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Any threat to the status quo within the American empire has led to the censorship, jailing and escape of the dissidents brave enough to stand against it. One may think of Edward Snowden’s asylum in Russia or Julian Assange’s refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy in London as recent examples. However, the history of dissidents fleeing American persecution runs deep. Joining host Robert Scheer on this episode of the Scheer Intelligence podcast to discuss his new book, “Flights: Radicals on the Run,” is author and journalist Joel Whitney.
The book exemplifies this missing history of dissent in America through accounts of people such as Angela Davis, Paul Robeson, Graham Greene and Malcolm X. Also included are the accounts of Lorraine Hansberry and her mentor, W.E.B. Du Bois. Whitney refers to Du Bois’ time starting an anti-nuclear peace movement and subsequently being persecuted by the U.S. government. “[Du Bois’] reputation took severe damage, so when Hansberry knew him, he could barely afford to buy groceries,” Whitney told Scheer.
“Flights” examines the stories of historic struggle of progressive thinkers and political activists who faced the onslaught of Cold War propaganda and McCarthyism, becoming refugees as a result of their political work. The book chronicles a counter-narrative of American history, where the bravest and most outspoken figures criticizing the system are crushed by it and their lives ruined.
The book title, according to Whitney, refers to “flights that are political persecution in some form or another. In a way, you could think of it as 50 or 60 years of counter revolution, massive amounts of funding to chase people … across borders, out of print and, in some cases, unfortunately, into an early grave.”
In the case of people like Graham Greene and his famous novel, “The Quiet American,” the blacklisting of himself and others for their exposure of American activities during the Vietnam War led to Americans “hav[ing] to wait about a decade or a little bit more to actually understand what carnage, what incredible, cynical violence the anti-communist Americans are overseeing in Vietnam as they’re taking it over from the French.”
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Robert Scheer
Hi. This is Robert Scheer with another edition of Scheer intelligence, where the intelligence comes from my guest. In this case, someone I’ve had before, because he’s becoming quite a prolific writer, Joel Whitney. He wrote a great book called “Finks,” and it was really about the corruption of pro-Cold War intellectuals who, in the name of defeating communism, really formed a high level McCarthyism all their own, Congress for Cultural Freedom and all that. It’s a classic work. And this new book just out last month, “Flights: Radicals on the Run,” OR Books, which is a terrific book publishing company, and it does something incredibly ambitious. It provides, with these radical flights, really the whitewashing of the whole Cold War period. And it was very convenient to that whitewashing to have, you know, an obviously deformed, one could even argue, evil, in most respects, Soviet Union as the symbol of communism. And then it was easy to identify anyone who objected to the prevailing narrative in the United States about virtue versus evil by blasting anyone in the Western world, no matter their own political leanings, no matter their complex views as being agents of this evil thing. And that included W.E.B. DuBois, it included Angela Davis, it included Paul Robeson, and, amazingly enough, it also included — somebody I consider to be one of the great novelists in English literature — Graham Greene. And Graham Greene wrote a number of really important books which sort of had of a common theme about the arrogance of American power, “Power and the Glory,” and “Our Man in Havana,” I forget all the different titles, but certainly “The Quiet American” stands out. And interesting of the reading this book, which is a marvelous reading, not for its organization, I’m going to let you tell us what the big theme is, but each chapter is riveting. And, you know, and I thought I knew a lot about Graham Greene and “The Quiet American.” I’d gone to Vietnam, written about it. I even interviewed CIA guy, Lansdale, Colonel Lansdale, General Lansdale after who figures prominently in it. But it comes to life here, and how Hollywood captured the story, distorted it, and so forth. But I’m going to throw it back to you now. What do all these people have in common, and what do you mean by the title of this book, “Flights: Radicals on the Run?”
Joel Whitney
Yeah, well, first of all, happy to be back on the show. It’s a pleasure to be here. I’ve spoken about a couple of these essays with you before, when they first came out. Here in this book, we’ve collected them together at OR books, my publisher. And the title, “Flights”and “Radicals on the Run” as the subtitle, it refers to exactly what you said. It’s, you know, it’s people trying to carve out their version of patriotism in the Cold War up to approaching the present. I guess we get up to the Obama administration in the Honduras. The last of the essays about Berta Caceres in Honduras, we go from roughly around 1940 when Diego Rivera is chased basically out of Mexico City from Stalin’s killers. He’s been he’s been hiding, uh, Trotsky in his house, and the killers chase him. He goes to San Francisco to do one of his biggest murals. That’s the earliest essay in the piece. And as I said, the most recent one is the death of Berta Caceres by people trained by the United States over her protests of a dam. And at the same time in her country, a US — probably US — sponsored coup unfolds, also chasing their legally elected president, Manuel Zelaya, out of the country. So the way I’m looking at “flights” in this book is a little bit loose. One of it is like a way of framing the constant repression that anti communists felt like they had to dole out to progressives, liberals, radicals, far left, whatever these folks identified themselves as. A lot of it starts the earliest essays. It’s the result of a Truman kind of pivot away from FDR policies to try to be more realist in the Cold War, to try to carve out this Washington Consensus, which is now pivoting away from our allyship with the Soviet Union, which of course ended fascism in Europe and elsewhere. And put, you know, Japan on its heels. So these are essays that were written in different times. You mentioned my organizing principle, generally the there’s, there’s three sections in the book, and you mentioned some of the folks in the first section. It’s Lorraine Hansberry, it’s Graham Greene, it’s Paul Robeson, who some people saw as an important forerunner to the civil rights movement. George and Mary Oppen are there. And Gabrielle Garcia Marquez, the novelist who wrote “100 Years of Solitude” and won the Nobel. In the middle section, we have people like Malcolm X. We have the Nobel laureate from Mexico, Octavio Paz, Diego Rivera, Angela Davis. And then, of course, Leonard Peltier, who’s whose parole was just denied once again, as he rots in prison or tries to get out of prison, depending on how you look at it. And then in the final section, there’s really a meditation on American indigeneity. A lot of the characters are in Central America. And we go in some detail into the US Dirty War that we sponsored in Guatemala and the after effects of a coup there. And then, of course, we pivot to Honduras. So the “flights” here are flights that are political persecution in some form or another. In a way you could think of it as 50 years or so of counter revolution, 50 or 60 years or more of counter revolution, massive amounts of funding to chase people, as I say, across borders, out of print and, in some cases, unfortunately, into an early grave. So you see this done through the CIA as one instrument, and then the FBI as another. And in the middle sections and at the end, you’re seeing a lot of confessions of penetration. You’re seeing people who penetrated Malcolm X, his- Malcolm X’s organization. You’re seeing people who penetrated the American Indian Movement. It was important to link these marginalized groups together for me, because they were doing such incredible work. I mean, the thing that you sometimes hear is, obviously socialism, by definition, doesn’t work, and the answer to that, implied in this book is and stated in this book, if it doesn’t work, why do you have to spend so much blood and treasure to stop it, anywhere it seems to be working? Anywhere you have a good government or someone doing socialist activism, or a Black power movement or an American Indian Movement fighting for its rights. Like if these nascent movements are, by definition, so wrong headed and so unable to work, why do we spend so much money trying to stop them?
