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Seeing is believing. Oftentimes tragedy, oppression or suffering can be dehumanized, merely defined by statistics, policy decisions and ends-justifying-the-means rationale. It isn’t until the personal stories and imagery of those affected by war, extreme poverty and tyranny are seen that a deeper understanding and empathy of situations emerges. Jane Olson, former chair of the International Board of Trustees of Human Rights Watch and decades-long humanitarian activist, brings these stories to light in her new book, World Citizen, Journeys of a Humanitarian.
Olson joins host Robert Scheer on this week’s Scheer Intelligence to give a glimpse into her life’s work, which defines much of the book. From the atrocities of the Vietnam War to her work with the Landmine Survivors Network—an organization devoted to those affected by landmines recover from their traumatic experiences—Olson demonstrates the power of storytelling and the importance, especially now in the midst of the war in Ukraine, of documenting the real effects of government decisions.
“In my first talk, I spoke about how many people were killed, how many refugees [were displaced], women raped, I had all the statistics. I talked about the geography, the history of the region… People were falling asleep. So I put down my notes and said ‘Let me tell you about this amazing woman I met named Mincy,’ and I started telling stories. Ever since, I have found that that is what informs people, what makes people care about these conflicts and their devastating effects on humanity and also moves people, moves them to make a difference,” Olson explains.
Olson and Scheer explore the humans responsible for these wars and how stories like the ones included in her book should be at the forefront of decision making. “The real enemy is war itself. As long as we support violence committed in our name, in any form, then it is on us,” Olson says.
The book also includes myriad photographs accompanying the accounts of the victims and survivors because of their effectiveness and “because you need to put a face on that Other. Show their dignity; describe their resilience, their survivorship, their ability to help out and reach others even when they are so devastated themselves,” Olson remarks.
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Transcript
Robert Scheer:
Hi, this is Robert Scheer with another edition of Scheer Intelligence, where the intelligence comes from my guest and a particularly intelligent but, you know, splendid human being. And I mean that in a journalistic sense, I’m not trivializing this. Jane Olson, who has spent 30 years of her life working on basically human rights issues around the world, basically dealing with the victims of miscalculation, evil error of foreign policy, of national ambitions, of politicians’ egos around the world. And during that period, she became the chair of Human Rights Watch, which is probably the most significant human rights organization in the United States, maybe in the world right up there. Well, I guess Amnesty International can give you a good run for your money. And she has now come out with a book called World Citizen, Journeys of a Humanitarian. And what I love about this book is that… And you get it now, there’ll be a Kindle version soon after this broadcast, you can get it on Amazon, you get it on other outlets. But the book does not sacrifice the art. And the art includes photographs that are compelling. The layout, it’s inviting. And what really comes through in the photography and the writing and so forth is the humanity of the victims of war, I think, would be the first thing, that this is not collateral damage. This is not you know, these are not just numbers. These are human beings of all ages. They’re innocent, caught up in war, targeted in war. And so the pictures become the art becomes really important. So why don’t we begin with that? And then I’ll just start with an amazing statistic. And this book, which has 29 chapters and I don’t want to put anyone off from reading World Citizen, Journeys of a Humanitarian, it’s really a very good read. It’s telling the story of people who don’t get a chance to tell their stories. And there’s… You visited or talked about in this book, 18 countries and throughout Africa, Central America, Asia, you know, the Cold War. No Cold War, uh, countries that the United States has messed up, like Nicaragua and so forth, and countries as recently as Ukraine that Russia is doing its best to mess up. And so why don’t you tell us about this book project? You know, you and I are not getting any younger. You’ve put in a lot of time, I think, being this incredibly exemplary humanitarian. I want to just say full confession, I’m biased in favor of everything you’ve done. I’ve followed your work year after year. You’ve called attention to all these problems around the world that we tend to ignore and victims of it. And now you’ve documented it in a compelling way. So just tell us about this project and your life. You can begin with Iowa.
Jane Olson:
Okay. Well, that’s actually an important place to begin, because I grew up in rural western Iowa, not on a farm, but a very small town where everything in the entire region was influenced and centered on agriculture. Um and I learned a lot of lessons in the Midwest. One of them is that the world’s not going to come to you. I always had a very active curiosity about the world and travel, spent a lot of time in the Carnegie Library, but also traveled a lot in my dad’s station wagon, all five of us children all around the country. So I’ve had a travel lust for a long time. I was trained as a journalist. My favorite class was investigative reporting and also, I have had a passion for photography since I was in sixth grade and got my first brownie camera. So the book is the result of a lot of what I would say, humanitarian and journalistic ventures, adventures into countries that are suffering from conflict, the majority, but also from severe poverty and diseases that are really part of the Middle Ages, many places in Africa. As with all life, it comes to you one thing at a time. And every time I said yes an invitation went off and then something else would come along. And I can’t say that any of this was really planned. So I took many journeys with highly esteemed humanitarian organizations and with Human Rights Watch. Every time I came back, I was full of stories that I wanted to tell and information that I wanted to pass on. Much of it was about the real evils and horror of war and its impact on individual human beings. I always looked for people that could give me some hope about the human spirit and resilience. And a lot of my book talks about the difference between being a victim and being a survivor. But when I came back, I was given opportunities to speak in Los Angeles primarily in the beginning. And I felt that since I wasn’t a lawyer or an international policy expert or professor or anything like that, that I had to know all the facts, I had to show that I was really grounded in facts. So in my first talk, I told about how many people have been killed, how many refugees, internally displaced people, women raped. I had all the statistics. I talked about the geography, the history of the region. And I looked out thinking everybody was going to be nodding it, thinking, oh, yes, how smart she is. And instead I saw they were nodding and falling asleep. So I put down my notes, Bob, literally, and said, let me tell you about this amazing woman I met named Mincy. And I started telling stories. And ever since, I have found that that is what informs people, makes people care about these conflicts and their devastating effect on humanity, but also moves people and moves people to want to make a difference.
Scheer:
So what was the first you were at, the first meeting where people were dozing off and then you put down your notes. Who did you tell them about?
Olson:
The story was about Mincy, a woman in Yugoslavia who had been… Oh, she had suffered a pattern that I heard from many women. The Serbs had come into her village, a Bosnian Muslim village, during the ethnic cleansing war against Bosnian Muslims. They had shelled the town until they were weakened, and then they came in, forcing everyone out of their homes. Killed the men and boys, put the women and girls in trucks and shipped them off to school houses and different places. And she was held in a rape camp for weeks and weeks and weeks, just brutalized and starved and beaten. And she finally escaped with the help of some Bosnian men and came to a place where she said she would have died if it hadn’t been for her young son that she had to keep alive who had been with her this whole time. That’s the story I told because her survival story about the community that she developed and all the other women and girls that she really saved is one of the most inspirational stories in my book. It’s one of my favorites.
Scheer:
That is the… You know I want to stress this book is a work of art and you really fought over the design and how you wanted to publish. You, you know, were instrumental in publishing it and in its design. And the art is very important, critical because it’s the beginning of forcing people to see these are not objects. These are not statistics. These are people. Whether they’re wrinkled and old or they’re young and, you know, vivid and so forth. And so they’re not just these statistics and the stories. That’s really the critical achievement here, because there is a genre of what some people call disaster porn. And, you know, the starving kid in Africa with flies circling around them. And yes, so some people will watch it, not watch it, but so then they get used to it in a way, war becomes a video game, it’s something particularly when we don’t have a draft. Now, I know you as a very cheerful, positive person over the years; has been very easy to, you’ve been very easy to be around. You have a great, you know, sense of humor and life. And you have deliberately put yourself, beginning with that first incident and we should go through a number of other countries to capture the range of this book, but how did you keep your own humanity while you were experiencing this degradation of other people’s humanity? How did you… Why aren’t you nasty and bitter and angry and everything?
Olson:
Well, I think it’s because I followed my mother’s advice everywhere I went. That’s what she always told me and my sisters. Be who you are, use what you have and do what you can. And I think everywhere I went, I followed that, those three points. I did what I could, which is in many cases, the most helpful thing is to sit with someone and listen, be present, hear their story. Not cry over them or, you know, beat your chest, but to just give these people the dignity of being a witness. And the other thing is I was traveling with substantial organizations that really could bring aid, bring help and make a difference.
Scheer:
Well, I think that yes, I want to make this clear. There are people who have borne witness and don’t have all that much effect because they don’t have the big megaphone, they don’t have the way of getting it out. You have been able to do both. And I know you because I was working at the Los Angeles Times for a while, quite a long time, 28, 29 years in the community that you were active in and your home and you know, you’re an active member of the Council on Foreign Relations. I met you when we both were at the Pacific, I forget the name.
Olson:
Pacific Council on International Policy, a wonderful organization.
