Put on your blinders back on

April 25

GUEST: Gloria La Riva, activist with the Party for Socialism and Liberation, and twice PSL presidential candidate, talks to us about her month long trip through Venezuela in the midst of growing U.S. aggression.

Eyewitness Venezuela National Speaking Tour

It is an honor and a pleasure to have someone like Gloria La Riva on Activist Radio. Her politics are left and she always speaks and writes the words she believes.

Those words are often in stark contrast to the narratives of empire. Of course, we live in the empire and don't notice that all our media and our politicians are saying pretty much the same things. Although we have some measure of freedom of speech, the spectrum of discourse is always very narrow.

Take Venezuela, Iraq, Iran and Saudi Arabia. Does our media ever bring up the fact that these four countries are in that rarified group that own most of the planet's oil reserves? Would any U.S. politician dare to suggest that our economic war against Venezuela is to control their oil reserves?

Thankfully for our sanity, we have people like Gloria La Riva to point out our blind spots. She says things that we can't even think, living as we do in the belly of the beast. Yes, our country wants Venezuela's oil. But it also wants to topple Venezuela's socialist model as a warning to other Third World counties that might try to use their natural resources to better the lives of their people.

It may be right here in the empire that this battle of ideas is most important. We live in a racially stratified society, with Black people at the bottom. Whenever they make some progress, the white majority elects a Woodrow Wilson, a Nixon or a Trump to put them back in their ghettos. The U.S. has the largest number of billionaires in the world, yet our infant mortality rate puts us squarely with Honduras or Guatemala. What if Poor, Black mothers were given more healthcare, and some of the billions spent on vast mansions and penthouses were diverted to saving babies?

Put on your blinders back on if you get too uncomfortable. 

Letting their countries turn into empires

April 18

GUEST: Gerry Condon, Vietnam era veteran, war resister, and President of Veterans For Peace, talks about veterans resisting the empire in Nicaragua, Venezuela, Cuba and Ireland.

Call on US troops to resist invading Venezuela

Gerry and I were in the military at about the same time, in the late 1960's. It wasn't a good time to be "serving" your country.

Gerry was a "Green Beret" and I was just a bewildered English teacher who was drafted after my first year on the job. I went into teaching in part because I didn't believe in the war, and certainly didn't trust our nation's leaders. Yet there I was being trained for Vietnam.

I was a poor and rebellious soldier. I wouldn't yell "kill" at bayonet practice. I snuck out off the base and got my share of Article 15 conduct charges. My biggest thrill was two days before graduation from bootcamp when the master sergeant proclaimed to all the other training sergeants that here was a man who had not been "broken." It was too late for them to do anything about it.

Gerry made a bigger transition, going from volunteering with the Green Beret to escaping from the Army and going to Canada. For the next six years he lived a life that I have often thought about. Why hadn't I done it myself? I guess I didn't want my parents to be ashamed in a small rural community, and I didn't want to lose my teaching license. In addition, I was making plans to marry. Conventional reasons.

Gerry spent six years as a radical, antiwar activist living in Canada and Sweden. I got my orders changed from Vietnam to Korea, where I spent a year on a base near the DMZ.

Both trajectories came to the same place. Gerry and I came to understand the empire and what it does to the people that it occupies and oppresses. Neither of us were part of the two to three million killed in Vietnam. I came to Korea well after the empire had murdered three million in that country, although the history of US war crimes was just below the surface.

And both of us pledged to expose the empire's dirty wars wherever they occurred. We were both in Nicaragua in the 1980's. We have both visited Cuba.

My first documentary was "The Resisters," a compilation of interviews of those who either went to jail or escaped to Canada to resist the war. I learned a great deal doing the film, and later when George W became president, several of the people I interviewed urged me to "get out while you still can."

Being a veteran at Standing Rock was the first time I really considered that I was "serving" my country. It was an exhilarating feeling, one that Gerry must experience often during his various trips to expose the war crimes of the US military machine. True patriots don't let their countries turn into empires.  