Robert Scheer
Well, what you really are summarizing is the hidden history of America since the end of World War Two actually even begins in the 1930s in the Depression, when we had the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement and a strong labor movement, radical movement of one kind or another, challenging the mythology of America as a classless society, as an inevitable success story for everyone who wants to work hard. And a denial of class, a denial of an elite that had power, a capitalist elite and so forth. And so anyone who really objected to that fairy tale or that narrative had to be whitewashed out or eliminated or excluded. And you know, the case of Paul Robeson, for instance. I mean, Paul Robeson was internationally famous as a singer, and he actually been a football player, an All American. He was one of the Black people in America who managed to rise above the assigned rank in American society, become an internationally famous model for behavior and concern for people all over the world. And they did to him what they did later to Muhammad Ali. What they did — they people who have real power — did to Martin Luther King, who was red baited to the point of his death, and we still know very little about his assassination. And throughout this is all an insistence on American exceptionalism, that everything we do is virtuous, and when it’s not, it’s an accident or a mistake and it’s quickly righted. Now, the value of your book coming out at this time is that it answers the question, really, of why Trump? How did Trump arise? Why are we in this disarray now? Why are we worried? I mean, now very respectable people who are apologists for the system, are saying something they would have punished any writer for saying, which is that America is in profound crisis. The idea that America could be in crisis was always denied, and its virtue was always acclaimed. Even when we had slavery, even more had segregation, even when women couldn’t vote until the 20th century. So really, what this book is explaining is why we have a contrived history that now catches us by surprise. And I actually like you to start with W.E.B. DuBois, because here we have a situation today, as we’re taping this where Donald Trump spoke to Black journalists and then attacked Kamala Harris for pretending to be Black or bringing up Black and so forth. And the denial of the history- of the distortion of America really begins… well, first of all with indigenous people, but certainly in full throated form, continuing on that with Black, with slavery, chattel slavery and so forth. So why don’t you deal first of all with that theme and the book and “Raisin in the Sun” and so forth, which it really goes back a long ways, and the red baiting of the person who would write that play.
Joel Whitney
Yeah, yeah, you’re touching on an essay. I do want to write the long form version of my W.E.B DuBois essay is ready to go for the second collection of “Flights” essays, but he appears as a character, as you point out in the in the Lorraine Hansberry piece first. It’s the very first piece after our opening essay with the great Seymour Hersh, in the little cheeky intro that I do. But Lorraine Hansberry came to New York after college. Her parents were the respectable kind of protesters trying to do work through real estate and through the NAACP, but they found that it all moved so slowly that her parents left for Mexico. And that’s one of the one of the repeat movements. It’s one of the repeat flights. There’s a lot of different layers of flights in each essay, in each section, and a lot of the characters move to to Mexico to avoid American political repression. The Oppens do so as well in the first section, George and Mary Oppen the poets. So Lorraine Hansberry’s parents move to Mexico. She stays in Chicago for her youth, and then she does college a little, a little bit, also in the Midwest. And then comes back to New York, and she finds herself working at Paul Robeson and W.E.B. DuBois, his magazine “Freedom.” And DuBois was her teacher, and thought that she could also teach his classes when, when he wasn’t available. Hansberry, was Dubois’s, his young protege, but he started a peace movement, an anti-nuclear peace movement that was under suspicion. It was treated like a foreign agency, and he was he was persecuted by the government, and they only dropped the case when Albert Einstein threatened slash promised to testify as Du Bois’ character witness. And only then did they sort of drop the case against DuBois, but his reputation took severe damage, so when Hansberry knew him, he could barely afford to buy groceries, was how Imani Perry tells the story in her biography of Hansberry. And I should say, you know, I’m very much indebted to the biographers and the people whose books I’m basically reviewing. A lot of these are film reviews, sort of review essays with with a new biography behind them. So I was looking for ways to write about these people that I admired. The Malcolm X essay is pegged to a side by side Malcolm X and MLK biography by Peniel Joseph as well as a Netflix show. But for the stuff that you’ve seen on DuBois and Lorraine Hansberry, that’s mostly indebted to Imani Perry’s book, “Looking for Lorraine.” And I should say that too, these, these came together as review essays in various outlets. And the Lorraine Hansberry story is just amazing because she was this young, you know, radical in the acceptable way, coming up when she did, appreciating everything that FDR did for, you know, public funding of the arts, for, you know, Black identity sociology and sort of record keeping in Chicago and writers movements that it funded. And while she’s watching this happen, she’s seeing in real time the pushback, the McCarthyism that comes a little bit later, but that was always there in some form or another, starts to take the name of anti communism in the late 40s, after the war, and it starts to affect her. Her dad dies, by the way, in Mexico, and she sees like his attempt to do everything through respectability politics, with a little bit of ambiguity after that.
Robert Scheer
But what you should… I mean, what one has to remember is, you’re using the– you’re referring to these people. But frankly, you know, I teach in a college, and our students know very little about any of these people, I mean. And you know, DuBois, for instance, he was the symbol of Black respectability at one point, right? And the connection with Harvard, and, you know, famous American intellectual, a Black person, and coming from that background, and then how easy it was to destroy him or attempt to, and he wouldn’t allow himself to be totally obliterated. And actually, and it’s interesting, because this whole question of communism, and American communism was that’s the great taboo, and so it has to be presented as a total evil in every manifestation, but then you destroy American history, or a large part of it. I mean, DuBois was the most important Black intellectual of his time, and highly revered and so forth. He dies joining the Communist Party when he’s, what? 93 years old, or something, at the end of his life, as a symbol. He says, “Screw you. You know, are you going to red bait me? Okay, I’m going to be one here.” And he finds actually a lot to flatter in Chinese communism and so forth. And it’s really amazing. Paul Robeson, who you’ve written about before, here was somebody who was held up as the perfect negro. Oh! You know he… yes, he plays sports and football. Oh, he has an incredible operatic voice, and yes, and he can be an actor, and he’s a great symbol. And then he dares to suggest that maybe America is building an empire after the war, and particularly around the whole Korean War, which was really aimed at China. Now we don’t even think about it. What was the Korean War? What was really once the Chinese communists had made their revolution. How are we going to get them that? Well, we’ll get them through Korea so forth. I.F. Stone actually wrote about that, a book called “The Hidden History of the Korean War.” Oh, he had his career destroyed over that. What you’re really doing here, and the book is called “Flights: Radicals on the Run,” is you’re bringing up the memory of these people who attempted, with incredible success, to shape American history in a way that was, you know, uncomfortable to the emerging empire. But there’s no doubt, you cannot talk about civil rights movement without talking about these people, they were critically involved, you know. So tell us a little bit more about that, because they were drummed out of the movie. Oh, let me just, I did want to get to the question of Vietnam. There was a perfect example. We had to blast anyone in the world who objected to our ambitions, you know, because we weren’t defending colonialism, we’re defending freedom. Yet we presided over the French attempt to return to Vietnam, where Ho Chi Minh had actually been an ally of the Americans, saving downed pilots and everything had been anti Japanese in World War Two. But nonetheless, the French wanted to rebuild their empire. We paid for it. You know, I think Eisenhower said 80% of it, or almost all of it, we paid their return. And then you have this chapter that even though I know so much about the subject, I’m not bragging, but, I mean, I wrote about it, I interviewed Colonel, then general Lansdale. I tried a visit, but you really have the best account of it I’ve read anywhere, and the movie “The Quiet American.” And actually, until I read it in your current book, I really hadn’t overlooked this corruption by Hollywood, this fake news thing, where they took this marvelous book, “The Quiet American,” with a deep understanding of an aspect… If you want to understand Donald Trump, read “The Quiet American,” let alone if you want to understand the liberal expansionists and so forth. And I never knew until I just read it in your book, really how Hollywood came to make this terrible movie that just totally distorted the meaning of the book. And at the end, Graham Greene, I think, walked out of the theater or denounced it, wouldn’t have anything to do with it. And they turned the CIA guy, Pyle into a hero, and defended this whole madness that brought Vietnam into the American eyesight, you know. And then when the French failed, instead of honoring the agreement and have an election? No, we’re going to do what the French couldn’t do, but we do it in the name not of colonialism, but of freedom and democracy. And we have Diem, and we end up killing him, our CIA does, and nonetheless. So tell us about that story. And it’s kind of a theme that runs through your whole book, which, by the way, is not some slight work. It’s, I think, 350 pages and is, it’s just incredibly detailed. It’s well documented. It’s a great learning exercise. I just want to make that clear. If you’ve got some relative or child or friend who really doesn’t understand what history, the Cold War history, which still plagues us, was all about, this is probably the best single book to read about. It so well, and I’ve read a lot of them. Tried to write a couple of them myself, so I’m saying that was true respect. But tell us about that chapter on, of course, it’s really the Vietnam story.
Joel Whitney
Yeah. I mean, I think you touched on the first three essays after our visit with Seymour Hersh. And you have Lorraine Hansberry. You have you have Graham Greene’s terrible experiences making his novel “The Quiet American” into a film, and then you have Paul Robeson. So those three sections have a lot in common. There’s a lot of recurring kind of early anti communist, McCarthyite movements. But it’s amazing to me what, what, what all of those folks saw — and then I’ll go into Graham Greene, particularly — they saw the lies of the so called American Century before many others did, and so they had to be dealt with. They had to be stopped or censored. In the case of Lorraine hansberry’s speech, right before “Raisin in the Sun” came out, the CIA was presiding over a Black cultural group trying to make sure they stayed centrist. It didn’t go too radical, and she she had the keynote Hansberry did, but they took it out of the booklet, and it wasn’t published again for 20 years. And of course, she died young, so the kinds of censorship of her or repression of her later involved the FBI following her from the moment she came back from a peace, a peace, kind of conference in South America. But in the, in the Graham Greene chapter, which you referred to, I was, I’d heard this story, Bob, about how, you know, “The Quiet American,” had elements of nonfiction. And he wrote it as a novel, of course, he fictionalized the characters names, and there’s a CIA agent who’s there doing exactly what you said, like trying to take over this colonial project from the French in the early 50s. I think Graham Greene was reporting for outlets like Life magazine and some other outlets in Europe from 52 or 51 onward, and so as the French efforts are heading towards their fatal blows at Dien Bien Phu, he’s seeing all the failures, and he’s seeing the lies that are being told about it. So he tries to tell an honest account about how the CIA is there effectively to blame Ho Chi Minh and the North Vietnamese for things that they’re not doing, for things that the anti communist allies themselves are doing. So there’s a big explosion in 1952 and a big Saigon square. And, you know, Graham Greene tried to write about it for Life magazine. They wouldn’t let him. So his character in “The Quiet American” says, you know, “I talked about the little explosions that led up to the big, big explosions, but my account was altered in the editorial office,” meaning that he knew he had to be censored to be over there. So he writes this up as a beautiful novel, a powerful novel, and it spent, I think, 16 weeks on the bestseller list, the New York Times bestseller list. So it’s doing some work that our mythmakers in the CIA don’t want done, as you well know. And so there’s a there’s a CIA agent in Vietnam at that time, he’d come fairly recently from the Philippines, where he was getting the right stories told. His name is Edward Lansdale. He had like an Air Force cover, which means, you know, he would have presented himself as an Air Force officer, but he was actually a CIA officer. And so he gets himself, you know, he gets himself attached to some interesting work, a lot of propaganda work, telling, you know, different stories than the one Graham Greene wants to tell while he’s there. But then when Graham Greene’s novel comes out in 56 he and others despise it for the truthful account that it tells of what anti communism actually does. So he gets himself attached to the filmmaker. It’s going to be directed by Joseph Mankiewicz, who’s pretty famous his brother as well, pretty famous, subject of a recent film, “The Brother Mank.” And so Edward Lansdale gets himself attached. And there’s a scholar named Joseph, Jonathan Nashel rather, who did the scholarly book on this, which I which I draw on. Basically, there’s letters between Edward Lansdale’s office and Mankiewicz and other filmmakers, and they basically like, look at this big explosion that killed innocent people in that Saigon square in 52 they decide that the whole movie has to be rewritten to make it look like the communists actually did that, even though the American ally in real life did it. So this is, this is the climax of both the novel and the film, but they’re just reversing it, and they’re saying things like, well, let’s say that the communists did it, but they blamed it on our ally. That would have been easy enough for them to do. But this is a major coup, and it’s also an early incident of Hollywood spooks getting their hands into the screenplays of would-be films and making sure they cleaned up the messaging for American audiences. And in the end — I’m being a little cheeky and sarcastic here — in the end, what the effect of that is is the Americans have to wait about a decade or a little bit more to actually understand what carnage, what incredible, cynical violence the anti communist Americans are overseeing in Vietnam as they’re taking it over from the French. And so just like you know, Paul Robeson was an early kind of, an early warning voice about what lynching was doing, sometimes as a response to Brown versus Board of Education, the desegregation of schools, the early civil rights impulses that are happening, Robeson sees that early. And so in the late 40s and early 50s, his voice is censored or persecuted or curtailed. You know, he’s basically de facto blacklisted. With Graham Greene, maybe it wasn’t as total. It was this one book that had to be rewritten as it was made into a movie. And his guy, he usually loved to see his books turned into movies, but in this case, he predicted that. I mean, first of all, it sickened him. He called it a travesty. He insulted it many times, but he also predicted, I think aptly, that his book in the long run would do better than the movie version would do. So that chapter goes into some detail over how this all unfolded. Some people have praised that as their favorite of the essays here, and it sounds like I touched the nerve with you, and I appreciate you reading it.