Scheer:
You know, and you were involved. I mean, you’d really talk more a little about your activist career because you acted on trying to change policy. So on the question of land mines, you work with the most important coalition to get rid of landmines, to ban landmines because they’re basically anti-civilian weapons. And your organization got the Nobel Prize for that. In addition to Human Rights Watch, which has been honored and so forth. So you are that rare person that has been able to keep your humanity and relate to ordinary people and tell their story. But you also have been one of the most effective people that I know of in getting your government, here in the United States, getting influential people, working with organizations like Human Rights Watch, which was very effective. And, you know, to get well in the case of landmines and other to get landmines banned. So you’ve actually been able to do both. You’ve been that witness. You’ve risked real danger in these situations, which we should talk about. You have a husband that’s been willing to support you, even though you went into situations of danger. I’m sure you made his life miserable at times. You mother his children and grandchildren and so forth out there doing this. I know, I have a journalist wife who scares me sometimes with what she gets involved with. But the fact of the matter is, you didn’t stop there. You didn’t stop there with recording it, communicating, telling stories. You decided to change policy and you’ve been very effective at it. Uh, you know, just I mean, yes, you know, you say you’re kind of a hick from Iowa, but, you know, your father had been in the war.
Olson:
I didn’t say hick! I have great respect for the Midwest.
Scheer:
And, you know, but we had to find the Carnegie Library, which was a famous library. But the fact of matter is, you have been very effective in influencing policy. And we should just get that out there. You have forced, you’re not the only one, but you have been part of this getting policy changed. You know? And not all of them. I mean, uh, you know, we still have fragmentation bombs are still use, napalm is still used and torture still occurs.
Olson:
And there are landmines in Ukraine being laid right now.
Scheer:
Yeah and, and landmines have been laid by lots of different governments and, you know, something equivalent to landmines, fragmentation bombs, those pineapple and guava bombs used by the U.S. in Vietnam still killed people and all of this I mean, I want… There’s a trajectory in this book, no one gets off easy in your book. You know, you have criticism of even people that you’re supporting from Central America who are up or against the U.S. but you have criticism even of them. And at the end of the book, you have a compelling analysis of what happened in Vietnam, going back to the head of the Air Force, U.S. Air Force, appointed by Richard Nixon. His name is You can help me, here’s Robert…
Olson:
Robert Channing Seamans Jr.
Scheer:
Robert Channing Seamans Jr. product of a fine private school education and Harvard and M.I.T. and everything. And you find yourself in a delegation. And this is the compelling last chapter, I think, of this book. This is the guy—we dropped more bombs on Vietnam than were dropped in World War Two on Europe—this is the guy that Martin Luther King when he said the US is the major purveyor of violence in the world today, well you were there in Vietnam many years later looking at these people and that guy actually had already written something for the government saying he thought the war was a mistake. He claims that he only stayed on for his second two years under Nixon because they promised the war would end. But, you know, and his daughter was against the war…
Olson:
It’s a wonderful story. You’re right. It’s a wonderful story. Landmine Survivors Network had programs in many countries around the world that had landmines. At the time, there were 80 countries that were mined and 80 million landmines estimated around the world. Vietnam was one of our last programs to be developed, but we discovered that there were very few humanitarian organizations working in Vietnam, with the exception of the Vietnam Veterans Association, because they knew the vets who’d been there were doing very good work over there because they knew what a mess we had left. So there were so many unexploded bombs all across Vietnam and many amputees. That’s why we went. But one of our ways to get support was to invite people to go with us. And on this particular trip, one of our guests was Kathleen Brown, who ran for governor, was a daughter of a governor and the sister of a governor of California. She went with us and some other prominent people and a woman from Boston who asked if she could go. She was friends with one of our staff people and we said, yes, of course. And then she called and said, may I bring my father? And she said that he doesn’t want anyone to know but myself as the board chair and the director, Jerry White, who was the executive director. He wants to come incognito as my father, but he was U.S. secretary, secretary of the U.S. Air Force during the course of the Air Force that I’m sorry, as secretary of the U.S. Air Force during the whole course of the Vietnam War and had never been to North Vietnam, he had never seen it except through infrared satellite images. Could he come? And we said, yes, of course. You know, having no idea what to expect.
Scheer:
He was under Nixon? He was there for the bombing of Vietnam, obviously very extensive. More bombs dropped in World War Two, but Cambodia. And he did this for four years under Nixon.
Olson:
So he did not come through the military, though. He was an M.I.T…
Scheer:
Efficiency expert.
Olson:
Yes, an aeronautics expert.
Scheer:
Why does that make it better? He was there making those decisions just like Robert McNamara had been making decisions when he was in charge of all of this about how to most effectively kill people. It was saturation bombing, destroying basically agrarian people, destroying their economy and so forth. So you were… I mean, this is what I want to get at because, yes, it’s very important what your book does. World Citizen, Journeys of a Humanitarian. We have to know that these are not statistics. This book settles that issue. One cannot look at the pictures, read the texts and so forth, and you get the stories. So you know it matters. You know, decent, wonderful human beings are killed. They’re as important as anybody, you know, and as you yourself as a reader. Okay. That’s the power of your storytelling. The fact is, a lot of this is a result of mischief by very smart, well-educated people, whether they happen to speak Russian or English. And you were traveling with one of those people, you know, and he didn’t do what Daniel Ellsberg did, who was involved in… You know, figuring out policy issues. But he became a whistleblower and challenged it. This fellow, Robert Channing Seamans Jr., was anguished a bit because he didn’t believe in the war through much of it, but he still was there approving, directing, efficiently directing the killing of these hundreds of thousands of people. I mean, Robert McNamara estimated three and a half million people died as a result of our war, and that was only early on. In the movie Fog of War, when he makes that the estimates really are all like five, six million people died throughout Indochina. This guy was instrumental to that. Wasn’t he a war criminal?
Olson:
Well, I’m not going to judge that, but I want to tell you what he said that I will absolutely never forget. The second day we were there, we were in Hanoi. We went on a tour that I think all tourists get. We went and saw the lake where John McCain’s airplane came down and of course, he was held prisoner. We went to the presidential palace. And our guide showed us that Ho Chi Minh, the North Korean or North Vietnamese leader, head of the Viet Cong, did not live in that palace and refused to live in it. He had a very modest cottage outside the palace. When I watched Secretary Seamans’ face, that surprised him. And the guy talked about the American war, they call it. And its impact on his family and the community and so on. But the more we learned about what their life had been like under French colonization and the great revolutionary spirit of these people, I heard Secretary Seamans say, “we didn’t understand this or we didn’t understand these people.” And I think that said it all to me. You know, you can get caught up in achieving a goal, a mission, in this case, winning a war. And now go back to the very fundamental question. Who are these people? Why are we killing them? What is this all about? And I think that the domino theory was so widely believed in our administration to justify this terrible war, which was our generation’s war, Bob. You know, many of my friends died in that war. Some are… Came back with injuries that they’re still suffering from. So this was very deeply meaningful to me to be there. But I think that the importance of what I’ve done is to put a face on the victim and show their side of it, show the impact on them. And we went down to a village along the DMZ, where Secretary Seamans went into a small house, he had to bend way over. And he’s tall, he was a very tall man, he’s since deceased. And he had to lean over to get in the house and he sat on a little plastic chair right across from a Viet Cong leader who lived in that village. And the two of them talked with a woman interpreter on her knees between them to get their words. I couldn’t hear what they were saying or the interpretation. But it was one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen. And I think he came out of that experience and that trip a changed man. And he said we were on the wrong side of this war. We didn’t understand.
Scheer:
It’s when it’s our side and we judge one way and then when it’s other people. I mean, should there have been a Nuremberg trial for that Robert Channing Seamans should have been involved. Why didn’t he know that the domino theory was nonsense? Why didn’t he know that China, for example, you know, had conquered Vietnam for a thousand years? Why didn’t he know nationalism was a strong force here for the Vietnamese? Why didn’t he know that, in fact, if we left the Vietnam War or had never gone in, of which we violated treaties, the basic you know, there was supposed to be an election and everything else. The fact is they would have gone their own way. And right now Vietnam is still communist, China is still communist, and they’re rivals right now. They’re fighting over some islands right after the war ended, they didn’t attack the United States, they went to war with each other. The whole thing was garbage. You know, just the same kind of garbage as saying to, you know, I had relatives in Germany when I went back to see them. You know, the old “we were told this and we were told that,” well, they were farmers. Okay. You believe that, it was all nonsense, you know. But why did this guy believe it? He was Harvard educated, you know, he came from the best schools. What does it say about our culture? And this is what I really want to ask you, because you’ve met people, you’ve been with the powerful and you’ve been with the most vulnerable, you know, And I want to put it… You were connected with a church that had a big impact on me. All Saints Church in Pasadena with a number of different reverends there, you know, and that church forced us to address these questions of foreign policy from a moral point of view, what are we really talking about? And it’s what Martin Luther King did in that Riverside Church speech. And I want to ask you that because the book begs that question. Because I read this and I read your book, I have this wonderful edition, I read it online. So I didn’t see the photographs in any clear way. Now I have a copy. World Citizen, Journeys of the Humanitarian Jane Olson, very important book to get. But when I read this, I’m full of anger. Why is this misery visited upon all of these people, whether it’s visited by Putin or it’s visited by John F Kennedy or it’s visited by Richard Nixon? Wait a minute. Yes, bad things will happen in the world without us, without the big shots. But the fact is it escalates because you have these massive weapons systems. You have this way of killing so many people. So your book. Yes, it’s a very important book because it reminds us of who the victims are and their humanity. You can’t then ignore it because it’s very powerfully told. But isn’t the real lesson that we are indifferent to that suffering? We discuss it as policy.
Olson:
Well, we have to be taught to hate. We have to be taught to fear. We have to be taught that there’s an enemy. I will never forget General Eisenhower, President Eisenhower, when he left the White House. The most important gift he gave to this nation was his warning: beware of the military industrial complex. We have to have an enemy in order to justify the enormous investment in so-called defense. I think that’s cynical, but it’s true.
Scheer:
Time for a break. We’ll be back in a few minutes. We’re back with Scheer Intelligence and our guest. I don’t want to pick on, I mean, he’s dead now, Robert Channing Seamans Jr. clearly knew Eisenhower had given that speech, our revered war hero. He probably also knew that George Washington, in his farewell address warned us about the imposters of pretended patriotism. The people who founded this country knew that empires would destroy representative democracy. They knew all that. So how can it be whether you have Democrats or Republicans, whether you have Harvard or Yale or whatever, how are these people all going along with nonsense? The domino theory was nonsense. It was a denial of nationalism, a denial of history. I mean, as you saw with Ho Chi Minh, whatever you thought about Ho Chi Minh, he was a nationalist. He was the guy who had fought the Japanese and supported the Americans during that war. He then fought the French. And by the way, in your book, you say the wake, the wake of a war with no winners. And I thought, wait a minute, anti-colonialism had winners, you know, and Vietnam actually freed itself from that French and American neo colonial joke at a very high price. Right?
Olson:
It’s to define what winning is. I mean, they gained freedom and at a very high price. And the amazing thing that I found is how much they love Americans. I talked to so many Vietnamese people who wanted to send their children to the U.S., they love the U.S. So in that in that sense, they were winners.
Scheer:
But wait a minute. That reinforces exactly the error, because the argument was, no, they are communists, therefore they will always be our enemy. They will always want to kill us. Well, they’re still communists. They’re still run by a Communist Party. And in fact, right now, the United States is trying to get the assembly of iPhones from China to Vietnam, because we think of Vietnam as the good communists. Now, the Chinese we think of are the bad communists now, the irony in this is that intelligence doesn’t seem to matter. Education doesn’t seem to matter. And this guy you traveled with, highly educated. How did he not know the history of a place?
Olson:
Well, I’m sure he did. He was a scientist. His focus was on the technical, scientific. And I want to say, in his defense, he was a lovely man and he had a strong conscience. He did not at any time speak negatively about McNamara or the presidents that he served or anyone in the administration. He was taking it all on his own conscience.
Scheer:
And this does not in any way, not only does it not detract from your book, it makes your book a more urgent and significant read because if it was just a game and statistics and, you know, so forth and chessboard the way we think about war. Okay, then, you know, really? All right. Did we win that? We lost this. You know, meanwhile, the economy improved, so forth. But when you look at the human cost, which is what your work is all about, whether with Human Rights Watch or in this book, this really important book, it’s not a video game. The consequences are horrifying, horrifying. Rape, you know, rape of a farmer, you know, children dismembered. That’s what got Martin Luther King to come out against the war. He saw these pictures, which actually I was the editor of Ramparts magazine, we had pictures of what Napalm did, what fragmentation bombs do. And so I want to challenge you not in an adversarial way, you don’t need any wisdom from me. You’ve spent your life getting informed about all this. But what I think we tend to do is give our own country, our own culture, a pass. And the fact is, Hannah Arendt, when she was writing about Eichmann in the Eichmann trial, got at the good German, you know, and I think I would argue I’m picking on the dead or anything, but a figure like Robert Channing Seamans Jr., when I read your book, I really had not thought much about this person. I never met him. But I would say the same thing about McNamara, who I did interview, I did know and talked to. These people played a monstrous role. And in the same not specifically the way Eichmann did, but certainly the carpet bombing of Vietnam, the destruction of any form of life there, including the peasants digging holes and planting their rice. It doesn’t matter whether they are nice after the fact or I have some doubts. They deliberately turn their mind away from what the photographs show.
