quickly, and now they don't want us to look at the disaster left behind. And back in August and September when those missiles were going into Syria, when Raytheon's stock was through the roof, where all the sociopaths on Wall Street knew those missiles were going to fly, the leaders of both political parties, the White House making the hard pitch, the President of the United States telling us to look at YouTubes of suffering children and either be in favor of their suffering or support his effort to send missiles into their country -- and we said no. And congress members from both houses, both parties, said they got more phone calls, more emails, more harassment, they were out, off home in their districts on break, on that than anything else in the past; more one-sided than anything else in the past. Rob: Really?
DS: We're talking about more than the banker bailout resistance; more than past wars; more than any other issue they said...numerous congress members from both houses, both parties said this was the most we ever heard from anybody. And this was with Jewish holidays, APAC, you know, missing in action; this was with the House of Commons in England leading the way saying no to a Prime Minister's war program for the first time since the surrender at Yorktown. I mean this was a perfect storm of public pressure, but the idea of working with Russia to get rid of the chemical weapons as an alternative solution. That had been lying on the floor for weeks. It's not as if the tide changed when somebody thought of that. The tide changed when public pressure said "no" just as in February of this year when public pressure said "no" to more sanctions on Iran and a commitment to jump into any Iranian/Israeli war. You know so...
Rob: But I also know, as Sy Hersh has told us, that the generals, the military and the U.S. also pushed back because they knew that it really wasn't Syria doing it, that it was Turkey instigating it.
DS: Right, Sy Hersh doesn't even address, and nobody's asked him and Democracy Now didn't bring it up, the idea that public pressure might have had any influence whatsoever. He just focuses on resistance within the military, which was real and which we knew about at the time, and which was critical. But we run like mad from the idea that what we do as activists could possibly have had any impact. You know, people credit the military, they credit the Russians, they credit the Brits, they claim Raytheon didn't really want to get rich that week and we run from the overwhelming, clear fact that the public was overwhelmingly against and, what appears to be very strong evidence, that that helped make a difference.
Rob: You know I have to admit that I didn't see that coverage anywhere.
DS: No, you wouldn't have. It didn't exist. It hasn't to this day. And I think it's important that we be willing to remain activists even when everything is going badly. But for people, and there are millions of them, who will only try to do something if it's already succeeding, you know, which is so backwards But this is the way people are. It's important that they be told about the partial victories and the partial contributions to partial victories that we've made. And we didn't help the people in Syria. They're still suffering. We didn't create humanitarian aid or a nonviolent solution. We didn't stop the CIA sending in the guns even though the public was even more against that than against the missiles, but we stopped the damn missiles. We don't tell each other that.
Rob: Well, I think this ties in with what I'm talking about, too. I think that the media is a big part of this problem and I think that it's a very highly pervasive problem. That is you and I and a number of the people who are in our shoes do the same kind of work, but boy it's tough. The system is so much against getting the truth out, getting a story that the people have the power. That is a narrative that the system really squelches.
DS: And Seymour Hersh had to go to a different continent to publish that article. No U.S. publication would take it. I'm sure OpEdNews would have, my website would have, but no publication that he wanted to go to would take it. And I do give him great credit for adding to the story the fact that it wasn't going to be 3 or 4 missiles. That it was a plan to really destroy Syria. That, when we say we stopped missile strikes and we stopped a war, and "oh, don't exaggerate, it wasn't a war," that's exactly what it was and that's what was stopped. And if it can be stopped once, and if the next day they can talk about nonviolent diplomatic solutions when the previous day they were talking about war as the last resort -- you know, they always pretend it's the last resort when it's their first resort, then why can't we do it again? Why can't we do it the next time?
Rob: Let's stay on this idea that the mainstream media does everything it can to prevent the people from seeing their successes. This is...you know, I mentioned that book, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. The way that James C. Scott describes the systems throughout history is that the people in power have the authority that they are in power, they deserve to be in power, in many cases, God put them there, and it is the natural way that things are. That's the story that they maintain. And it's...the challenge is to challenge that in public and to make it clear that they are not in power and they do not have the right and it is not ordained by God and it's not the natural way. It seems to me like that's something that is our challenge, that we have to do is we have to somehow break through this mindset that the average American has that this is the way the system is and it's the way it's going to be and there's nothing that can be one about it. Bernie Sanders just wrote about this about how a lot of people are giving up on politics because there's so little hope that there's anything that can really be done. Frankly I'm one of them. I've given up on electoral politics. I don't think that it's going to change anything except maybe at the community level, at the county and city level.
DS: Well, you know I work for an online activist group called RootsAction.org and people laugh off petitions and mass email campaigns, and what good can that do? There are, of course, all sorts of downsides and the downsides may outweigh the good, and maybe we're dividing ourselves and we're missing human contact the ways that activism can be built because we're sitting behind our computers thinking we're accomplishing more than we are. But you look at our website and we have a list of victories that we contributed to that are significant. You look at the engagement of activist groups with congress and the successes are limited, but they are very real, and if people knew about them they would be doubled. And you go back and you look,and I know that the system has gotten increasingly corrupt and it's gotten harder, but you go back and you look at memoirs of any activist from the past and they've always discovered years later the ways in which their work had a larger impact than they knew at the time. So people marching around in front of the white house telling Kennedy not to start up nuclear testing just because the Soviet Union is doing it and they think they had no impact, and they discover years later that, in fact, Kennedy delayed that decision and held off on re-engaging with nuclear testing because of them, that he had been watching them through the window. If they'd known that, there would have been twice as many of them there the next day.
Activists who started a movement for a nuclear freeze who went in and talked, decades later, with top officials from the Reagan White House and others of that period who tried to tell them they hadn't noticed, "We didn't know about you. We had no idea," and finally got one of them to confess that they had a whole program to take on and resist this activist movement and what a huge influence it had had. Then and interviewer went back and questioned those who had lied and then, once one of their colleagues had admitted to it, they admitted to it. The media is the same way. They don't tell us about a vote that's coming up next week and how we can weigh in. They tell us about an evil bill that just passed yesterday. And when we do weigh in and have an influence, they don't tell us that and they go out of their way to paint a picture as if that didn't happen. It's exactly as if the media were against self-governance, were against influence of people on the government which, yes, is minimal, yes, is difficult, but if we had 3, 4 percent of the public engaged, we could do absolutely everything we dream of and much more. And it's tamping that down, keeping it down to a fraction of a percent that makes it so hard.
Next Page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
1
1
1