Robert Scheer
Well, it’s about the creation of fake news, you know, and we now, again, even though Russia is now run by a person who rejected communism and favors rapacious capitalism, nonetheless, we have have to have these convenient enemies. And it all ends up cleansing the image of American imperialism, dare I say it, which is a reality. It’s a military expansion that has enormous, I mean, the biggest empire that’s ever existed the most powerful and one could argue, as Martin Luther King did, he asked a question a year before he was killed, how did you know that… he condemned “My country is the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today,” and that was the end of Martin Luther King. But the interesting thing in terms of this whitewashing, it’s what we can’t understand about our history, our country and our place in the world right now. Because right now and it’s, you know, sometimes it’s complex, it’s confusing, it’s contradictory, but there’s no doubt there’s a worldwide revolt against this image of America as the virtuous leader in every area. So the dollar has to be sacred. No, a lot of people around the world say, wait a minute, that gives you a special advantage. And, oh, you can drop 2000 pound American bombs on Gaza. No, that’s not virtuous. You know, just because they’re American made and, you know, given to Israel. No, it’s not virtuous. Wipes out, by definition, the power of that bomb wipes out whole areas of civilians and so forth. Of course, even the dropping of the atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, you know, not shown the damage in the movie Oppenheimer. But nonetheless, it’s a reminder, we are the only country. We developed the weapon and this inhuman weapon that could end all life on the planet. We’re the only ones to use it, and we’re now actually involved in the NATO expansion in Europe, again, virtuous in every respect, by our definition, and that could blow up and end life on the planet. And so you have a situation. Now I’m going to try to wrap this up, but reading your book, I was thinking about it when I grew up as a kid during this Cold War, and then witnessed it as a journalist and everything there were, there were some good guys in out there in the third world. Now, so opposed to China, there was supposed to be India. Well now India is connected with China in this BRICS alliance. And no, you can’t tell us or do so India right now, which has moved to a right wing government, nonetheless, is also buying the major oil from Russia and violating or undermining our whole notion of virtue and foreign policy, which they’re not supposed to do. Well, they’re doing it, and so is Brazil and or other trade and so forth. And we actually see a world that we’re that is mystifying most Americans. Why don’t they love us? You know? Why don’t they accept our leadership? I mean, it’s actually confusing Democrats as much as Republicans, or maybe even more so if we compare Biden to Trump in this respect, in fact, Trump is red baiting as somebody who’s a Putin person. So I’m going to leave it to you to sort of wrap this up, but it’s I just want to get across to people listening to this. This is a book about history. I know we are raised to not take history as an instructive mechanism, the study of history, but the fact is, it couldn’t be more timely that. That’s why I wanted to do this podcast. It just seems to me a necessary text for study and maybe say something about the writing style. It’s, it’s not a polemic. It’s, what is it? It’s, what’s the word? You would just what? What is the style of yours? Because it’s…
Joel Whitney
These are inquisitive essays. They’re, they’re kind of readable, non specialized biographies, selecting out certain details where, you know, I’m trying to find, sometimes, maybe an intimate detail, so you can see what this felt like. These are emotive essays. These are essays with a lot of, I hope, feeling in them, feeling for all the characters. I don’t try to make them into saints. You know, a lot of these characters make terrible mistakes, but what I’m showing is the full effect of an empire coming upon them just because they said something in a way to exercise their freedom of thought. And that’s another kind of “flights” that I’m obsessed with in the book, flights of imagination, flights of freedom, that are almost twinned with these, these flights of persecution. And the flight of persecution leads to these, these flights of imagine, to freedom. But also you touched on this too, like the size and power of the American empire, or imperial project, or whatever you want to call it… Like American foreign policy, it’s very perplexing Bob, when you think about our foreign policy approach, actually started with the natives