The 75th anniversary celebrating the creation of NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, creates an opportunity for those in the war machine to double down their commitment to war and for peace advocates to amplify their calls for non-violence. David Swanson, co-founder and executive director of World BEYOND War and long-time peace advocate, joins host Robert Scheer on this episode of Scheer Intelligence. Swanson talks about his new book with Medea Benjamin, “NATO: What You Need To Know,” and how it analyzes what NATO means today as a worldwide enforcer of U.S. led military power, having grown from a 12-member organization to 32 members and “partnerships” with more than 40 non-member countries and international organizations.
According to Swanson, NATO’s original function as a defensive alliance against the Soviet Union has outlived the fall of the communist state and transformed the organization into a rapidly expanding extension of the U.S. war machine. “You don’t have to ask informed historians or intelligent peace activists. The Secretary General of NATO says it; they now wage wars, not just in defense or what they call deterrence.”
What was once envisioned as an adjunct to the United Nations addressing war and peace has now evolved, with NATO extending its reach far beyond the Atlantic to forge partnerships with Asian countries in a militarized response to China’s rise.
Swanson does not make light of what this will mean for the future: “It’s the end of everything. It’s the end of all life on earth. There’s no small nuclear war. There’s no tactical nuclear war, and yet this is where we’re headed.”
Credits
Host:
Producer:
Introduction:
Transcript
This transcript was produced by an automated transcription service. Please refer to the audio interview to ensure accuracy.
Robert Scheer: Hi, this is Robert Scheer with another edition of Scheer Intelligence, where the intelligence comes from my guest. In this case it’s David Swanson, the author of World Beyond War. He does the Talk Nation radio site. He’s the author with Medea Benjamin of a book called NATO: What You Need to Know. The 75th anniversary of NATO, the meeting is taking place in Washington as we record. This is on Wednesday. We’ll broadcast on Friday. I don’t think there’ll be any big surprises. But really, we’re talking about an image of NATO that has doubled in size, still has the obligation to go to war if any of its members are attacked and its partners are now expanding into Asia.
It’s a worldwide organization, and it seems to me, basically is the U.S. alternative to the UN. It’s basically a claim that was not a rival to the UN but what I got from reading your book and what I get from observing it, NATO is now the war machine, is now held up as the major way of uniting the world. And it’s their way or the highway and anybody who objects whether it’s going to be India, China, Russia, no matter what they’re called, they could be communist, anti communist, right wing, left wing. If they’re not in that program and they’re not in that club, they’re the enemy, the presumptive enemy. And so take it from there, David. You’ve been writing about this, you’ve been nominated for a Nobel Prize. You’re a consistent peace advocate. You criticize any nation that’s making war or threatening the peace. So what’s going on with NATO? I want your summary here on the 75th anniversary.
David Swanson: It was advertised as a temporary step to help Europe get on its feet and organize its own catastrophic mass murder machines. But these things take on a life of their own. They gain momentum, they gain bureaucracy. It was advertised as defensive and it is thought of anachronistically as having been a defense against the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact, even though the Warsaw Pact was created years after NATO and the Soviet Union wanted to join NATO and be in alliance with NATO and has wanted that repeatedly over the decades.
But NATO is thought of as a defensive grouping of democratically elected representatives of peoples who get together and commit to helping defend one of their members, should that member be attacked, none of which has anything to do with reality. NATO’s members and partners include the worst dictatorships on Earth. NATO’s primary function is in arranging weapons deals to every flavor of government on Earth. This was their big accomplishment yesterday, more missiles for the world. NATO has fought numerous wars, none of which have been against any country, attacking or even threatening one of NATO’s members.
Only once has NATO even claimed to be calling on its members in collective defense against someone and this was following the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001, for the disastrous, on its own terms, murderous, environmentally destructive sinkhole of trillions of dollars war on the distant, impoverished country of Afghanistan. This is NATO’s biggest accomplishment. And every single member of NATO has had foreign terrorist attacks. Only once was this a cause for a war, an excuse to pretend that a war had been started by someone else because NATO doesn’t have democracy within its own decision making. It is the play toy of the US government and none other.
