Taking our place with the peaceful nations of the earth

Larreynaga, Nicaragua

September 9

GUEST: Dr. Arnold Matlin. retired pediatrician and long time political activist in solidarity with the Nicaraguan Revolution since the 1980s, talks about the need to defend Sandinista gains from US imperial interventions.

NicaNotes: Hands off Nicaragua!

Dr. Matlin has made Nicaragua an important part of his life. After visiting Nicaragua in the late 1980s during the Contra Wars, he has returned over 30 times to the sister city his group in Rochester, NY had established in El Sauce, Leon. My brother and I have been to El Sauce too, each of us driving a truck full of medical supplies, bicycles, and schoolbooks. My truck eventually made it to the sister city that my town of Rhinebeck, NY had established. We called our group the Mid Hudson/Larreynaga Sister City Project. 

El Sauce, Nicaragua

Noam Chomsky recently did an article for Jacobin Magazine, and I thought his take on Nicaragua was right on. 

"Of course, the world is somewhat different. One difference is the population. To the extent that today’s wars are more humanitarian, that’s thanks to people like you. It’s coming from people on the ground. The country has become more civilized as a result of the activism of the 1960s. And there’s plenty of evidence for that, though it doesn’t get discussed. It’s not the right story. Take the Central American wars. Horrible atrocities. Hundreds of thousands of people were killed. There was torture, massacres — everything you can think of.

But there were things the United States couldn’t do. It couldn’t do what John F. Kennedy could do in South Vietnam twenty years earlier. They tried, but they couldn’t do it. There was simply too much opposition here.

When he came into office, Ronald Reagan tried to duplicate what Kennedy had done twenty years earlier. There was an immediate backlash from the population. They weren’t accepting that anymore.

What happened in Central America was something totally new in the entire history of imperialism. It was the first time ever that people in the aggressor country didn’t just protest but went to live with the victims. I visited churches in Middle America where people knew more about Central America than the academics, because they were working there." AN INTERVIEW WITH NOAM CHOMSKY

I am a believer in long term activism. It doesn't always bring our troops home. It often doesn't stop the US Military Industrial Complex's from launching new invasions and occupations. Perhaps Chomsky is right when he describes 250 year of US history. Our country has always had an addiction to expansion, from the extermination of its indigenous peoples, to the continuing economic embargo of Nicaragua, Cuba, and Venezuela. We are the empire, and most of the slaughter and mayhem committed since World War II has "Made in America" stamped on every landmine, smart bomb and drone involved in the bloodshed. But people like Dr. Matlin don't give up. Pete Seeger once told me, "You never know which grain of sand it will be. But one grain will eventually tip the balance." We were standing at a vigil against the invasion of Iraq, which happened anyway. The scale wasn't quite ready to tip. But perhaps one day it will, and our beautiful and multicolored country will learn how to take its place with the peaceful nations of the earth. 

Fascism in the US has been crafted by many elites

September 2

GUEST: Thom Hartmann, top rated progressive national and internationally syndicated talk show host, and New York Times bestselling author of over 30 books, talks about his latest work, The Hidden History of American Healthcare, Why Sickness Bankrupts You and Makes Others Insanely Rich.

The Hidden History of American Healthcare

In an era of Black Lives Matter, we can see the white supremacy basis for denying healthcare. Thom Hartmann spells it out for us in this very informative and readable history of America's shame, the denial of the human right for universal healthcare. 

Read how the early campaign for healthcare denial was based on reducing the number of Black people in our society. As an "inferior race," they couldn't be allowed to multiply. It was Nazi thinking well before the Third Reich was even conceived. And it was supported by Prudential Insurance, seeking another source of vast revenue. 

Read about how FDR and Churchill and met secretly to insure that after World War II, Europe would not succumb to fascism again. The answer that both men agreed upon was a social security plan and universal healthcare. Unless nations were able to make their citizen's lives better, the population would be vulnerable to fascism. Or so their thinking went. England adopted both social security and state supported healthcare when the war ended. But US corporations fanned the flames of white supremacy and universal healthcare never passed. 

In fact, fascism is never mentioned in the healthcare debate in our country. Nor is racism. But remember that our media is owned by the same class of people who have so effectively bought off our politicians. There is no end of elected officials on the take from our insurance and healthcare industry, from Reagan to Joe Lieberman and Obama. Fascism in the US has been crafted by many elites. And the death toll over the last century has been staggering. 

 

When will we ever learn?

 

August 26

GUEST: Dr. Jerry Lembcke, Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the College of Holy Cross, researcher on media and myth-making, and co-author of the new book, Dissenting POWs, From Vietnam’s Hoa Lo Prison to America Today.

Monthly Review, An Independent Socialist Magazine

How does a country lose wars time and time again, squandering its national treasure and good name for nothing at all? The Vietnam War (called the American War by the country that freed itself) was particularly bloody, with up to 3 million Vietnamese killed. And then there was the loss of US lives, over 58,000 soldiers who came home in body bags. Looking back, the insanity of this campaign leaves any reasonable explanation of it in the dust of history. 

There were those who showed immense bravery and opposed this war from the start. Some were celebrities like Jane Fonda, who traveled to Hanoi to talk to US prisoners of war. She is in Dr. Lembcke's book, as are the captured soldiers who felt the same way she did about the war. In fact, the war was finally ended because the war mongers in power as well as the generals had stopped trusting their own troops. There was an unexpected rebellion from within the ranks, from soldiers who at last refused to be part of the carnage.

I did my part in a small way to frustrate the US war machine from within. It was self preservation first, and some GIs did so much more. But I was a terrible soldier from start to the finish, leaving the military at exactly the same rank as I had entered, that of an E-1. It had taken me several field grade Article 15s to get there. My colonel told me, if we were in Vietnam, he would simply shoot me with his pistol. I told him that if we were in Vietnam, he would be dead already. And he would have been; he was such a bastard. 

So Dr. Lembcke's book is not about me. His goal is to educate the American public about how the Vietnam War was resisted from within, even in the prisoner of war camps in Hanoi. We have had so many catastrophic military adventures since then. When will we ever learn?

Removing the US knee from Haiti's neck

August 19

GUEST: Robert Roth, activist in the Central America solidarity movement, organizer for various campaigns to free political prisoners in the US, and co-founder of the Haiti Action Committee, talks about colonialism and how our media covers it up.

Haiti Action Committee

Like Jim Crow in the US, racism towards the country of Haiti has gone on for generations. And it has mostly been invisible to the majority of white Americans.

Part of that racism can't be understood unless one looks at the history of Haiti, and its overlord, the US Empire. The perpetual invasion, coups and private interventions are airbrushed out of our ever compliant media. Stories about Haiti are always like stories about our inner city ghettos. Blacks are perpetually described as shiftless, rebellious, and incapable of creating a workable society. 

What isn't referred to is the millions of dollars being taken from Blacks in the form of wage theft, resource robbery, and ethnic cleansing. Many US corporations and their grossly overpaid CEOs thrive on exploiting Blacks, both in the US and in Haiti.

Slavery itself, that most obvious of exploitive institutions, persisted for hundreds of years in the US. Jim Crow and Sundown Towns lasted well over a century. The imperial injustices visited on Haiti's Black population go way back as well. Haiti is really an oppressed colony of the US, and since colonialism ultimately depends on racism to survive, the treatment of this supposed independent nation has been particularly bloody. 

Take a look at the Haiti Action Committee above. Freedom for Haiti means removing the US knee from this island's neck. 

Obama's 11 million dollar mansion for all the homeless people

August 12

GUEST: Dr. Larry Wittner, early civil rights and anti-apartheid activist, author of several books, and Professor of History emeritus at SUNY/Albany, talks about his new article in Counterpunch, "Nationalism on the Decline."

Nationalism on the Decline

We have had Dr. Larry Wittner on Activist Radio before. This time we talk about nationalism and about why it is suddenly in decline after seemingly peaking in the Trump era. Larry points to the failure of authoritarians to solve the major problems of the day from climate collapse to COVID. In essence, he outlines the futility of using race hatred and violence to solve national crises. Eventually people want relief rather than scapegoats. 

What we do need in the US is a conversation about how fascism arises in the first place. Obama can't be ignored, that huckster of hope and change we can believe in. The Democrats have been lying to the public for decades, promising our citizens so much, only to be rob them again and again. Trump's new way of thinking appealed to so many who have finally figured out this two party scam of the American public. 

Obama will have all his billionaire friends at his 6,892-square-foot Martha's Vineyard mansion this weekend. He has served them well, and like the grifter Clintons, he can now wallow in all his unjust rewards.

One of those rewards is fascism, a time when ordinary people decide that they will try anything to get rid of the current cleptocracy. I hope that instead of fascism, we try socialism next time. Perhaps one of the first things that the 99% will do is to offer Obama's 11 million dollar mansion to all the homeless people he helped create. 

A nation that continues year after year...

August 5

GUESTS: Yohana Beyene, organizer for Horn of Africa Pan-Africanists for Liberation and Solidarity, and Tunde Osazua, Coordinator of Black Alliance for Peace's U.S. Out of Africa Network, talk about the sordid history of US involvement in Somalia and Ethiopia. 

Horn of Africa - Pan-Africans for Liberation & Solidarity

It's a powerful combination: US military aggression and the ignorance of the American people. The aggression part has been around since the end of the WW II, when government "leaders" decided to expand US hegemony to include the rest of the world. And that has been the underlying motivation of the CIA, created during the war to destroy fascist armies, but now transitioned to attack any country that strays from the US neoliberal agenda.

This has been especially damaging to emerging democracies in the Third World. In places like Korea, Vietnam, Iran, Guatemala, Chile, and many newly formed countries in Africa, Somehow, the US sees itself as above the law when it comes to subverting elected leaders or assassinating critics of the empire.

The CIA has made the transition from fighting the Nazi SS to becoming its United States equivalent. This agency should have been shut down after the war was won and our troops came home. Only our troops never came home from all the countries that our military liberated. And the CIA was vastly expanded so ensure that our bases multiplied and stayed forever. In that way, the US became the Third Reich, determined to last a thousand years, despite the yearnings of tens of millions to be free. 

If the US empire ever falls, we will be left with the baggage of its war crimes: tens of millions killed and dozens of governments overthrown. The US will have spent all its vast treasures on war, with little to show for it besides a burning planet and the hundreds of billionaires who talk of escaping to outer space. 

A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual doom. - Martin Luther King, Jr.

Room for all God's miscreants

The new Supreme Court has significantly expanded the rights of religions over the good of all citizens. For this court, the First Amendment "free exercise" clause includes just about anything a religious group chooses to do, no matter how detrimental that might be to the common good. Want to have hundreds at a wedding during a deadly pandemic? Now religious groups have the right to be super spreaders of COVID 19.

That is probably good news for the 40,000 fundamentalist Mormons whose practices of polygamy may now be protected. Other religions groups also have reason to be spiritually joyous. Take the Catholic Church, where the sexual abuse of children has become so commonplace that it is almost part of the religious experience. Thousands of priests have abused children for decades, and their actions have been protected right up to the Vatican. Why couldn't the church now claim that pedophilia is a part of its religious tradition, and as such is protected from criminal prosecution?

Zionists have reasons to celebrate as well. Israel is an important part of the Jewish and Evangelical Christian religions, so wouldn't the apartheid treatment of five million Palestinian now be protected by the Supreme Court? In fact shooting Palestinians, bulldozing their homes and walling them into fetid ghettos has been part of both religions for over a century. Why not celebrate it, along with bigamist Mormons and child molesting Catholics? The new religious freedoms enshrined by the Supreme Court have room for all God's miscreants.