of our own country. You know, that was the first foreign policy. They were the foreigners, even though they lived here before us. That’s how perverse our foreign policy is. This is a meditation, an intimate meditation, I would say, on sovereignty and how it’s the basic land based building block of democracy, and how the United States, more than any other country in any of our lifetimes… You have to probably go back to Rome to see as many violations of sovereignty as the United States has committed, just in the past 50 or 60 years, let alone over all of its history, if you think about Black people being, you know, kidnapped and dragged here for free labor and the free land that was stolen from Native Americans. So I was trying to do this kind of three section book where I’m tying together these topics that are meditations on democracy, sovereignty, land, and how this building block, the sovereignty of the land, of the people of the land is violated by American coups and by the very first interactions with the original Americans, the indigenous people. So nobody has done more to just cross these borders, to overturn democracies of one form or another, whether it’s Vietnam, it’s whether it’s our own individual sort of left wingers here in the United States, whether it’s the American Indian Movement — which I look at — whether it’s the FBI counterintelligence program or the New York Police penetrating Malcolm X’s movement. This is all a meditation, an intimate meditation on violations of sovereignty and how you can’t have democracy without sovereignty.
Robert Scheer
What’s really critical, if I throw in my own editorial note, is it’s basically a denial of the right of other people to make their history, and that’s really what comes what Graham Greene understood. I want to pay tribute to Graham Greene here, because I think his books are fantastic. I owe my whole, a large part of my political awareness, to reading Graham Greene and whether it was about Cuba, whether it was about Mexico, whether about multinational corporations and and so forth. And what he understood was the danger of that particular arrogance about American exceptionalism, and “the Quiet American” captures it perfectly. That Pyle could go in there and he’s going to find the third way. He’s going to find a way that you can have a colonialism that people will like or at least we can sell it on them and so forth and where it’s always we don’t torture people. We enhance interrogate them. It almost sounds like a civilizing movement… And you see it just playing out all over the world for all those years, and suddenly the mask is off, and your book, your book, takes that mask off. About this whole post war period, you say essays, but there’s a theme to this thing, and that this is not just that we didn’t have adults watching the store and that reckless- you know, that’s one view. “Oh, they bulls in the china shop” or whatever they, you know. No, no, that’s not it. This is really the arrogance of American exceptionalism, and it’s really what it is. They know what they’re doing. It’s a cover for, basically, the rape of the world. It’s a cover for making the world conform to your needs, and you know your power, and not even the all Americans. It’s the power of an elite in that country who benefits from the system. I’m going to end it on that, not going to say you necessarily endorse that view, but reading the book, I can’t think of- it just somehow the style of writing, which is very powerful and written very often like you’re reading fiction, except it’s true and it’s well documented. So this is not some conspiracy theory or something. No, it’s laying out the history we were denied. You know, it’s like Howard Zinn, but more like a novel that Howard Zinn would written based on reality. And I want to thank. Okay, thank you for doing it. And I really liked your other book, Fink- and “Finks,” and then I think the two should be read together. I want to thank Christopher Ho at KCRW, the very great NPR station in Santa Monica, for producing these along with Laura Kondourajian and posting them on the station’s podcast site. Joshua Scheer, our executive producer, for realizing your book was out, saying “We got to get this guy again.” Diego Ramos for writing the introductions, Max Jones for putting up the video. I want to thank the JKW Foundation in memory of Jean Stein, a terrific independent writer who saw through a lot of the illusions of empire, for giving some funding. And Integrity Media Foundation for supplying critical support to being able to do this kind of work in the interest of diversity and questioning in a free press. See you next week with another edition of Scheer Intelligence.
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