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In part 2, Jafrikayiti recalls that after Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide was overthrown, Canada Haiti Action Network asked officials on Parliament Hill in Ottawa as to why free and fair elections weren't being held in Haiti. The response was that Lavalas, the movement headed by Aristide, "occupied too much space," and foreign actors wanted to "level the playing field" to ensure that Lavalas wouldn't regain power. Furthermore, he delves into the myths surrounding former policeman Jimmy "Barbecue" Chérizier. Chérizier, whose victims have notably not been members of the predatory Haitian oligarchy, has subsequently been armed and granted impunity from arrest. Jafrikayiti calls for genuine solidarity with Haiti from people in the U.S., Canada, and France in order for there to be a paradigm shift in policy.

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I am the host of India"} A discussion about independent media and ownership, censorship, self-censorship in media and a discussion about hate speech laws. This interview was originally published by Plebity. .kt-post-loop_b9f1a6-8a .kadence-post-image{padding-top:0px;padding-right:0px;padding-bottom:0px;padding-left:0px;}.kt-post-loop_b9f1a6-8a .kt-post-grid-wrap{gap:30px 6px;}.kt-post-loop_b9f1a6-8a .kt-blocks-post-grid-item{border-top-width:0px;border-right-width:0px;border-bottom-width:0px;border-left-width:0px;border-top-left-radius:0px;border-top-right-radius:0px;border-bottom-right-radius:0px;border-bottom-left-radius:0px;}.kt-post-loop_b9f1a6-8a .kt-blocks-post-grid-item .kt-blocks-post-grid-item-inner{padding-top:10px;padding-right:25px;padding-bottom:25px;padding-left:9px;}.kt-post-loop_b9f1a6-8a .kt-blocks-post-grid-item header{padding-top:0px;padding-right:0px;padding-bottom:0px;padding-left:0px;margin-top:0px;margin-right:0px;margin-bottom:0px;margin-left:0px;}.kt-post-loop_b9f1a6-8a .kt-blocks-post-grid-item .entry-title{padding-top:5px;padding-right:0px;padding-bottom:10px;padding-left:0px;margin-top:0px;margin-right:0px;margin-bottom:0px;margin-left:0px;font-size:16px;line-height:17px;}.kt-post-loop_b9f1a6-8a .entry-content{padding-top:0px;padding-right:0px;padding-bottom:0px;padding-left:0px;margin-top:0px;margin-right:0px;margin-bottom:0px;margin-left:0px;}.kt-post-loop_b9f1a6-8a .kt-blocks-post-footer{border-top-width:0px;border-right-width:0px;border-bottom-width:0px;border-left-width:0px;padding-top:0px;padding-right:0px;padding-bottom:0px;padding-left:0px;margin-top:0px;margin-right:0px;margin-bottom:0px;margin-left:0px;}.kt-post-loop_b9f1a6-8a .entry-content:after{height:0px;}.kt-post-loop_b9f1a6-8a .kb-filter-item{border-top-width:0px;border-right-width:0px;border-bottom-width:2px;border-left-width:0px;padding-top:5px;padding-right:8px;padding-bottom:5px;padding-left:8px;margin-top:0px;margin-right:10px;margin-bottom:0px;margin-left:0px;} Paul Jay and Freddie deBoer Discuss Independent Media, Censorship, and Hate Speech Laws Censorship in Germany, Israeli Hacking & Saudi-Iran Peace Deal – Dr. Shir Hever YouTube Censorship & the Threat of Nuclear War With Paul Jay Pt 2/2 – Paul Jay & Abby Martin on Afghanistan, 9/11 & Climate Change Big Tech Censorship and Defying Offical Narratives – Paul Jay and Joe Lauria at the World Ethical Data Forum Big Tech Censorship or Deal with the Real Problems? – Thomas Frank YouTube Censorship and Now What’s Happening in Kansas – Thomas Frank Transcript Listen Donate Subscribe Guest Music Jyotishman Mudiar Hello and welcome. I am Jyotishman. I am the host of India and Global Left moderating this conversation between Freddy and Paul as part of Plebity’s Free Speech and Left Conference. We are joined today by independent journalists Paul Jay and Freddy deBoer for a conversation on independent media censorship and hate speech laws.  Paul Jay is an independent journalist and documentary filmmaker. He is the founder, editor-in-chief, and host of theAnalysis.news, a site of political commentary and interviews. He is currently working on a documentary with Daniel Ellsberg titled How to Stop a Nuclear War, which is based on Ellsberg’s book The Doomsday Machine.  Freddy deBoer is an independent journalist based in Brooklyn, New York. He is the author of ‘The Cult of Smart How Our Broken Education System Perpetuates Social Injustice’ and his newest book is ‘How Elites Aid the Social Justice Movement’. Freddy is a self-styled old-school Marxist and writes regularly on his subtext about politics, Marxism, education, police reform, and other topics.  Welcome Freddy and Paul. I wanted to start with you, Freddy, on hate speech and hate speech laws. I read your article where you have argued that hate speech laws don’t work. So why don’t we start with your opening statement on that and then Paul respond to that? Freddie deBoer Sure. I mean, I think the first thing to say is always to point out that there is no such thing as a hate speech exemption to the First Amendment in the United States. One of my frustrations is that very often when liberals and leftists are talking about the concept of hate speech, they often talk as though there is such a thing as an already existing statute of hate speech, what it is legally in the United States. There is no such category as hate speech in the United States. You can say this is hate speech in a sense that you think is descriptively true, but there is no legal category of hate speech. And I also think that it’s almost entirely pointless to talk about the creation of one.  In order for there to be a hate speech provision for the United States, you would have to make an amendment to the Constitution to create that exception to the First Amendment. And among other things, an amendment to the Constitution requires three-quarters of the state legislatures of the United States to go along with something, which is just totally fanciful under current political conditions.  I think that Republicans would rightfully feel that any kind of a hate speech code written into the United States Constitution would be used primarily as a cudgel against them. I mean, I guess you can sort of theoretically define an idea of like a partisanly neutral, ideologically neutral hate speech code, but in practice, it would almost certainly be used more against conservatives than against liberals and the state legislatures of Republican countries, of Republican states, excuse me, we’re not going to get on board with that.  Hate speech laws don’t work because I think we have very good evidence that they don’t. The most obvious examples are countries like Germany and France. Germany and France both have aggressive anti-hate speech and anti-far-right extremism statutes on their books. They both ban explicit Nazism. Nazi parties are not allowed. Nazi iconography is banned in both of those countries. They both have a robust implementation of various laws in place to try to stop the spread of far-right parties, and they also have a huge far-right problem. Both of these countries that have really actively attempted to stamp down neo-Nazi propaganda and neo-Nazi parties have a significant neo-Nazi problem.  What you see in both cases, particularly in Germany, it happens over and over again, is that a party will rise, a far-right party will rise. It will have a lot of iconographies that are new but is in the vein that we’ve seen from fascist parties, and far-right parties in the past, and they will eventually be criminalized by the German government.  The Department of Interior, I think, is usually who’s responsible for those sorts of things. And then, once that happens, they formally disband. Maybe a few of their leaders will be arrested, but then they will simply scatter, and then they’ll reform and reconstitute new parties. You can ban the party. You can ban the particular expression of these ideas in individual parties and their specific slogans and the names of the parties. But the ideas that underlie them, right, are popular with a certain subset of the population. And so, they will continue to be expressed in some way in the political process.  In both Germany and France, we’ve seen the increasing salience of these parties in electoral politics. The sitting…  Jyotishman Mudiar Okay. Sorry. So, can we just stay here and let Paul respond, and then we can come back to you?  Freddie deBoer Sure.  Paul Jay Well, this is not my preoccupation, but I don’t believe in some absolutist free speech. And there are certain forms of hate speech laws, which I think can work. I’m living in Canada right now. We have a hate speech law here. And as far as I understand it, the experience with it has not been so bad. It’s essentially aimed at overt forms of racism and fascism. I mean, overt. And I personally have no problem with that. Now, whether you could have a law like that in the United States constitutionally is a whole other matter. But if we’re talking about, is this something I would be for, I am for it. And I am not for, for example, which I do understand might be the case in Germany, that there should be a law against any interpretation of history. I don’t think ipso facto, by saying there wasn’t a Holocaust, that’s automatically hate speech. Although maybe it is, I don’t think any court should be involved at this time in deciding how history is discussed. But hate speech, whose real intent is to mobilize people against a specific race, group, or ethnicity, I have no problem banning that.   As I say, I think the Canadian experience on that is not so bad. But either now or a little later in the conversation, I think we really have to broaden this conversation. This isn’t about a particular hate speech or censoring hate speech without looking at the context.  I’ll get into it more later, But there is a war going on throughout this world. And the one thing that’s really banned from mainstream media, is to discuss the nature of this war. And you can’t even talk about this without getting kicked off and never invited back. You can’t say the most obvious thing, which is we live in a class society. And throughout the world, there is a class war going on every single day.  Now, sometimes this breaks out into state-to-state war, the aggressive invasion by Russia and Ukraine, the Americans backing the Saudi war in Yemen, you can go on. But I lived in Baltimore for eight years, nine years. There is a class war against black workers every single day. And even the Department of Justice, under the Obama administration, investigated the Baltimore police force and concluded that every single day in Baltimore, people’s constitutional rights are being violated. Why? So that there can be a cheap labor force available for institutions and corporations in Baltimore. In the context of this kind of war, let’s then talk about censorship, and hate speech. But on the face of it, in a very narrow interpretation, meaning very overt racism, very overt fascism that could lead to mobilizing people, sure, I don’t have a problem with that. Let’s, there’s a reason why so much money is invested in propaganda. It’s because it works.  Jyotishman Mudiar  Freddie, would you like to respond to Paul’s point that it does work? And he makes the point that in Canada, it seems to be working at this point.  Freddie deBoer Sure. I mean, I think that Canada is distinct from the United States in all manner of ways, for, you know, a variety of historical and cultural reasons. I just don’t believe that, of course, we’re in a class war. I think the first thing I would say in response to that is one of the things that really disappoints me about the contemporary left is that the definition of who the biggest enemy is has changed within my lifetime. I understand the real enemy, the person who does the most damage, is a guy who puts on a $2,000 suit and goes up to a tall building on Wall Street, and as an investment banker, ruins the lives of ordinary Americans every day. But in my own lifetime, as someone who’s been an activist in left circles for his entire adult life, the focus has fallen farther and farther from that person; that immensely wealthy tycoon on Wall Street. It is now more and more a Proud Boy or some other, you know, part of the lumping fascist movement in the United States who shows up at a protest and throws some rocks and punches some people who have no actual power to affect anything in the world.  I mean, to me, the way to win the class war is to understand that the people who are the greatest danger to the working class, to the environment, to people of color, to LGBTQ people, et cetera, ultimately are the people who hold respectable positions of power within the established economy. It’s not the fringy John Birch society types. I think those people are despicable but I don’t think that they actually control the sort of bulk of the disruptive power in the United States.  I would also say like, look, look at an issue like acceptance of interracial marriage. Nowadays in polling, even Republicans poll north of 90% of people approve of interracial marriage. But as recently as the early 1990s, a majority of Republicans were consistently saying that interracial marriage was immoral. How did we achieve victory in moving that needle over time? We didn’t ban the idea that interracial marriage is wrong. We didn’t carve out an exception in the Constitution and say, you can’t argue this. Rather the force of the idea, the fact that we were morally correct, right? The fact that people lived lives demonstrated that these marriages were not destructive. The fact that we demonstrated our values in a lived sense, created a natural organic rejection of the idea that interracial marriage is bad. I think that that’s just always going to be in the long term, a more permanent and durable way to achieve change than by trying to ban things.  Paul Jay Yeah. Well, I don’t think I disagree with a word of that. Any attempt that goes beyond what I was saying to ban overt racist and fascist language that is meant to incite people to attack in a racist and fascist way. Anything else, I’m not for, anything. And of course, you have to win by persuasion.  In fact, why is there such a Trumpist movement? Why did 75 million people vote for Donald Trump? It’s not because the majority of them are racist and fascist. The majority of them are not by any means. The majority of them are just fed up.  I interviewed a guy in the lead-up to the first Trump election where he won in a diner outside Baltimore. We asked him how he felt about Trump. And he said, “Well, he’s a liar. He’s a scumbag. I don’t trust him. I’m going to vote for him. What’s that tell you about what I think about the other guys?” The whole system is toxic. And it’s toxic for what you just said. It is how stuff is owned. It’s the concentration of ownership.  The concentration of ownership, particularly in the financial sector, which has become so parasitic that far more money is in this casino capitalism than investing in anything productive. People are suffering from that. And the corporate Democrats and the liberal face of this system have simply written off those 75 million people that voted for Trump. They don’t give a damn. And they till the soil for such crazy shit to be believed. So if you want to deal with the crazy shit, no, you don’t ban the crazy ideas. You don’t ban people that believe in this theory or crazy theory. What you do is invest in a public education system right across the country. And you actually pay teachers properly. And you train teachers to actually know history.  Look at some of the papers kids are writing in school about the Second World War. They absolutely haven’t got a clue who were the Nazis, who were the Soviets, who were the Americans. And they’re getting A’s. Why? Because the teachers don’t know any better than the kids do. If you really want to deal with the descent of so much of the population into a kind of, I don’t know what else to call it, a kind of ignorance that makes people susceptible to being recruited into a theocratic fascist movement, it’s the complete collapse of a decent public education system outside of major cities.  Freddie deBoer Yeah, I think casino capitalism, I think, is just the right term. I think that one of the things that I think that we could all do a better job of sort of explaining to everyday people is the degree to which financialization is not just found in the financial industry anymore.  One of the things that emerged from the financial crisis in 2008-2009, a lot of people didn’t know but became apparent. For example, General Motors was making most of its money, the majority of its profit were not coming from selling cars. It had created a financial bank that was attached to it and was making bets on the economy. And the same thing was true of the major airlines, the same thing was true of General Electric.  One of the things that happen when you have this financial sector that is promising people such incredible returns, you say, well, look, you can go and you can build a factory and you might make 5% a year, or you can invest with me and you can make 20% a year. When you have that kind of a margin because you’re making these extremely risky bets like they were making with mortgages and mortgage-backed securities and derivatives and all that stuff; ordinary investment can’t compete. If I just have an old-school factory in which I’m building widgets and I can employ people and I can send these things out, then that looks like a much less attractive investment opportunity to investors.  One of the things that happen is that financialization spreads further and further across the country because in order to compete with the interest rates that some of these banks are dangling in front of people, institutions that are not fundamentally financial have to use those shenanigans too, which of course is fine until inevitably whatever cracks are in that financial model happen to break and we have explosions as we had in 2008 and 2009.  Jyotishman Mudiar Yeah, I just wanted to quickly add that the implication goes beyond the country and particularly its impact, the impact of finance capital on the global South has been very, very extreme.  As we speak, we are seeing country after country, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka, facing the balance of payment crisis. And one of the roots of this was this liquidity was following the global financial crisis in the global North that went into these bond markets, through the bond markets into these countries of the global South. And the moment interest rates are high in the global North, capitals are switched back, leaving the country’s money into depreciation, trades falls, balance of payment goes into a sort of complete toss and then IMF goes in and imposes the austerity and eventually the burden is transferred into the working people.  Sorry for just this addition since I come from the global South, I thought there was this great moment. I want to quickly switch from this discussion, but if we can just quickly put this thing away since Paul mentioned school education and I’m taking university as part of this and maybe my question is particularly relevant to university. What are your thoughts about the rise or this conflict around free speech in university, particularly with regards to what we generally understand as cancel culture or issues of diversity, equity and inclusion? Do you see a particular threat in that or is it blown out of proportion by the right wing as a sort of weaponization?  Paul Jay Well, I think the answer is both. I think it does get blown out of proportion by the far right and I also think it gets exaggerated by sections of the left. We are facing an existential threat. The climate crisis and the risk of nuclear war have never been more threatening, so you cannot judge an issue without starting there. So if a particular professor or a particular thing is being said, it doesn’t mean, it doesn’t offend someone’s identity, it doesn’t restrict some rights. I’m not saying people should lay down in the face of it, but is it the primary issue? And if we need to build a unity of the people to force real policy, real action on climate and real policy to reduce the risk of nuclear war, then everything else has to be judged in the context of that. You got to pick your battles and it serves the interests of the oligarchy, to use Bernie’s words or whatever, to keep people fighting over these other issues.  Right now the abortion issue is after years of hurting the Democrats because it pushed so many votes towards the Republicans. Now all of a sudden it’s galvanizing some vote that might help the Democrats and it’s clearly a legitimate fight for women to control their reproductive rights, but there are a lot of serious people, honest people, ordinary people who are religious and in good faith, not in bad faith, think abortion is against their principles. I don’t think women should have to give up their rights because of that.  On the other hand, there should be an enormous effort, including knocking on doors in all the areas where people vote for Trump to say, look, okay, we’re going to disagree on this, but we’re faced with an existential crisis. Human civilization could end. So how about we agree at least to reduce the risk of nuclear war? If you don’t get the climate science, let me tell you what I know about it. And, you know, we all know there’s lots of us aren’t going to agree on some of these other issues like abortion or even, you know, gay marriage. Okay. We won’t agree. But in the context of what we’re facing, the threat we’re facing, you know, if there was like a meteor about to hit the earth, you want to be arguing about abortion? Well, that’s the kind of moment we’re in.  And the problem is the corporate Democrats, which essentially are the political face or much of the financial sector, they don’t want effective policy to deal with climate. Because what is effective policy? It’s a kind of central planning. You actually have to plan a green economy. And it can’t be done by anywhere other than government. It’s clear the market can’t do it. And as much as even they know, like you listen to Larry Fink, who runs BlackRock, he’s fully aware of the facts of how dangerous the climate crisis is. But they don’t want a kind of government planning.  Now, it’s not they’re against central planning. They don’t mind when the Fed bails out banks. What is that but central planning? The bloody Pentagon is central planning. There’s lots of central planning, but essential planning done by a government and politicians very beholden to the financial sector. But they don’t want to open the door to a transformation to a green economy that will require pulling back on some of the profit centers they have in fossil fuel companies and such, even though they know human civilization is threatened by it.  Freddie deBoer Yeah, I would also say that my response is like, it’s both at the same time. Look, I’ve written a lot about civil liberties on campus. I do fundamentally think that conservative students and conservative professors should have the right to hold and express the opinions that they do. I also think that it’s very fraught for the American university system if it really does become entirely one side of the political spectrum because that means that it’s much less defensible. I mean, one of the things, there’s been this terrible defunding of America public education, higher education in the last 20 or so years. And one of the things that Republican state legislatures always do is they say, one of the reasons we’re cutting funding is because these are just leftist indoctrination camps anyway, et cetera, et cetera. I do think that there’s, of course, in a certain sense, these are tempests in a teapot, but I think it’s worth asking, why have young people today become so habituated to expressing their problems in a way that is very sort of parochial, so very like my campus is the world and I need to clean up my world and I appeal to the dean and he’s the highest authority there is, and my problems are all about offense and my desires are to limit people’s language. I think you have to look at that and say that these are young people who have grown up with a sense of disenfranchisement. That, in other words, part of the reason why so many young people spend so much time with the language policing and with freaking out about who gets cast in what movie and having social media freak-outs is because they’ve grown up into a political system in which they don’t believe they have representation. In other words, they look at the political system in which they’re embedded and they don’t see themselves as having a voice, as having an opportunity to really influence things.  One of the things that I’ve found myself is there’s a really interesting combination and kind of dark combination among a lot of young people of great idealism but also nihilism, in the sense that they have very developed political instincts and they have a strong sense of right and wrong, but they don’t believe that they can actually create change. They don’t think that anything’s going to get better, and so I think that part of the reason why you see these perpetual blow-ups on college campuses is because it’s one of the only places where people of that age feel that they have any power. They don’t think that they can get a political system that actually represents their interests. They don’t think the economic deal is going to get better for them. They’re looking at a world where healthcare, education, and housing just keep getting more and more prohibitively expensive. Most of these kids don’t believe they’ll ever be able to own their own home and they’re probably right, and so they see this very pessimistic outlook on the world and they say, well, look, here at the place where I spend $30,000 a year in tuition checks and where we can raise our voice and yell at administrators who can give us what we want, here we’re going to exercise our power. It’s the expression of this is the only place I feel enfranchised, the only place I feel empowered, so I’m going to become more and more controlling of that space.  Paul Jay Well, I’m not sure that’s so bad. Where else are they going to fight except in the school where they spend most of their time? What I’m more concerned about is the way universities suppress discussion indirectly by who they hire. For example, the Israel-Palestine question. I mean, how many professors have either lost their jobs or are scared about their jobs if they talk about what’s really going on in terms of the apartheid state in Israel against the Palestinians? The institutional power is far stronger than anything the left is capable of doing. That said, I think it’s important, don’t divide the students on secondary issues. I don’t mind closing down a member of the Nazi party if they’ve been invited to speak. Go there, scream at them, disrupt. It’s fine with me. I think suppression of overt Nazism, again, there’s a difference between conservative opinion, right-wing positions, and overt Nazism. But the main thing the left should do is promote as much open discussion and debate.  If you believe facts are on your side, you don’t fear discussion and debate. And I wish, I hope the left one gets over so much sectarianism. How much left just winds up spending its time attacking other portions of the left? And don’t divide the student body over secondary questions. There’s some polling recently, even amongst Republicans that consider themselves seriously conservative Republicans, it was something close to 20% of them thought climate is a legitimate threat, the climate crisis. 10% of those Republicans thought it was at the amongst their top three concerns, the climate crisis. So how about trying to win those people over and talk about climate and try to subdue the fights on some of the questions you know you’re going to disagree upon.  Again, the meteor is about to hit the earth. You know that movie Don’t Look Up. Well, we’re in that kind of moment. We better be smart and tactical to try to build as much unity. I’m not naive.  There’s a section of the population that because of indoctrination, however, the belief system, there’s a lot of money being invested in getting people to believe that Trump is a vehicle of God. And the Christian theocracy, I think is a serious, it’s not the Proud Boys that are a problem. It’s amongst the elites that are using their money to mobilize Christian nationalism amongst the people. It’s a very serious threat.  Mikey Weinstein from the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, who do a lot of work on pushing back against Christian theocracy in the military, they think as much as 30% of the military have been recruited now actively into Christian theocratic forms. The real story of January 6 on Capitol Hill was not what happened on January 6. It was the lead up to January 6 where 10 former secretaries of defense, the former Supreme Commander of NATO and an editorial in the Financial Times, all on January 4th, essentially said a coup was in progress. And this is, by the way, another form of censorship because you can’t say this at all in mainstream TV. They don’t want to acknowledge there was a coup in progress on January 4th. They want to just focus on Proud Boys on January 6th, which is the more irrelevant part of what happened.  But as I said earlier, propaganda works. And there’s a lot of money invested in mainstream media, online media, social media, to recruit and persuade people. But how do we deal with it? Even if you advocated banning it, it’s nonsense. You have no power to do so. We need to talk to people and persuade people. And so as far as free speech on campus goes, if facts are on our side, are meaning the left, and I think they are, let’s rely on them. Jyotishman Mudiar Freddie, do you want to respond very briefly before I shift the conversation?  Freddie deBoer No, I mean, I think that’s all said. I think that there, again, as sort of little sympathy as I have for these Republican voters that we’re talking about, again, I think that what they share with these very liberal college students, again, is a sense of disenfranchisement, which is part of, which is, I mean, in one sense is crazy, right? Because no one is more overrepresented in our political system than the average white male Republican. But at the same time, if you look at things like QAnon or the rest of these wild conspiracy theories, I think part of what unites all of them is a sense that the system is broken down, change is impossible within the system. And so QAnon is like this apocalyptic sort of conspiracy, right? Q will come back and there will be a great cleansing and there will be fire and blood in the streets, et cetera. And that sort of stuff often comes from a sense of among ordinary people that the system is rigged, which it is, and that change isn’t really possible. And so that prompts people into these extremes within their own little affinity groups, because you won’t think that you can work within the system to create change. You’re always going to sort of gravitate towards just getting more and more intense within your own little niche. Paul Jay And the other thing I would add to that or suggest to people on campuses and such. Daniel Ellsberg was a militant who released the Pentagon Papers. I’m doing a film with him now on his book, Doomsday Machine. He was a nuclear war planner. I interviewed Larry Wilkerson a lot, who used to be Colin Powell’s chief of staff. They were militant, militant cold warriors. They really believed the Soviet Union could try to have a first strike against the United States. They thought it was trying to take over the world. They believed all that stuff. And then they came to realize it was bullshit.  So even people that believe in the QAnon stuff, and I agree what was just said, it’s out of desperation. You pick up, you believe in this stuff. Your own life doesn’t really validate it. So if you’re going to talk to people, listen, some people are nuts. They’ve been driven mad by a culture that’s essentially irrational, and maybe you can’t talk. But most people who voted for Trump are not completely nuts and are not QAnon. And even if they are, just set that stuff aside. Just say, listen, do you think there’s a climate threat? Do you think climate crisis is real? So argue on that. Forget the rest of the stuff. Most of the ordinary people don’t have an economic interest in these crazy shit. But there’s a gang of billionaires who do have an economic interest in people believing this stuff. So what Fred said earlier, yeah, let’s get the attention back on these guys in the $2,000 suits, including the ones that are working around Trump, that are behind Trump. And let’s try to have as much unity amongst people as we can.  Jyotishman Mudiar  A lot of stuff about beliefs is due to alienation. If you read military or war histories, you very quickly realize how easily people understand the ravages of war, just by being involved, which they generally may not have understood. And thinking about this alienation, this is a good segue into my next discussion, which is the internet. This is the sort of our great moment of transformation, the new market, sort of the way Carl Polanyi would say the great transformation of the 28th century. This is our great moment, perhaps in the last 20 years. So I want to start with you, Paul, about the issue of censorship in the digital market. And there are issues about arbitrary usage of algorithm. There are issues about involvement of government. And there are issues about corporations in the digital market using our data to manipulate us, or even turn ourselves into commodities.  So can you, if you can just tell your story very briefly, but also respond to this sort of the moment we are living in, and the issue of censorship that comes with the internet space? Paul Jay I’ll try to do it quickly. Yeah, I run a website called theAnalysis.news. And I did this story about January 6 on YouTube, we have a YouTube channel, where I pointed out that the real issue was the events that led up to January 6, not January 6. Again, about all the various mainstream sources that were talking about an attempted coup. Essentially, Christian nationalism within the military.  And in the video, I also pointed out that the corporate America had decided they’d had enough of Trump and wanted a peaceful transition. One, they don’t so fear a Biden presidency. They know in the final analysis, there may be some legislation they don’t like, but it’s not going to challenge their essential power. But something I pointed out in the video that was reported in mainstream media and then disappeared, the doors of Capitol Hill were breached at 2.10 in the afternoon. At 3.10 in the afternoon, the Association of American Manufacturers called for Vice President Pence to invoke the 25th Amendment and remove Trump. That means the preponderance of the elites had decided that this guy had gone nuts and they couldn’t trust him, and they feared this kind of coup. Well, that video, because it targeted Christian nationalism, because it exposed how corporate America’s role in this, and I should say the Association of American Manufacturers loved Trump right up until those days. They got everything they wanted in terms of deregulation and tax cuts. YouTube took that video down and gave me a warning, official warning. Jyotishman Mudiar And it was selectively you, not the big media. Paul Jay Yeah. Well, what happened is they said, because we had a clip of Trump speaking to the crowd just before they went to Capitol Hill, we were promoting the idea that the election was stolen and promoting disinformation. Now, it was obvious in the video we were denouncing Trump and not just…  Jyotishman Mudiar Just to be clear, the big media could run the same video.  Paul Jay They all did. That same clip had been on every single mainstream media on YouTube. So then, as an experiment, I took out the Trump clip and I added more, because I knew more about the story of the role of Christian nationalism in the lead up to January 6th, and I published that story. I also raised the issue in the first and second story. What was Mitch McConnell’s role in this? Because nobody wants to talk about that.  The three guys that oversee the Capitol Hill Police are the Sergeant of Arms of the Senate, the Sergeant of Arms of the House, and for some reason, the congressional architect. But the guy who really runs as senior is the Sergeant of Arms of the Senate. Who does he report to? The majority leader, Mitch McConnell. And the chief of police of the Capitol Hill Police was actually quoted as saying on the morning of the 6th, he went to the Sergeant of Arms of the Senate and asked for the National Guard to be called in then. And according to the chief of police, the Sergeant of Arms said to him, well, I have to go ask my boss, Mitch McConnell. And I never heard from him again, says the chief of police.  Well, in my report, Christian nationalism, focusing on Mitch McConnell’s role and the lead up. So because I took out the Trump piece, they didn’t take the piece down. Then I tried to buy an ad to promote the piece. I got a letter from YouTube and then from Google saying, this piece spreads disinformation. You are now banned from advertising on all Google platforms forever. You, Paul Jay, me personally. So then I interview Mikey Weinstein. I do a piece about Christian nationalism. I don’t even talk about Trump’s role. It’s just about Christian nationalism in the military and the role in the lead up to the 6th. They take that piece down. I get a second strike now. I’m one strike away from the channel being closed down.  The only reason I didn’t get closed down, I know Matt Taibbi and Matt wrote a piece about this and contacted YouTube and they knew he was going to have a piece exposing all this. And so they actually did an apology. They said they made a mistake and they took away my lifetime ban and put up a couple of back the stories, but it hadn’t been for Matt. They would have closed the channel down.  So we cannot leave deciding what’s legitimate information and misinformation up to big tech. They cannot have the right. I mean, these things should be publicly owned anyway. If there’s going to be something like a YouTube, it should be publicly owned. There’s just no way a private corporation. And then even if it’s publicly owned, there has to be a process within which there needs to be real democratic public participation into what information is there. And even there, it shouldn’t be about banning stuff. It should be about properly financing independent news and investigative journalism so you can actually persuade people.  And just to add one thing, I do think this Dominion voting machine lawsuit against Fox, maybe that’s a good model. Maybe we need to create a fund for class action suits against broadcasters that publish bullshit and let it be fought out in a courtroom with evidence where you can actually prove they’re knowingly publishing lies. Because how much of this war after war is based on mainstream media promoting outright propagandistic lies to support the war? Maybe we should have an ability to have class action lawsuits against this. I mean, obviously the real solution is real democratization, real public ownership of the media, diversified media, which means we have to find ways to gain more political power. It’s not just coming up with some ideal scheme in our heads. Jyotishman Mudiar Freddie, go ahead.  Freddie deBoer Yeah, I think we’re in a very weird time in terms of the balance of power between independent media and corporate media in a certain obvious sense. It’s never been easier to spread your message as an independent purveyor of the news or opinion. The technological tools have never been more accessible or more widespread.  My father was, he was an avid fan of the Village Voice, but also of these little all weeklies, printed newspapers from different cities across the country. When we were growing up, when I was growing up in Connecticut in the 1980s and 1990s, in order to get his hands on a bunch of these all weeklies, he had to just have friends in those cities, just send them in the mail every week or every month or whatever it was. In other words, there was just no distribution system. For the Village Voice, you could get it delivered, but for most of these little papers, if you wanted to get one and you didn’t live in that town, you had to have someone send one to you. Some of them had subscriptions, some of them didn’t.  Now, obviously, everything’s online. It’s incredibly cheap and easy to set something up. When I first started using the internet seriously, you had to pay money for photo hosting. You had to put down real money just to put some photos online, and now you can get unlimited whatever. At the same time, we have this series of very real and major challenges to establishment or mainstream media. There’s not a single show on CNN that still gets more than a million viewers regularly. There’s been a terrible collapse in the number of local newspapers across the United States in the last 10 years. The total number of people employed in newspapers was cut in half between 2008 and 2018. You’d think that the balance of power has shifted decidedly into independent media. In some ways, it has, but in a certain sense, it’s bad for everyone, I think. A fundamental problem we face is that actual news, news gathering process, has never been a big moneymaker. When the New York Times sends a small team of journalists to Syria, and they’re there for three months, and they have to pay for their plane tickets, they have to play for their food and their lodging, they have to pay for security, they have to pay for translation, they have to pay money to grease the wheels with the local authorities, etc., that all costs a lot of money. The number of people who read the stories from Syria that come out of that is quite low compared to other things. Hard news, unless it’s about very topical stuff, hard news just doesn’t do big numbers.  What’s always kept the news making industry afloat is bundling. Your newspaper had the hard news up front, but it also had the personals, so the classifieds, the demise of which was a horrible financial blow for local newspapers, the classified ads, which you don’t need anymore because you have the internet. They had the opinion section, which is much cheaper to produce than news. Again, a news story could require you to send reporters into the field for months at high expense, whereas an opinion takes one person just thinking and writing for a few days. You had the recipes, you had the comics, Garfield, etc., you had the crossword. One of the things that the internet has done is that it has broken the bundle up, where if you want a crossword, there’s just an unlimited number of free crosswords that you can do online. You will never run out of crosswords to do for free online. If you want comics or cartoons, there’s an unlimited number of free cartoons you can read online. If you want opinion, like the kind that I produce, you can look up a million newsletters and websites and blogs and whatever and get all that opinion.  The problem is then how does the news get subsidized? I think that this is a really deep question and a really powerful one because that old model, I am thankful for my success at creating a newsletter, but I don’t have the skills or the funding or the wherewithal to go and investigate what’s the story with the drug war in Mexico right now in the cartels, etc. You have that problem there. Then you have the problem that Paul just talked about, which is that while we have the accessibility of all of these tools, they’re ruled from the top down by a financial elite who can do whatever they want because they’re privately held tools.  We’ve seen with Twitter, recently Elon Musk was upset with the company’s substack and so he throttled the reach of substack newsletters on Twitter. He owns the company so he can do whatever he wants. YouTube can arbitrarily decide who can run a clip of Trump and who can’t. Ultimately, they’re not a public agency. They’re a private company so they can do whatever they want. That’s the other half of this, which is that yes, we have all these incredible digital tools for distribution, but at the end of all of these digital tools always, there is some corporate bureaucrat who has the ability to pull the plug, dictate standards, twist the algorithm, do whatever they want.  In a certain sense, it’s never been easier to reach an audience, but the state of actual news gathering is very, very fraught and your ability to disseminate your message to your audience is always at the whim of a corporation. Paul Jay Let me just add a couple of things.  Jyotishman Mudiar I’d also like you to call to say at least two sentences about how do you look at real news, having founded you and some kind of that kind of experiment. How easy or difficult it is to do that? Paul Jay Well, real news, I’m now at the analysis.news. I’m not working at real news anymore for acouple of years. Well, it goes to what I was about to say, which is in spite of, what’s that joke about everybody has the right to walk in the front door of the Ritz hotel? Not everybody can afford the room. Yeah, we can all get to YouTube, but who’s actually dominating YouTube is all the mainstream media companies. What’s one of the most visited sites in the world? CNNs and New York Times is one of the main sources of online news. Anybody can start a YouTube channel, but can you actually break through to a large audience? That’s where YouTube’s algorithms can really get to choose the winners and the losers.  When Julian Assange was arrested, in his handcuffed hands, he was holding my book. It was a book based on interviews I did with Gore Vidal called The History of the National Security State. The next day, Dan Ellsberg said to my wife, he said, you be careful, you’re really on their radar now.  The same thing happened. I was in Baltimore during the Freddie Gray uprising, and we did a lot of coverage, giving a real class interpretation. In fact, our building was the headquarters for a lot of the organizing that was going on amongst the protesters. I was really on the radar then too because the local fusion center where the NSA and the FBI and the state police and probably the CIA all work out of this fusion center with the local police department. Well, they were all infiltrating, watching our building.  Then this reporting I did on January 6th, clearly an algorithm kicked in that said, okay, this guy has already been flagged. If you look at our numbers on YouTube, they greatly drop after they start taking down our stories. Matt Taibbi has been doing these stories on Twitter, some of which has shown how the FBI algorithms talk to the Twitter algorithms. That’s got to be the same case on YouTube. Here’s a practical suggestion. The progressives that are on the hill or even at state levels, if they can do it, have a hearing where you force YouTube to reveal the algorithms and whether or not they’re talking to the FBI and try to actually out the way the state agencies are creating agendas for social media. That would be a useful service because there’s simply no question is happening.  Anyway, just back to your point about the Real News. I’m sure there were things we could have done better and same thing what I’m doing now with the analysis.news, but it’s very hard to break through to a mass audience, almost impossible unless you’ve got enormous amounts of money to promote and buy advertising. Even then, like in terms of mainstream TV media, it doesn’t even matter how much clout you might have. Often, they’re not going to let you on anyway.  I think I’m an interesting talker. Maybe other people don’t, but a lot of people seem to. I never get invited on anything. Nothing. Occasionally, I used to get invited on RT and then I said to RT, I said, fine, but I’m not going on RT without critiquing Russia, which I did. I never got invited back on RT again. Same thing. If you talk in real terms about what’s going on in the world, you don’t get on mainstream TV. I’ll give you an example of something which is nuts. I interviewed Senator Bob Graham, who was the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, co-chair of the joint congressional investigation into 9-11. He told me on camera that Bush and Cheney deliberately disorganized the Americanintelligence agencies, and two, didn’t just do that. They actually actively facilitated the 9-11 attacks in a few ways, including that famous memo, bin Laden plans to attack America. Graham told me that the normal protocol after a presidential briefing is called a principles briefing that goes out in the next day or two. Heads of agencies, secretaries of departments, undersecretaries. If there’s anything in the presidential briefing that requires action for national security reasons, it’s in the next principles briefing. Well, Graham tells me in the next principles briefing that memo bin Laden plans to attack America was omitted. Graham says this was part of actively facilitating.  I emailed every major news organization in the country. It makes no difference whether Graham’s right or wrong. It’s just he’s a serious guy. The fact he said this is news. I will give you this video clip for free. All you got to do is credit me with doing the interview. Not one news source, not a single one, including people I actually knew personally, not a single one followed up and asked me.  There’s certain lines you must stay within to break through, whether it’s mainstream media or on social media. It makes no difference whether you’re fact-based. You could go outside the lines of the official narrative. It’s very hard.  What is the solution? The solution is, we have to really find ways that alternative media cooperates more, creates something bigger with more clout. Bernie Sanders’ campaign shows you can raise a ton of money online. It isn’t a hopeless situation, but we have to find ways to create some clout and do get people elected. Then once they are elected, they got to use that to expose these kinds of issues. Imagine having a guy, like I phoned a guy, I’ll end quickly. He ran World Affairs for one of the coverage for one of the major newspaper chains. I knew him. I said, Bob Graham, serious guy, right? Oh, yeah. Intelligence insider. Oh, yeah. Head of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Here’s what he just told me. I told him and he says, holy shit. I said, I got it on video. You can have it. Christ. I knew this guy.  I’ve got a mainstream news network background. My documentaries have been on all the major networks, A&E’s and BBC’s and you name it. My television show was a debate show for 10 years on CBC. I was the exec producer. I’m not coming from nowhere. I’ve got some mainstream credibility. Zero. They wouldn’t touch the story. Even there’s so much credibility to it We have to build something with our own resources. If there’s plenty of money amongst us to do this, if we can break out of this, all of us competing with each other. Jyotishman Mudiar Freddie, I give you the final words. If you can also tell a little bit about your experience with the subscription driven sort of media, how independent you can be and do you feel like making a broader impact at all, if anything? Freddie deBoer Well, it’s interesting. I am frequently brought to things like this. I’m often sort of invited to be a voice of sort of independent media. On the other hand, my last book came out from McMillan. My new book is coming out from Slamid & Schuster and I’ve been in the New York Times and the LA Times and the Washington Post and the Guardian and Harper’s, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah, look, I’m very lucky to be successful making the newsletter that I do. A really good post will get like 120,000 views typically. I’ve had a couple of posts that have been sort of just by luck have sort of gotten to like 200 or 250,000. I’ve been blogging for 15 years and I have long since given up on understanding the gods of what gets read and what doesn’t. I mean, I cannot tell you how many times I have labored over a piece for days and days, spent hours and hours on it, researched deeply, cared very much about it, thought that it was a piece that had a real chance to do something and it just goes nowhere. And then will dash something off in an afternoon that doesn’t mean that much to me and it will be one of my biggest pieces.  Certainly, there is a trade-off to be had between sort of the freedom of doing my own thing and the broader audiences of the other sort of doing mainstream stuff. I frequently have to sort of let young writers down and let them know how poorly mainstream places pay.  I mean, what I very often will hear from young writers is some version of, well, I’m sweating it out now, not making a lot of money blogging or working for sort of low prestige sites, but someday I’ll make it to the New York Times or I’ll make it to New York magazine or I’ll make it to Harper’s and then I’ll make real money. And I have to tell them places don’t really pay as well as you think they do. Like it’s really-  Jyotishman Mudiar  How much does the New York Times pay for a column? Freddie deBoer So the online only column that I put out in 2022, I think, I put out a piece about the American socialist movement for the New York Times. It was 1800 words, 2000 words. I got $750 for it. Print stuff, when I was in the print magazine, I got $4,000 for 3000 words. But that was a long, long process with a lot of sort of things like that, which is certainly not bad money, but if you’re going to do it as a freelancer, you’ve got to be churning it out all the time.  So one of the things for me right now is if I am thinking about doing, okay, I want to get a bigger audience, I’m going to write for a mainstream publication. I have to sort of do the math in my head, even if I am committed to doing that, where on a per word basis, writing for my newsletter makes me much, much more money. It makes me much more money than writing for the New York Times or for whoever.  But at the same time, my newsletter audience is largely a self-contained one. I have about 40,000 people on my mailing list. The average post gets about 40,000 or 50,000 views. Like I said, occasionally they go to 100,000 and maybe three or four in the history, in the three-year history or whatever of my newsletter, they’ve gone to 200,000, 250,000. But it’s usually the same people. So it’s sort of like a hermetic environment where I’m getting paid well to be a writer, which is the only thing I ever wanted, but I’m not really influencing the broader conversation. And then every once in a while, a post will go big. But like I said, I’ve given up on figuring out why.  Yeah. And the thing is my ability to publish in various places, mainstream places, has very little to do with the quality of my recent work. It has everything to do with who is cool with who. What person who likes me recently became an editor somewhere, who owes me a favor, who doesn’t like me, even though this piece is perfect for them. There’s just a lot of high school stuff, unfortunately, that really deeply influences the freelance market for writing.  So I certainly haven’t found the right lane. I think in a bigger picture sense, I don’t know. It’s a very real concern to me that most cities don’t seem to be able to sustain a local newspaper anymore. There were fundamental jobs being performed. It’s like the Cincinnati Inquirer, which did a pioneering story about how the Dole Corporation was committing crimes and fomenting violence in Central America. I think the Cincinnati Inquirer is down to six pages a day is the length of the paper.  Paul Jay Can I add just one final sentence? I’ll make it really short. Yeah, I think what people watching this should do is use people like us on this panel, other sources of analysis and news to help inform you. But we’re not ever in this stage of human history. Is this media going to become influential on a mass scale? It ain’t happening.  So what needs to be done is take and get what you can from us and then get involved in organizations that are knocking on people’s doors, bypass the bloody media, go talk directly to people and persuade and discuss and listen. There’s organizations doing this all across the country. We aren’t going to break through. Let’s be realistic. It ain’t happening in this stage of capitalism. They know how to keep us in the margins, but they can’t stop people from knocking on doors and talking to each other. So use us to go do that.  Jyotishman Mudiar Absolutely. I guess if enough of us start doing that and who knows, perhaps on the ground, there is more ground swelling and maybe capitalism, if not is toppled, it is forced to change character to at least make it somewhat of a command economy from this very sort of free range casino capitalism that you say. We’ll have to leave it there. Thanks, Freddy and Paul, for your time. It was wonderful being with you. Freddie deBoer Thanks for having me. Select one or choose any amount to donate whatever you like any amount $5 $15 $25 $50