The thrill of being overlords in the Promised Land

It is a bright new day in Dutchess County. Some of our most important leaders are joining forces to link the county and its educational institutions to the "only democracy" in the Middle East, Israel.

Important things happen when great minds get together. The president of Vassar College seems to have discussed plans with the Deputy Consul General during her trip to Israel. Now, many more leaders on on board, including our county executive, and decision makers at the Culinary Institute and IBM. Here are some suggestions for how this visionary group might partner with the apartheid state.

Israel already trains many U.S. police forces in military tactics and weaponry. Maybe the police in Poughkeepsie and Beacon could patrol in armored vehicles rather than on bikes. Checkpoint technology might also benefit these communities. People of the wrong color or religion could be made to wait in long lines and be inspected before they travel out of their areas. Israel's high tech surveillance industry could be used to track goings on within these inner city ghettos.

On a cheerier note, Dutchess County could benefit from all the Israeli products that support the occupation, like Jaffa oranges, Ahava cosmetics, Sabra hummus and Psagot wines. Nothing like the taste and feel of products that come from appropriated territories. The Culinary Institute could even create a "settlement restaurant" where diners could experience the thrill of being overlords in the Promised Land.

You would have to be a real anti-semite not to be enthused.

Remade in the best interests of all the people

April 11

GUEST: Eldad Benary, born in 1937 in Tel-Aviv, Palestine, educated and propagandized in Israel, and conscripted into the Israeli Defense Force (active and reserve for 20 years), talks about his longtime efforts to inform Americans about occupation and apartheid.

+972 Magazine

It was an honor having Eldad as a guest of Activist Radio. Few people come from Israel, settle down in the U.S., and work so hard letting his friends and neighbors know about the realities of apartheid. 

I took him years of reading, because it is not a simple thing to reinterpret a life spent in a propagandized society. Most Americans don't think about how many people the empire killed in Korea, Vietnam, or Iraq. They know that their country always had the very best of intentions. When wars fail and millions of civilians lie dead, we reinterpret these wars as mistakes in logic. The Vietnamese "weren't ready for democracy." We tried to make things better for the women of Iraq, but slaughtered millions; it was a "tragic mistake." 

If the populations of countries could see the truth, there might be an end to wars of aggression. If Americans were like Eldad, we would study our history and not be afraid of where that takes us. Then we would then spend 25 years of our lifes informing others. Its a recipe for the end of the empire, when we the people rise up and demand that our government be remade in the best interests of all the people. 

U.S. citizens hold the key

April 4

GUEST: Elik Elhanan, a soldier in an Israeli Defense Forces combat unit from 1995-98, and current military refuser, talks about the loss of his sister to a Palestinian suicide bomber In 1997 and his subsequent role in the formation of Combatants for Peace.

Combatants for Peace

Elik is a former Combatant for Peace and now lives in the U.S. He was kind enough to fill in at a panel we held in Woodstock when the Palestinian Combatant for Peace was not allowed into the country. In America, we reject the workers for peace and reconciliation at our boarders, lest their ideas about nonviolence infect the citizenry.

Elik is even more moving in person. We had a full house in Woodstock, some 60 people, and he was brutally honest about what his homeland had become. Combatants for Peace operates in Israel as well as the U.S., so their group presentations tend to avoid hot issues like BDS, the right of return, and the one state solution. Combatants would be in a lot of trouble in Israel, even for the mention of Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions, since individuals and groups can be sued for there for such things. I suspect that their acceptance by our local ministers and rabbis reflect this. Combatants will be relatively safe for their churches and synagogues.

And that is probably a tactic rather than a principle. Combatants can get into communities that other pro-Palestinian human rights groups can't, and that is a big plus. The price paid is that the most important political issues must be muted. Like the role of the U.S. in Israeli apartheid.

Palestinian refugees often hold keys to the houses that they were ethnically cleansed from. U.S. citizens hold the key to ending the suffering and violence in Palestine. End America's support for apartheid Israel, and that includes getting rid of Congress members who are bought and paid for by the Israel Lobby, like Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi.