Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 10/10/22 Medea Benjamin on the Need for Peace in Ukraine

Episode Date: October 14, 2022

Scott interviews co-founder of CODEPINK Medea Benjamin about the antiwar movement and the risks brought about by the war in Ukraine. They start out with a discussion of how the antiwar movement has evolved since the George W. Bush years before digging into the need for off-ramps in the conflict against Russia. Benjamin argues the war fever in Washington is blinding the establishment to the risks and that the war-caused economic turmoil which lies ahead will breed unrest across the globe.  Discussed on the show: “Biden calls the ‘prospect of Armageddon’ the highest since the Cuban missile crisis” (New York Times) War in Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict by Medea Benjamin and Nicholas Davies Peace in Ukraine Coalition Medea Benjamin is the co-founder of the women-led peace group CODEPINK and the co-founder of the human rights group Global Exchange. She is the author of ten books, and writes regularly for The Guardian, The Huffington Post, CommonDreams, Alternet, and The Hill, among others. Find her on Twitter @medeabenjamin. This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: The War State and Why The Vietnam War?, by Mike Swanson; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott; and Thc Hemp Spot. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show. I'm the director of the Libertarian Institute, editorial director of anti-war.com, author of the book, Fool's Aaron, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and The Brand New, Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism. And I've recorded more than 5,500 interviews since 2004. almost all on foreign policy and all available for you at scothorton.4 you can sign up the podcast feed there and the full interview archive is also available at youtube.com slash scott horton's show all right you guys on the line i've got medea benjamin the code not the code the co-founder of code pink welcome back to the show how you doing medea hey great good to be on with you

He's got. Really great to have you here. And congratulations on your new book. It's War in Ukraine, making sense of a senseless conflict by Medea Benjamin and her co-author, Nicholas J.S. Davies, an old friend of the show and anti-war.com as well. So congratulations for that. And I have to tell you, I'm a little bit jealous because I'm writing a book about it too, but I have too many jobs. And I'm way behind compared to you. So I'm very happy that you have this out. And I want to hear all about it. But first, I want to talk to you or, well, make declarative statements in your presence at least, that people say some of the time I hear that, oh, yeah, no, the left all gave up on being anti-war once Obama ran for president. And old code pink hadn't been seen since or something like

that. And I hear that from time to time. And I just think that people, really maybe are ignorant. I mean, it's true, I guess, that the mass numbers that you guys were able to turn out during the Bush years have diminished. But you and the leadership and a great part of the membership of Code Pink has been steadily at it opposing the war all the way through without partisan favor from at least the time of W. Bush. And that means through Obama and now into Biden as well. And so for people who think that you guys are somehow just shills for the Democrats or something. They don't know what they're talking about. And I give you full respect for how hard you've worked against all of these wars. And I couldn't even count them all. They'd take the

rest of the interview. So thank you. I'm really glad you said that because it is so true that the anti-war movement as a large movement that could get numbers of people out on the street did fall apart under Obama. And we discovered at Cook Pink, how many people that had been with us out in the streets under Bush, disappeared when it was a Democrat in the White House. And it was sort of a shock to us that so many people put the partisan politics above the anti-war organized thing. We also have to say that from the time of Bush on, the wars in places like Afghanistan and Iraq started to feel like they were just a normal part of doing business in the good old USA, and it was hard to get new people, young people involved in the anti-war

actions. But be that as it may, we are stuck today with this major war without an anti-war movement there to be out on the streets or putting pressure on the politicians. So it really is a terrible historical legacy that we don't have a movement that's up to the task at hand. Well, that's certainly true. But still, I mean, as far as your role and your group's role that you guys have been steadily hard at it this whole time. And so for people who don't know of that, they should. And you set a great example. And frankly, you know, you shame the rest. Certainly the liberals. I don't know. I mean, there are a lot of great leftists on more stuff. But the liberals who just don't give a damn. I mean, boy, do you make a moment?

mockery out of them just by getting up in the morning. You know, it's just... Well, we've made a lot of enemies along the way when we protested Hillary Clinton and certainly when we protested Obama and we've constantly protested Nancy Pelosi. We've camped out, slept outside our home in San Francisco many a time and the leadership of in the Senate like Chuck Schumer. So, yeah, we don't really care what they're political. political affiliation is, we want them to stop militarizing our foreign policy and getting us

into these horrible wars all over the world. Yeah. All right. So speaking of which, let's talk about the one that truly seems to have the potential to end our civilization sometime in the next few weeks. If somebody doesn't figure out what else to do here, the war in Ukraine. It was a big deal like COVID there for a little while. And then I think TV is sort of over it and has moved on in the news cycle.

And yet here we are at the precipice of thermonuclear annihilation. Armageddon, the president of the United States said three nights ago. We're as close as we've been since 1962 in the Cuban Missile Crisis, he said. That's right. It was good to hear him say the term, but he announced it at a Democratic Party fundraiser instead of as something that was announced to the nation and accompanied by some kind of policy change to make sure that we weren't indeed going into nuclear Armageddon. But instead, yes, it was part of a democratic funding group that listened to him.

And I don't know how they reacted to it. But certainly one would think when the president mentions that it would be accompanied by. And so we are blah, blah, blah. Right. Yeah. Well, in fact, so I wanted to point this out, I found that. this, I had missed this, but Matt Taiibi linked to this piece by the horrible David Sanger in the New York Times. It's called, in dealing with the Putin threat, Biden turns to the lessons of

Cuban missile crisis. And it's about the Armageddon comment, but Sanger is focusing on a lesser publicized comment from that same speech where he actually did say something along the lines of. So we're trying to look for ways that we can give Putin an exit ramp here, something like that. In other words, an implication that in their, you know, very poor imitation of Jack and Bobby Kennedy here, that they really are maybe realizing that, God, if we really are this close to disaster, maybe we need to find a way to strike a bargain with these people. So I don't know how seriously to take that, honestly, Medea, but at least... Can I give you the real quote of JFK? Because it's important. Yeah. He said, we must avert those confrontations which bring an adversary to a choice of either a humiliating defeat or nuclear war.

So, yeah, his point was to don't pick a fight with a nuclear power and not give them an off-ram. Right. So, I mean, it's unbelievable we're having this conversation in October, and Anthony Blinken has not spoken. spoken to Sergei Lavrov at all, other than possibly they spoke very briefly about prisoner exchange matters, but they have not discussed this war at all. Their foreign minister and our secretary of state this whole time, which itself is just treason against all the mankind on behalf of the thermonuclear weapons there. It's just unbelievable that they've gotten away with it this far, but hopefully maybe there is some kind of backchannel talks going on. I don't know.

I hate to say this, but this David Sanger piece in The Times is, I think, the most hopeful piece of information that I have come across, that Biden even mentioned the term off-ramp. I haven't heard anything like that this whole time, Medea. Yeah, well, just going back to the issue you brought up about Blinken, you know, he said it to us, the public, that he was going to talk to Lavrov about getting a, a basketball player released, but not about the war in Ukraine. And he said it in kind of a bragging way. You know, I will not talk to him about this war. And, you know, we have the, it's not just Blinken, it's not talking to Lavrov. It's Biden that's not talking to Putin. You probably saw the comment from Donald Trump saying that if he were president, this war wouldn't happen. And I think many people believe he would have talked to Putin and, and, uh,

why isn't, why isn't Biden doing that as well? So yes, it's nice they're talking about an off-ramp, but if you don't talk to your adversaries, where is that off-ramp? And it's not just going to be a solution between Ukraine and Russia. It's going to have to be one between the United States slash NATO and Russia as well. So they've got to talk to each other. Yeah. You know, shades of, I remember my own stupid self when I was like seven. saying that like, you know, if I'm riding my bike dangerously in the street, that, well, if I get hit by a car, it'll be their fault where the point is, yeah, but you'll have all your bones shattered or be dead. So it doesn't matter whose fault it is. Sort of the same thing if you start losing cities and go, yeah, well, Putin is the one who's the worst jerk here compared to Joe Biden. I'm not sure that's true. But even if you believe that, so what does it mean if you're willing to trade Atlanta for your principal? You know, that's crazy. That's right. And if you say that Putin is a maniac, then wouldn't you be really concerned about him using nuclear weapons? Wouldn't it be more of a reason you'd want to sit down and find this off ramp? So, yeah, it's easy for us to say that Putin is the aggressor. But at this point, it's like, how do you stop not only a nuclear Armageddon? How do you stop the war that's happening right? now? How do you stop all these Ukrainians from being killed? These Russian soldiers now going

to be conscripts from being killed. And then we know the repercussions that are happening all over the world with the price of fuel, the price of food, the destruction to the environment from the sanctions on Russian oil that have led to increases in oil exploration. and fracking and coal use. So there are so many repercussions to this, so many reasons that our leaders, whether they're in Congress and the White House, should be calling for a ceasefire in negotiations.

Yeah. So now there's also the problem of, as Taibi wrote about in his piece that I mentioned there earlier, that linked to Singer, about the consensus in Washington, D.C., in New York. York City. And it really is just like 20 years ago. And I don't think, you know, to the fever

pitch out in the country, I don't listen to AM talk radio very much. I guess I should try more. But it's not, you know, emotionally among the population, it's not the same as 20 years ago. But in D.C., it sure is. And Taibi quotes Bill Crystal's Licksbittle, Jamie Kirchick, writing in the New Republic about how. All of the peace activists, anti-war.com and Ron Paul and Code Pink and everybody in between, are all objectively pro-fascism, which was exactly what Jonah Goldberg, the editor of National Review, wrote 20 years ago that if you're against the war, then you are objectively pro-Saddam. And so therefore, no one, especially not a center-left Democrat, wants to be accused of that kind of weakness.

And everybody knows that anyone, that America is up against is always Hitler and that means that we must always be Churchill and all of this crap and the consensus is really seems to be just as strong as if you're sitting on Richard Pearl's defense policy board this time 20 years ago about this is just exactly what the hell we are going to do and everybody agrees right go team you know right it's quite remarkable to me to see what's happening in Washington, and that when the head of the Progressive Caucus, Pramila Jayapole, puts out a letter that is so mild that groups like mine won't even endorse it. It gives so much credit to Biden for all the help he's giving to Ukraine.

It says nothing about how we are fueling the war with these massive billion-dollar tranches of of weapons upon weapons, but it does call for diplomacy. And she has a really hard time getting her own Progressive Caucus to sign on to that letter. And we can't get a senator to introduce a similar kind of letter because they say you're tone deaf if you talk about talks with Putin. So there is a war fever and fervor in Washington, D.C. that has blinded even the most anti-war folks. Now, of course, there are some people on the right that have voted against the $40 billion for Ukraine. But they are few in numbers as well. And when you look at the leadership of the Republican Party, they seem to be fighting over the Democrats about who can allocate more.

more money for Ukraine. Right. Yep. And that's always the narrative, right, is no matter who they're burning to death, the Democrats are always weak and effeminate, and the Republicans must always be more macho and attack them for never being violent enough, no matter what. They're just stuck like that forever. Well, maybe not forever, because I think this war is going to get less and less popular all over the world. And here in the United States, as time goes on, and people recognize that spending now over $60 billion in Ukraine and the year is not even over yet is something that is affecting us in many different areas and affecting what people mostly care about, which is inflation and the prices that they pay at the gas pump that are going to go

up now, given the cut in oil production. But I do think that this will get less and less popular. And who will be there to reap the benefits of that? You know, maybe Trump, because he says there needs to be a negotiated solution now and put himself forward as somebody who could do that. Maybe it's the folks on the conservative, more extreme, I would say, part of the Republican Party who will reap the benefit of it. It certainly won't be progressives because they have not taken up the mantle even of calling for negotiations. But I don't think the American people will continue to look favorably upon this as time goes on and it becomes clear that there is no easy win that this is just a lose-lose situation. Yeah, if we all live that long. Give me just a minute here. At the Libertarian Institute,

we publish books. Real good ones. So far we've got Will Griggs Snow Quarter. Sheldon Richmond's coming to Palestine and what social animals owe to each other. And four of mine. Fools Aaron, enough already, the great Ron Paul, and my brand new one, hotter than the sun. Time to abolish nuclear weapons. And I'm happy to announce that we've just published our managing editor Keith Knight's first one, The Voluntarius Handbook, an excellent collection of essays by the world's greatest libertarian thinkers and writers, including me. Check them all out at libertarian institute.org slash books. And for a limited time, signed copies of enough already and hotter than the sun are available at Scott Horton.org slash books. Hey guys, I had some wasps

in my house. So I shot them to death with my trusty bug assault 3.0 model with the improved salt reservoir and bar safety. I don't have a deal with them, but the show does earn a kickback every time you get a bug of salt or anything else you buy from Amazon.com by way of the link in the right-hand margin on the front page at Scott Horton.org. So keep that in mind. And don't worry about the mess. Your wife will clean it up. Well, I mean, that's certainly true.

And it's interesting, of course, the dynamic, as always, the centrists are the extremists, right? These moderate compromisers on the center left and the center right in these parties. And it would be, if it was anyone in the, Congress, it would be the more left-wing people. We've got Bernie Sanders, maybe a couple people. I don't know. And on the right, it's the more populist, Trumpian right? Who are the ones who are skeptical about this? But meanwhile, Mitch McConnell and Nancy Pelosi and the leadership are stuck in the George W. Bush era as ever. So what we really need is for the people to kind of try to provoke

these partisan fights within the left and the right and see a civil war. Let's see Mitch McConnell overthrown by Rand Paul. Let's see, you know, I don't know who on the left, but let's see something where there's a real fight between the America firsters and the George W. Bushers, right? And then on the left, you guys phrased it

your own way, but cause this fight that like, hey, all real good progressives hate this war and hate the Democrats who would dare to support enough of this already. You know, who do you think you are? George W. Bush? This is wrong. Well, it's

it's a problem when you say those on the left because where are they? Bernie Sanders won't even introduce a similar type of letter as Jayapal calling for negotiations. And when we met with his staff people, they said, you're tone deaf if you think you could negotiate with Putin. So I see that as we started out this conversation talking about when you have a Democrat in the White House. We talked about Obama and now it's Biden. And so it's very hard even to get progressives to go against what their party is calling for. And especially when their elections coming up around the corner, I think they've been cowed to basically be silent on this issue or just go along with what the White House is calling for. Yeah, it's so sad. And I love the quote too,

tone deaf. In other words, never mind. what's right or wrong and whether humanity hangs in the balance and all of this stuff, it's, what if they talk bad about me on CNN? Or what if, you know, people just portray me in a way that affects my reputation for being too good on peace? But that is how they think. That's exactly how they think. It's hard to know how they think because you wonder if it's just, I'm going to go along with the party until November.

and then maybe I'll talk rational and say, yeah, we need to sit down at the table. Or is it that they believe it because some of the progressives have gotten on the plane and gone over to Keeve to have their pictures taken with Zelensky? And some of them, I think maybe are delusional in thinking that there is a victory around the corner. But certainly you'd think that people have seen and heard this before, whether it's about Afghanistan or Iraq, that we were just about to win in these places as years went by, how long do they think that we can stay in this war in Ukraine and keep saying that the Ukrainians are going to be able to do the impossible of taking back all of Dunbass and Crimea. which seems to be where the U.S. policymakers are thinking right now, trying to, as they scuttled talks that were happening between Russia and Ukraine early on in the war in late March, early April, to the position now of a complete victory, which is delusional. I mean, seriously, for them talking about, oh, yeah, and we're going to kick them out of Crimea, too, and all this. We'll all die before that happens.

know, I believe it was Eric Margulies who taught me this for the first time, that I forget now if it was two or three hundred thousand Russians died defending Crimea from the German and Romanian Nazis in World War II. So you think about, I'm a Texan, I guess you're from the northeast up there somewhere, think about what West Point means to New Yorkers, what the Alamo means to Texans. Imagine if 300,000 men had died defending. the Alamo what it would mean to us then we think that they are going to give up Crimea they're not and it's kind of like Ho Chi Minh said you know what even if you kill three million of us we're still not going to give up like there are red lines you know and that's clearly one of them

and yeah talk about delusional yeah delusional to death this is just completely crazy they might as well demand that Putin just resign. That's absolutely how off the table this is for even discussion in a rational world right now. Right. And I think we want to acknowledge the Ukrainian resistance and how they are resisting an invasion of their country and they're not going to give up either unless there is pressure on them and on the Russians. And that's why. I think when you have people like the Pope who comes out and says, come on, you all, we've got to do something about this. It's affecting the whole world.

And my colleague Nicholas Davies and I listened to all the speeches at the United Nations and picked out 66 speeches by heads of state that we're saying, this is affecting our people. We are island nations that are about to go underwater. and here you are spending more money on Ukraine than you've put into the Global Climate Fund in the last decade, or people saying that we already had people facing hunger in our countries, and now the prices are doubling. So people all over the world, it might not be happening in Washington, D.C., but it's happening in countries that represent the majority of people in the world. They're saying, we don't want to take sides in this. what we want to do is force you all to sit down and hammer this out.

Where the line is in Dombas, you know, that's for you all to decide, but sit down and figure it out. You had the Minsk Accords and it wasn't adhered to. Well, maybe we have to go back to that and make sure it's really going to happen. So I think there is more and more pressure coming from the outside, and hopefully it will have some effect on people in the leadership position, in this country, who seem to think it's fine to just every two weeks allocate some more billions of dollars for weapons and think this is going to be a situation where victory is going to be in the offing. Yeah. Well, it's such an important point, what you say, about the devaluation of currency all over the world from the lockdowns and all the money printing after that, led by the

United States and the European Union, of course, and then with all these restrictions on supply chains and all these things, driving up prices, especially the grains from Eastern Europe because of this war, this is how the Arab Spring started off, right, back in 2011, was it was bread riots that turned into political revolutions. Then, of course, America and Saudi hijacked them and burn the whole Middle East to the ground, but that's a different story. But the point is that people can't stand it. If they make 50 cents a day, and now it's only worth 25, and they can't feed their kiddos. Something's going to catch on fire. You just can't do that to people. Right. And as we go forward, remember that Russia is such an important producer of fertilizers, and the fact that they are not getting out,

even though the U.S. says, well, there's a carve-out for fertilizers. They can sell those. Well, the international banks don't want to deal with Russia. They're afraid of the U.S. sanctions. So these fertilizers are not getting to the farmers who need them to plant their crops. And so this is going to get worse as time goes on. And yes, these upheavals are going to be happening. And this time, it's not just going to be in the global south, but let's see what's happening, what's going to happen in Western Europe when people can't pay their energy bills. And that's such an important point that you make there about the sanctions. And we've seen the same thing over and over again with Iran, for example, and with Syria, where they can't import

medicines, even though, of course, medicines are officially exempt in the laws and everything, but you just have the major commercial shippers. They just don't want to cross the U.S. Treasury at all. So they just sail around Persia and drop off their medicines somewhere else, because the U.S. Treasury is like second only to the Pentagon or the CIA, maybe third after CIA, is the most powerful organization on this planet. You don't mess with that. them they'll destroy and they'll destroy a trillion dollar business or whether they don't care and so um you can see exactly that situation here where there's an exemption for fertilizers but still what shipping company wants to participate what bank and what insurance company are going to make

sure these transactions go through when you're talking about messing with the u.s. treasury department you might as well be a branch of video with treasuries ATF coming for you no way absolutely and this kind of economic warfare the u.s has been able to get away with it in most cases because it is the big bully but this is a case with russia and it certainly has been the case with china as well where there is a tremendous backlash and the people who are most affected by it are not in russia the people most affected by it are people in the rest of the world. And I think the big changes we are starting to see in Western Europe are going to just get greater and greater in the coming year. And then, you know, who knows what's going to

happen here at home when people recognize that the people that they thought were leading them politically are more concerned about keeping up a war in Ukraine than they are about the well-being of the people here in the United States. Yeah. All right. So I'm sorry we're short on time, but I really want to hear about this book, and I want to go ahead and recommend it in advance because we run so much stuff by you and Nicholas together here. Nicholas J.S. Davies. He's been writing directly for us,

and we've been reprinting things by him and linking to things by him and you for more than 10 years, I'm sure. And he's, of course, a brilliant genius and a fantastic writer. and you guys articles are always great. So especially I want to recommend this for people as, you know, maybe to give to members of your friends and family who are on more of the liberal Democrat left and they need to be attacked from the left or given a good argument from the left that they can identify with in a social psychology kind of way

and not have to worry that now they're a Trump or some kind of eye roll thing, right? So this is what you do. It's at ORBooks, ORBooks.com. It's called War in Ukraine, making sense of a senseless conflict. And just take us through it here real quick, could you? Well, yeah, it's a book that really is a basic primer about what the issues are in the lead-up to the war in Ukraine. We go into great detail about the issues of NATO and what is NATO, what has been the history of NATO, why it's not a defensive alliance, but an offensive alliance. We go into the success and failure

of the Minx II plan. Why did it never get really off the ground? We go through the invasion itself, kind of step by step, and we look at the media and how the media has been portraying this war from the different perspectives. We have a whole chapter on the sanctions. What exactly are those sanctions and what have been the consequences of them. We have a chapter on the nuclear war and what have been the treaties that the U.S. and Russia had been signed on to. What's the status of them now? And then talk about where are the solutions to this? Where could it be leading us and how people can get involved? And I'm, both Nicholas and I are doing a 50 city tour around the United States with the book and with a 20-minute video that we did based on the book and the

purposes to not only educate people, but to get people involved, get them to contact their elected officials, get them to complain to the media, how this is being portrayed in a very propagandized way, and start to rebuild this anti-war movement that has been so decimated in recent years. Great. All right. Listen, everybody, again, that's ORBooks.com. And the book is War in Ukraine, Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict by Medea Benjamin and Nicholas J.S. Davies. And Medea, where can people find a list of your speaking tour and all that stuff? Is that here, too? Yeah, they can go on the Code Pink website under the Ukraine book tour. And I also want to mention, Scott, and a coalition that's come together called Peace in Ukraine.

org. You can see that website and lots of ways to join that coalition or get involved in the actions that we are proposing. Okay, great. And that's codepink.org, of course, peace in ukraine.org. I'm typing that in now. And we'll give that a look. And orbooks.com for the new book, War in Ukraine, making sense of a senseless conflict guaranteed to be great by Medea Benjamin and Nicholas J.S. Davies. Thank you so much for your time, Medea. Great to talk to you. Great talking to you, Scott. Thank you so much. The Scott Horton Show, Anti-War Radio, can be heard on K-PFK, 90.7 FM in L.A.

APSRadio.com, anti-war.com, Scotthorton.org, and Libertarian Institute.org.