Olson:
Right.
Scheer:
And they had access to photographs like that. They could have seen that. They deliberately avoided thinking about the very thing that your book is about, these human beings that are being butchered.
Olson:
And his daughter told me as I said, he, I felt a strong regret and deep conscience in this man when he was over in Vietnam. A reconciliation with what he’d done. It was really, deeply moving. And he never spoke a word against McNamara or anyone else in the government. But his daughter told me that they were skiing in Colorado, turned on the morning news while her dad was doing yoga in front of the television or doing stretches on the carpet and saw that the U.S. was bombing Cambodia. He took the hit for that. He didn’t [inaudible] wasn’t even consulted on that happening, that they did that while he was gone, but he was the one who took responsibility for it. But you talked about our own country and one of the great motivations for me to write this book and to do it now, and I did feel an urgency, is the horrendous polarization in this country right now. The hate speech, the stereotyping of immigrants and asylum seekers as criminals. There’s so much hatred in this country for the Other right now and lack of understanding about the Other person, the vulnerable person that just needs our help, that just needs to be given a chance. And I felt an urgency to get my book out now. And I thought the photographs were very important because you need to put a face on that Other. Show their dignity, describe their resilience, their survivorship, their ability to reach out and help others even when they are so devastated themselves. I don’t want to make heroes out of or glamorize the victims, but I have to say, I was deeply moved. And I think in this country we need a little more compassion and a little more understanding of the Other and those in need of our help.
Scheer:
But and I’ll let you have the last word, it seems to me, the power of your book is that these people in the government that have power and this is in Russia right now about what are you doing in Ukraine is, you know, through the U.S. when you were in Nicaragua, it is true, the U.S. in Vietnam and so forth, they can have access to these pictures. They can easily have a deeper view. They are going along and I’m talking about the high level. This is where you get the analogy to Nuremberg and the Germans, because after all, the Germans were well-educated people, including plenty around Hitler and everything. If they wanted to really know who were these Jews or who were these gypsies or who were these Slavs, they knew. In fact, there were plenty of Jewish people integrated quite nicely into German society. They knew what they were the most, they were some of the most brilliant scientists, and you know that they had played an important role in their society. They went along with scapegoating because it was convenient to their careers, their security or what have you. And that’s what’s monstrous, that’s… I mean, to my mind that this damage to human beings that you describe is done by people who can present after the fact as, oh, look, anguished, they didn’t know this, but that doesn’t get it off the hook.
Olson:
You’re absolutely right. In the end, I think my last word in this book is, the real enemy is war itself. And as long as we support violence committed in our name in any form. Then it’s on us.
Scheer:
Okay, that’s an important note on which to end this. I want to thank you for doing this. The book is World Citizen, check it out, it’s available. Journeys of a Humanitarian. There will be a, I would say, Kindle version because this one’s a… It’s worth $35 that’s what books go for. The Kindle, I think, is going to be cheaper. But Jane Olson, who has had an incredible life of doing the right thing, doing the right thing, and it’s captured in this book.
Olson:
I might also mention that I have a website worldcitizenthebook.com
Scheer:
Great. World Citizen, the book. And it’s an incredible story and you’re an incredible human being. And I just want to testify to that because I’ve seen you in action. I’ve learned a lot from you over the years. So I wanted to do this, I’ve heard you speak on different subjects. You’ve been a force in our community here in, not just in Pasadena, but in Los Angeles, the greater community. I think if there’s one human being that I’ve that all, while I’ve been here, you know, ever since I came to work in the L.A. Times in 1976, who really made international human rights pressing, it was you, I think that you were sort of the central figure when I think of Human Rights Watch and organizations like that.
Olson:
That’s a high compliment. Thank you so much, Bob. I appreciate your friendship and support.
Scheer:
All right. And I also want to thank Laura Kondourajian and Christopher Ho at KCRW for posting these shows. Joshua Scheer, our executive producer, Diego Ramos, who writes the introduction. The JKW Foundation, which in the name of a great writer, Jean Stein, helped support us, and a special shout out to Sebastian Gruber and the crowd here at the USC Annenberg School for Communications and Journalism for making the facilities available to us. See you next week with another edition of Scheer Intelligence.