And when other nations become members of NATO or partners of NATO, they are swearing their subservience to the United States government. And so NATO now wages wars in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine, a major role in Ukraine, where the Secretary General of NATO says that NATO caused the Russian invasion. You don’t have to ask informed historians or intelligent peace activists. The Secretary General of NATO says it. And they now wage wars, not just in defense or what they call deterrence, which is actually provocation in most cases, but for any reason, anywhere on earth, including to defend threats to their values.
So if China isn’t threatening you by its manufacturing and it’s not actually attacking anyone, NATO can claim that China is a threat to its values and no one even asks what the heck that could possibly mean. This is why it is such a danger. This and its support for nuclear war and its organization of all of its members, those with and without nuclear weapons, to plan for nuclear war. And there’s no buffer anymore between NATO and Russia. There’s no communication. There are no treaties. This is the most dangerous point in time we have lived through.
Scheer: There was a certain oblivious, zany attitude towards nuclear war now, despite the effect of, Oppenheimer movie worldwide, but maybe the movie made the mistake of playing down the death and destruction. After all, we didn’t really see what happened to Hiroshima and Nagasaki with this Oppenheimer’s toy and the consequences. And of course, the bombs dropped in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were child’s play compared to what we have now. And yet, there’s a kind of “bring it on, let’s call Putin’s bluff, let’s see what happens if we humiliate him, let’s see if he would really use it.” And I want to go to the statement you just made, because many people listening to this probably think you were off base when you quote the NATO leader, who’s now retiring as having confirmed the view that they provoked Russia into this war.
And by the way, that was how Russia got involved in fighting in Afghanistan and how we ended up supporting the regime change there, because Zbigniew Brzezinski was very proud of the fact that he lured Russia into fighting in Afghanistan and that brought about their collapse eventually. But take that point you just threw out before how the Ukraine war, because this is the point here, the riskiest point right now with NATO, is that they’re looking for a humiliating victory for Russia and everybody who’s looked for a humiliating victory against Russia, beginning, well with Hitler, has been rewarded with their own humiliation, because the one thing the Russians seem to be able to do is mobilize a fighting force when they feel they’ve been attacked.
So explain, what is this? Go take us through the mirror of confusion about how this war got going.
Swanson: You know that the Secretary of Defense who came to that position from Raytheon, Mr. Austin says that the point of the war is to damage Russia, to hurt Russia. This is the reason to keep the war going. Countless historians, diplomats, government officials, the current head of the CIA over the years, predicted very clearly that pushing to get Ukraine or Georgia into NATO was going to result in a war with Russia. You have a RAND Corporation report not predicting it, advocating for it, advocating for provoking Russia into a war in Ukraine to damage Russia.
When you see that happening and, your warning against it, and then it works and then you finally have Russia do such a stupid and evil thing as to jump into the trap and then you predictably have the build up of NATO in response and the further build up by Russia in response to that I condemn this madness by both sides. There is absolutely no excuse whatsoever for Russia to invade Ukraine, but to call it unprovoked is just ludicrous. It’s a provoked war. A provoked war is an evil mass murderous escapade, but it’s provoked. There’s no sense in pretending otherwise. I went 200 yards from The White House.
There’s the Russian ambassador’s house where Bobby Kennedy, the first one snuck in the back door and prevent and ended the Cuban missile crisis with, the deal to take the missiles out of Turkey and Italy, which President Kennedy pretended publicly hadn’t happened, pretended [inaudible] had done it, which has been a disastrous lesson. And I went and talked with the Russian ambassador and he said, they won’t talk to us. I’m sure Joe Biden could make it a few hundred yards down the street. If 18 people helped him, he could do it, but they won’t go and talk to them, but I talked to him and I said, won’t you end this?
I don’t care whose fault it is, who started it. Won’t you do anything to end it? Won’t you at least stop this insane idea of putting nuclear weapons in Belarus? And he said, Oh no, putting nuclear weapons in Belarus is perfectly fine. The United States puts nuclear weapons in Turkey and Italy and Germany and Belgium and Netherlands and UK. And I said, that doesn’t make it perfectly fine that the world’s biggest criminal operation is doing. It doesn’t make it okay. Oh yes, it does. And what happens the day before the NATO summit this week? Belarus threatens to use the nuclear weapons that are supposedly Russia’s, that Russia has put in that country. This is, we’re getting closer and closer, and both sides are shameless about threatening it.
Scheer: Okay, but you and I have spent many years, I’m much older than you, dealing with these issues, and a lot of people come up on it, and they just see good guys, bad guys, and little Ukraine, not so little, somehow attacked by Russia. But what I don’t understand, you said that the U.S. establishment and its allies in Europe and so forth that do its bidding, buy its equipment, and one of the big things about NATO is there’s a NATO standard for the military that… Here’s India, still gets military equipment from Russia that it got going back to when it was a communist country. But the basic arms trade in the world is defined and fueled by NATO, and some people have to buy stuff that we make and can use. But I still don’t understand the great mystery of what happened in the Cold War, at the end of the Cold War. Here was Ronald Reagan. I interviewed Ronald Reagan when he was first running for president, he talked about those monsters and why you couldn’t have peace agreements with them and so forth. Ronald Reagan met with Gorbachev, believed, and I think correctly, believed Gorbachev that he wanted to end this confrontation of the Cold War, was in favor of actually releasing satellite countries, beginning with East Germany.
And Ronald Reagan was then judged the way they don’t want to judge President Biden, because he’s going to cheer on NATO, right? When Ronald Reagan suddenly became the peacenik and said, we could maybe get rid of all these weapons. He was denounced and no, suddenly we discovered he was senile or something was going wrong with him and so forth. But what I don’t understand is, and you’ve interviewed a lot of these people. And talk to them. How did they get off saying that an alliance that was formed to prevent communism led by the Soviet Union, which was a farce to begin with, because there was a Sino-Soviet dispute, communism was highly nationalistic, it was very little that Russia could control, Soviet Union could control in all this, they actually get along better now when the Russia is not communist than they did when Russia was communist Russia and China, but nonetheless, how do these people justify this expansion of NATO basically to contain a non communist country?
Which is Russia. Putin favors the market. He favors oligarchs. He favors the Russian Christian Church. He ran successfully, he defeated the communists in an election. He was appointed by Yeltsin, whom we were backing. He stepped in because he’s a teetotaler and he could run things and Yeltsin was a hopeless drunk. So where did they get off in a consistent, logical manner, saying our big enemy is Russia? How is Russia in any way different, and even in terms of democracy, than Turkey or Hungary, I mean we can criticize any of these governments for how they have elections. What is driving this?
Swanson: Certainly not democracy and certainly not a battle between values and civilizations and world views. The leaders of these countries, Russia, China, the United States, Germany, have much more in common with each other and with their political opponents within their country than they do with you or me. These people benefit politically and financially from hostility, from conflict, from war, from weapon sales. NATO is a weapon selling operation. This, the majority of its staff, the bulk of the money that goes through it is for increasing weapon sales. Its doctrine is that nations must spend more on weapons and less on humans, less on the environment, less on anything other than weaponry. And this is Biden’s great claim to fame that he’s gotten NATO members to spend more on militarism. Even though Trump did more of that than Biden did. And Putin’s been a bigger boost to NATO than either of them. They get away with this.
Scheer: If they didn’t have Putin, they’d have to invent them. What would be the justification for the expansion of NATO? It’s pretty hard to say you have to expand NATO into Asia now with your partners to contain China, because after all, China is not spreading by militarism. It’s spreading by being more effective at capitalism and trade and making cars that are cheaper and so forth.
Swanson: If you listen to the United States Congress, every hearing, every committee, there is no distinction between China, the economic competitor, and China, the military enemy. There’s no line there. It’s one and the same thing.
Scheer: It’s a big lie.
Swanson: Of course, it’s a big lie.
Scheer: Don’t say of course, because when we talk about misinformation, when we talk about fake news in this country, when we suppress websites, when we suppress people who dare object the idea that the main misinformation comes out from Russian bots or something, I’m sure there is a lot of it, or Chinese propaganda, but the fact is the big propaganda lie right now is that American expansion of economic power and privilege, western, but mostly driven by the United States, is inherently a force for democracy, enlightenment, fairness and decency. And any economic success by any other country. Whether it’s Saudi Arabia trying to modernize, whether it’s India, whether it’s non-communist Russia, whether it’s communist China or communist Vietnam, when they really try to get in the higher end of the market and build up their own economy, they become the enemy.
And they don’t even have the rubric of some kind of Marxist ideology to define it. That’s what I’m trying to get at. It’s inherently an illogical exercise, and yet they get away with it. And so you have this celebration of 75 years of militarism, that has increased tension in the world rather than decreased ever more so now. And I’m asking you as somebody who observes these people up close, when you went to, didn’t you, Virginia, University of Virginia, right? Jefferson’s creation. And, you’ve been around these elite people and so forth. How the hell do they do this with a straight face?
Swanson: They don’t always do it with a straight face. Yesterday in the press briefing at the State Department, my friend Sam Husseini was calling out the spokesman for smirking while he’s talking about the wars. I think they promote the idea with vague, completely vague talk about values and interests. They aren’t required to explain themselves, and with not just China as the enemy and Russia as the enemy, but terrorism as the enemy and piracy as the enemy and propaganda from others as the enemy and climate change.
Where in the NATO charter does it say NATO has anything to do with any of these things, but they simply expand and expand. They have this whole NATO command devoted to expanding NATO’s program to take on all these other matters, the environment, education, media, et cetera. It grows and grows, and the media boosts NATO and NATO holds events where it thanks the media for its services to NATO. This is what they do. You know that they are a problem.
Scheer: Just as a footnote to that I noticed in the reporting on this NATO 75th anniversary. They had not invited 19 leading internet influencers and social media because they say traditional media is no longer as effective as it has to be in manipulating public opinion to be pro-NATO. So they bring in these influences, give them access on the highest level. None of them, as far as I know, have any knowledge or expertise in these areas. But yes, they’re very conscious of that, I’m trying to get at the question of how they get away with it, because you’re a lone voice of somebody who, you’re not the only one, obviously, we are cohorts, Medea Benjamin, I think, has done a very good job, there are plenty of, there are a lot of other people, but you’ve actually tried to apply logic and fact. You’re not an apologist for any side. You actually believe in peace and the importance of preserving it, so you come, you’re highly credible in my eyes anyway, and quite consistent.
I just wonder about these people because I’ve rubbed shoulders with them. I interviewed Richard Nixon after he was in office. I interviewed Ronald Reagan. I interviewed Bill Clinton. I’ve interviewed a lot of these people. they at least tried to make an argument. And Nixon actually, in his period of disgrace, made a great deal of sense about the danger of nuclear weapons and the need for arms control agreements and the danger of hubris and so forth. But the current crowd and the current media crowd seems to be oblivious to what we’re talking about here. We’re talking about hair trigger alerts for these weapons. And you get it wrong, there’s no second chance. It’s the end of humanity. Every image, every person you ever cared about, anybody who cares about now, gone, and we’ve lost that. That’s what I want to get at. And we’re celebrating now, we’re thinking we, maybe we could stick with Biden if you’re a liberal Democrat.
Oh, if he performs well at the NATO anniversary means if he says all these stupid, irrational things about the need for expanding NATO, and if he can pull that off. Then he’ll be a solid president, the progressive caucus will back him, the Black caucus will back him, the brown caucus will back him, conservatives will back him, because then he’ll be sensible. And, on the other hand, you got Trump, and occasionally he says something sensible, like why do we need NATO? Maybe we shouldn’t be messing around and everything, and then we can judge him insane or crazy or a demagogue, and sure enough, he’ll come up with something crazy and demagogic to justify that, but we’re in a very bizarre moment where there is no peace movement of an effect.
There’s certainly no elected block of people speaking out in any serious way for peace. and yet, I want to be optimistic here, there is an alternative vision embraced by other countries that have a view of a multipolar world. And that is an indirect challenge, really, to the NATO idea. And even within NATO, you still have Hungary, for instance, which has an electric car plant from China, which they want to sell in Europe and don’t want it blocked off. And you even have in Germany, people want to sell their German cars in China, don’t buy into this. So there are contradictions, but the main one is that at the same time that NATO is meeting, I mentioned it before, that you had Modi from India being in Moscow, meeting, and they’re breaking our blockade of Russian oil.
They’re the first or second biggest purchaser of Russian oil products. So that destroyed it. Saudi Arabia didn’t lower prices dramatically to go along with our plan for stopping Russia. Brazil, for instance, is objecting to this. You have the BRICS coalition. So let’s talk about this. At a time when we have defined a military coalition, NATO, to be our alternative, really, to the UN and our representation of democracy, a military alliance. There are these alternative networks developing. Brooks is one of them where they say, no, despite our differences, we can do trade. We can live in peace. We can benefit from each other. We should talk about that because that’s really what the American media I think is obliterating that there is really a struggle going on in the world that, we don’t have to, we can do business, this was what Nixon believed, we can do business with people that we don’t agree with and maybe they’ll come around. Maybe they’ll change. Maybe there’ll be exchanges. Maybe there’ll be communication. Maybe… right? And that’s what’s got smashed to the ground.
Swanson: NATO is most of military spending and most of foreign military bases and most of the wars in the world, but it is not most of the population of the world. It is not most of the countries of the world. It is despised in most global public opinion around the world. The international community understood to be the NATO countries, the countries that don’t recognize Palestine, the countries that don’t join the new treaty banning nuclear weapons. They’re a small part of the world that thinks of themselves as the whole world. Biden says in a recent interview, I’m running the world for democracy. So he believes that the world has elected him to run the world. Nobody’s going to give him a cognitive assessment exam on that nonsense.
They’re going to ask him to…
Scheer: Because he’s speaking the truth. He’s speaking the truth, that’s how he views American policy. He wasn’t supposed to say it. But he wasn’t supposed to say it, but he said it and that’s what they believe. They really believe not only are we running the world, we should run the world.
Swanson: But he’s lived through reinforcement that the best conduct as a politician is to lie and to back wars, right? This is a guy, Joe Biden, who was not a big supporter of the first Gulf War and was denounced for it and has loved and adored and promoted the heck out of every single war ever since. This is a guy who was attacked for plagiarism scandals and lying every time he spoke and got away with it. And this is a guy who was such a leading supporter of the war on Iraq that he couldn’t become president. He said, what I gotta do is lie about it. So he just started lying that he had been an opponent of the war on Iraq and everyone repeated it and repeated it.
And so now, everything Israel says, beheaded babies, whatever, he just tells the lie, gets away with it, nobody cares, and so he can say, I’m for democracy and I run the world, and no one even questions whether that makes any sense or not. So how can they do it with a straight face? They get away with it. They’re encouraged by everyone around them. Joe Biden’s wife is not the only person around him saying, Oh my God, you’re so wonderful. Everything you do is perfect. Everybody around him is saying that.
Scheer: Yeah, but you know what they have going for them and the reason they can be totally irrational because really why you want to hurt China when in fact, if nothing else, China is the greatest anti-poverty program the world has seen in some time. Hundreds of millions of people have been lifted. I remember I was in the center for Chinese studies. I was a fellow trying to be something of an expert at UC Berkeley. And no one thought China could develop; with 450 million people, they thought they were too big a population. They now have almost a billion more.
No one ever thought they could attain high levels of production and so forth. And so there’s no question, and it’s happening in India, a little bit more slowly, but it’s happening. That they want to have their place in the world. They got a lot of people to take care of, and they can’t do it by being on the tail end of just cheap labor. And that’s happening for Brazil. It’s happening for South Africa and so forth. And so the real issue is whether the people of the world have a right to make their own history and take care of their own people and take care of their own population. What we want to do is put it in the fulcrum of war and evil and good and a crusade and so forth. It’s the most destructive thing. The reason they get away with it now, you do not have, even a single Dennis Kucinich in the Congress. You don’t have that because of Trump-washing. We have, like we do with Putin-washing. You’ve got this evil guy. You can define him as evil. You got the enemy, what Orwell talked about, the creation is, if you don’t have a real one, you make one up.
And so you’ve got Trump. And now you can count on Trump to say something mean spirited, crazy sounding and everything, even when sometimes he makes sense. But what you do is you get off the hook. You do not have, and you’ve been a long time influencer or a person trying to change the public dialogue. So we’re going to run out of time here, but I’d like you to give me just a few words of what you’re up against in terms of this disinformation. You’ve got somebody like Brill there, he wants to tell people what to publish because anything that’s critical of the U.S. government seems to be disinformation, where whoever it comes from, whether it’s, and, you’re in that camp now that will get branded as, oh, he cares about peace so he’s the enemy. So just tell us, take a few minutes and what you’re up against and what you’re trying to hope to accomplish. The book is available and I always mispronounce her name. It’s Medea Benjamin, right?
Swanson: She says Medea.
Scheer: Oh, Medea. Sorry. Oh, okay. Medea Benjamin. I have great respect for her work. Medea Benjamin and David Swanson. You get it anywhere books are sold. And it’s “NATO: What You Need to Know,” and on the 75th anniversary, I recommend it. But take just a few minutes to explain, what you’re up against and how can you possibly break through it and tell us why? It’s scary, but what are we going to do about it?
Swanson: I find my name on Ukrainian lists of enemies of the people of Ukraine, because I, while I have thoroughly denounced everything the Russian military has ever done and everything the Russian government has done that is in support of militarism, I’ve done the same for the United States and NATO and Ukraine. And that makes me supposedly at World Beyond War, where I work, we have a board member who’s based in Kiev, Ukraine, and he’s denounced the Russian invasion and denounced Ukrainian militarism. And he’s facing the risk of prison as an enemy of Ukraine, as a supporter of the Russian invasion, even though he’s denounced it, right?
Because it’s very hard for people to grasp the notion of opposing both sides of a war. You must oppose one side of a war, adore and love and embrace the other. That’s the only thing people can understand, even as there is a significant peace movement against the war in Gaza. And there are thousands and thousands of people denouncing the Israeli genocide and military attacks by Hamas, which is maybe unprecedented, certainly bizarre, certainly doesn’t transfer into any ability to comprehend how anyone could denounce both sides in Ukraine. And so I’m an enemy of the Ukrainian people, even though I want the Ukrainian people to live and survive and thrive. And December 2021, Russia said, here are extremely reasonable terms.
Keep Ukraine neutral. Don’t put it in NATO. Don’t put weapons on our borders and all will be well. And the United States government said, not even going to look at it. Russia invaded in March of 2022, Russia and Ukraine sat down in Turkey. Came within inches of negotiating a deal, central to which was Ukraine not in NATO. And the United States and the UK said, no, don’t do it. Keep the war going. And so this notion among the U.S. public that the United States is a force for peace and is providing weapons for peace and the weapons are the way to end the war is exactly upside down, weapons are not the way to end the war, right?
This is, fornication for virginity. This is not sensible. And so we’re up against sheer madness, but there are ways to break through. There are good shows like this one. There are people who still read books. There are people blowing the whistle in ever increasing numbers. People are dropping out of the US government and saying, why? At our book event about the NATO book last night in Washington, DC, a guy named Gabriel Shipton was there, whose brother, Julian Assange, is now free. It was an ordeal, but he’s free. And the lesson is that you can tell the truth. and sometimes it helps a great deal. We keep trying.
Scheer: Okay, I’m really happy to have this chance because I’ve known of your work, but we’ve never really had a conversation. And of a different generation and I, just want to take a few minutes to explain why I’m depressed about the current situation. As a kid, I was born in 1936, and it happens that I’ve mentioned this other times, but it’s a big deal in my life. My mother was a Lithuanian Jew and left after the revolution, her group. The Jewish Socialist Bund was turned on, Lenin turned on their group, and suddenly she was a political fugitive. She’d been very active, and she got on a steamer and came to New York and became a garment worker and union organizer. On the other hand, she fell in love with my father, and he was a German Protestant, and he came after the First World War. He, as a union organizer, was on the left. And so I grew up in both communities in New York and then the war Nazism came. And the Germans, I knew all were anti-fascist, good people, working class, but unfortunately their relatives in Germany went along with this monstrosity.
I never thought that I would be this many years up the road and Russia, whatever its political system, is somehow pictured as the main instigator of turmoil and misery in the world. And these other nations, some of them were active collaborators with the Nazis, of course, Germany spawned the Nazis, Italy had its own version, Hungary had a version, the number of people who fought back were actually disproportionately people, socialists on the left or communists or what have you. But nonetheless, we have retained the state now where the people in the Western establishment are drunk on the notion of their innocence. It’s an innocence that is affirmed no matter what they do. I’m talking about the U.S., I’m not talking about some deep state about the official state. it doesn’t matter.
You can show; whether Sy Hersh showing My Lai or Abu Ghraib or what have you. Torture. It doesn’t, it’s not torture, it’s something else. It’s an accident. We made a mistake or so forth. And it extends to the whole question of waging nuclear war. And, the situation now, even though we are the only ones who have used nuclear weapons to kill, used them. We are the ones who said they’re usable. We are now playing with the situation, where it’s our way or the highway. And I’m afraid with Trump, it’ll be even more because that’s his method of assertion. Now, whether he delivers or not, he didn’t actually start as many wars as some more enlightened Democrats have, as far as I know, nor did Reagan, for that matter.
But, the conceit here is that somehow, our virtue gives us license to do the irrational. That’s the takeaway. And at an advanced age, I find that enormously depressing. And if you object to that narrative as you point out, you’re attacked. You’re attacked as unpatriotic, un-American, working for somebody else, or not caring about what the other people do, and so forth. And it doesn’t matter whether you’re Amnesty International, which has a record of condemning tyranny all around the world and suppression of freedom. But they say something about Gaza and what the U.S. is doing there, suddenly they’re a non-organization. In your case, you’ve been very consistent in condemning the violence of any regime anywhere it doesn’t help. They owned, they bought, they franchised this territory of enlightened Western democracy or freedom and so forth. And then when our president goes and gives a fist bump to the leader of Saudi Arabia after his government, he has dismembered a Washington Post reporter. Oh, that’s okay.
We can accept because we need him and we’ll only attack him when he doesn’t undermine Russian oil prices, so it’s a crazy making world and you are a sort of a poster child for me of somebody who, you tried to follow the University of Virginia, Jeffersonian values, I said, No, am I planting that on you or putting too much on you? So let’s end with that, how are you going to survive?
Swanson: I’m not gonna own people and beat them like Thomas Jefferson, but I…
Scheer: I know we’re not allowed to say anything good about talking about the matter is he got hold of some very important, enlightened ideas. And so let’s not…
Swanson: I was about to try to say that.
Scheer: Okay.
Swanson: I was going to attempt to say that I am going to value things like freedom of speech and freedom of assembly and freedom of religion, for everybody, not just for the limited people they were for at that time. But I think that what we’ve got now is this notion that it’s not what’s done, it’s who does it, yeah. If Russia sends a missile and it hits a hospital, it’s the most evil thing in the world. And when every single hospital in Gaza has been hit, it just doesn’t matter a bit. And this is a crazy situation to be in when you’re dealing with nuclear weapons, right?
When the people who refuse to see what’s happening to Joe Biden until he’s in a debate are the same people you’re trusting to prevent a nuclear war, not to react to it after it happens. We’re up to our necks in it. And you have a Trump advisor who wants to resume nuclear testing. Remember all the efforts, before I was born to, to stop that. And it’s fantasy that we’re being fed. Nuclear deterrence is fantasy. It very clearly does not deter non-nuclear wars. And studies have been done that the threats and the efforts to coerce people with nuclear weapons don’t work. Nuclear nations are no better at persuading anybody to do anything than non nuclear nations.
And yet we have this fantasy that nukes deter nuclear war, so we need more of them. It’s based on zero evidence. And it’s the end of everything. It’s the end of all life on earth. There’s no small nuclear war. There’s no tactical nuclear war and yet this is where we’re headed. And we’re supposed to believe it’s okay because of which side we’re on, so if some cockroaches survive, they can say to each other, at least we stood up to Putin or at least we stood up to NATO, and be proud about it. But you and I won’t get to say you should elicit.
Scheer: Yeah,
Swanson: Everybody will be gone. So now’s the time to listen.
Scheer: Okay, let me close this. I always bring them up multiple times. George Washington and his farewell address did what Eisenhower did in his and warned about the imposters of pretended patriotism, and it’s amazing to me that for all of and again, you can attack George Washington on all sorts of grounds. I’m not making light of that either. Slavery is the curse of America, of course, and unfortunately it’s, deformed the nation ever since. But, the idea that these two generals said the most sensible necessary thing about the restraint of empire and the folly of war, and they’re not studied. And particularly Washington, I never hear anybody talk about, they learned about it in school or his farewell address or anything.
It’s amazing, America’s great military leader. Okay. On that note, I want to thank you for doing this. If you want to know more, check out World Beyond War, check out Talk Nation Radio, check out Medea Benjamin and David Swanson, the really important new book, “NATO: What You Need to Know,” 75th anniversary, just read that and then read what’s being said about the NATO anniversary in Washington, and you’ll really get an idea of how you got to think about journalism and the media, and a critical, exercise and critical thinking.
I want to thank Christopher Ho and Laura Kondourajian at KCRW, the NPR station in Santa Monica for hosting these podcasts. I want to thank Joshua Scheer, our executive producer, who lined up this interview today and said, how come you haven’t had David Swanson on? Okay, we got you on. I want to thank Diego Ramos, who does the introduction, Max Jones, who does the video production and the JKW Foundation, the memory of a very independent, writer, Jean Stein, who spoke out a lot about what was happening in the West Bank and Gaza in relation to Israel for many years, a late writer. And, see you next week with another edition of Scheer Intelligence.
Please share this story and help us grow our network!
Robert Scheer
Robert Scheer, publisher of ScheerPost and award-winning journalist and author of a dozen books, has a reputation for strong social and political writing over his nearly 60 years as a journalist. His award-winning journalism has appeared in publications nationwide—he was Vietnam correspondent and editor of Ramparts magazine, national correspondent and columnist for the Los Angeles Times—and his in-depth interviews with Jimmy Carter, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, Mikhail Gorbachev and others made headlines. He co-hosted KCRW’s political program Left, Right and Center and now hosts Scheer Intelligence, an independent ScheerPost podcast with people who discuss the day’s most important issues.
Editor’s Note: At a moment when the once vaunted model of responsible journalism is overwhelmingly the play thing of self-serving billionaires and their corporate scribes, alternatives of integrity are desperately needed, and ScheerPost is one of them. Please support our independent journalism by contributing to our online donation platform, Network for Good, or send a check to our new PO Box. We can’t thank you enough, and promise to keep bringing you this kind of vital news.
You can also make a donation to our PayPal or subscribe to our Patreon.
ScheerPost.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license. CC-BY-NC-ND only applies to ORIGINAL ScheerPost content.