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– Daniel Ellsberg (pt 2/2) Risking Nuclear War to Avoid Humiliation – Ellsberg (pt 1/2) Drone Whistleblower Hale is a Hero – Ellsberg and Chomsky Rising Fascism and the Elections – Chomsky and Ellsberg Why is Biden Risking Nuclear War with China? – Chomsky and Ellsberg Chomsky and Ellsberg on the Death of Gorbachev A Warning From Chomsky and Ellsberg Chris Hedges, Edward Snowden, Noam Chomsky, Paul Jay and Daniel Ellsberg on Assange Daniel Ellsberg on Nuclear War and Ukraine Daniel Ellsberg on Assange Extradition Hearing Ellsberg on Milley, China and the Danger of Nuclear War Daniel Ellsberg at 90 – “It’s Still Possible to Save Humanity” Daniel Ellsberg on the Assange Extradition and Growing Fascism Chomsky, Walker and Ellsberg Defend Julian Assange The Doomsday Machine Still Exists – Daniel Ellsberg Convert Military to Green Production, or Perish – Daniel Ellsberg on RAI Pt 13/13 Dismantle the American Doomsday Machine – Daniel Ellsberg on RAI Pt 12/13 The Doomsday Machine and Nuclear Winter – Daniel Ellsberg on RAI Pt 11/13 A Strategy of War Crimes, Killing Civilians to Win a War – Daniel Ellsberg on RAI Pt 10/13 The Discovery That Should Have Changed the Cold War – Daniel Ellsberg on RAI Pt 9/13 Once Fired, There’s No Calling a Nuke Back – Daniel Ellsberg on RAI Pt 8/13 U.S. Refuses to Adopt a Nuclear Weapon No First Use Pledge – Daniel Ellsberg on RAI 7/13 U.S. Planned Nuclear First Strike to Destroy Soviets and China – Daniel Ellsberg on RAI Pt 6/13 Russian Doomsday Machine an Answer to U.S. Decapitation Strategy – Daniel Ellsberg on RAI Pt 5/13 The Largest Act of Terrorism in Human History – Daniel Ellsberg on RAI Pt 4/13 Truman Delayed End of WWII to Demonstrate Nuclear Weapons – Daniel Ellsberg on RAI Pt 3/13 Hitler Wouldn’t Risk Doomsday, But The United States Did – Daniel Ellsberg on RAI Pt 2/13 The Doomsday Machine: The Big Lie of the Cold War – Daniel Ellsberg on RAI Pt 1/13 Transcript Listen Donate Subscribe Guest Music Paul Jay Hi, I’m Paul Jay. Welcome to theAnalysis.news, please don’t forget the donate button and the YouTube subscribe button. April 7th is Daniel Ellsberg’s 90th birthday. Ellsberg is the original whistleblower. The man who leaked the Pentagon Papers and helped end the Vietnam War. Henry Kissinger called him the most dangerous man in America, but not as we have mistakenly believed for many years because he was about to pull back the curtain on U.S. policies in Vietnam. Kissinger was terrified that Ellsberg was about to reveal an altogether different set of papers. The other Pentagon Papers, ones that would reveal the extent and sheer madness of U.S. nuclear war plans to the public. Dan Ellsberg was born in Chicago in 1931 after graduating from Harvard in 1952 with a B.A. summa cum laude in economics. He studied for a year at King’s College Cambridge University on a Woodrow Wilson fellowship between 1954. In 1957, Ellsberg spent three years in the U.S. Marine Corps serving as a rifle platoon leader, operations officer, and rifle company commander. 1959, Ellsberg became a strategic analyst at the Rand Corporation and a consultant to the Defense Department and the White House specializing in problems of the command and control of nuclear weapons, nuclear war plans, and crisis decision making. His book, Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner, revealed what he called the institutional madness of American nuclear war planning. Edward Snowden said this long-awaited chronicle from the father of American whistleblowing is both an urgent warning and a call to arms to a public that has grown dangerously habituated to the idea that the means of our extinction will forever be on a hair-trigger alert. Ellsberg’s book exposes much of the mythology that was the basis of the Cold War with the Soviet Union and was used to justify the creation of a massive military-industrial complex. In 1967, Ellsberg worked on a top-secret study with Defense Secretary McNamara U.S. Decision Making in Vietnam 1945 to 68, which later came to be known as the Pentagon Papers. In 1969, he photocopied the 7000-page study and gave it to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. In 1971, he gave it to the New York Times, The Washington Post, and 17 other newspapers. Ellsberg’s subsequent trial on 12 felony counts, posing a possible sentence of 115 years, was dismissed in 1973 on the grounds of governmental misconduct against him, leading to the convictions of several White House aides and figuring in the impeachment proceedings against President Nixon. Ellsberg’s release of the Pentagon Papers was an important contribution to the pressure on Nixon to end the Vietnam War. Now, joining us to talk about the extraordinary life of Daniel Ellsberg is historian Peter Kuznick. Peter is a professor of history and director of the Nuclear Studies Institute at American University. He’s the author of Beyond the Laboratory: Scientists as Political Activist in 1930s America. He and filmmaker Oliver Stone co-authored the 12 part Showtime documentary film series and book both titled The Untold History of the United States. Thanks very much for joining me, Peter. Peter Kuznick Happy to be with you, Paul. Paul Jay So this is Daniel’s 90th birthday, and I have to say he’s still active as hell and still campaigning against nuclear weapons and speaking out on so many issues. I wish I had his energy now, never mind at 90, but let’s start with the issue of Dan’s role as a nuclear war planner and what he has revealed over the years about American nuclear war strategy and the significance of it. Well, Dan first learned about the possibility of atomic bombs when he was 13 years old from one of his middle school teachers. Before that theoretically, it is possible to make an atomic bomb. This was before Hiroshima and from that point on Dan was very, very worried about the prospect of doing so. Once the bombs were detonated over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, his fears were confirmed. At Harvard, he was actually studying economics and in his graduate studies, he studied decision theory, especially decision making, in a situation where there was a lot of ambiguity, and that’s what his Ph.D. dissertation was on. He went to work for the RAND Corporation after his years in the Marines because he wanted to work on problems of preventing a nuclear war. You have to remember, he starts really working there in 58, I guess, permanently onboard and 59, and at that point, especially in the aftermath of the Soviets launching Sputnik in late 1957, October of 57 Americans assumed that the Soviets had an advantage in terms of intercontinental ballistic missiles. The Soviets had actually tested their first ICBM before Sputnik in the late 50s. There was a lot of discussion about the missile gap, the idea that the Soviets not only had an advantage, but they could launch a preemptive strike. You might remember the Gaither Report and the Gaither Report warned that the U.S. is in the worst peril of our existence, that the Soviets could launch a first strike on the United States that could effectively wipe the United States out. So when Kennedy got elected in 1960, Kennedy had run in part on the basis of this missile gap, which most people believed to be true. Kennedy takes office and he quickly finds out that there is no missile gap, then he gets McNamara to continue the study, and we soon discover that there is a missile gap, but the United States has a vast advantage. The United States is ahead in most categories of at least 10 to 1, in some categories of 100 to 1 over the Soviet Union. Dan at that point was working on McGeorge Bundy’s staff. Been with the Rand Corporation, was now working with McGeorge Bundy. He was in the Defense Department and he was assigned to do several things that were quite important. One was he wrote the speech for Roswell Gilpatric that basically lays out the reality of the missile gap, one which they admit publicly how far ahead we were, and he saw that as a way to warn the Soviets not to do anything extreme because the United States had this capability, which, of course, Khrushchev already knew, but he also, then for Bundy, McGeorge Bundy, pose certain questions to the Pentagon, which people did not know before. The main question he posed was how many people would be killed in a U.S. nuclear attack. It was delivered by Bob Komer in the name of President Kennedy, and the Pentagon responded in two parts. The first part talked about how many Russians and Chinese would be killed. The second part talked about how many people overall would be killed, and what Dan then discovered in this response was that the Pentagon estimated that between 275 million and 325 million Russians and Chinese would be killed from America’s weapons. Then we also found out that 100,000 West Europeans would be killed, 100,000 in the surrounding countries. Overall, the total was going to be 600 million dead from America’s attack alone, which means it’s more than 100 Holocaust’s as a result from America, because America’s plan at that point was to shoot off our entire arsenal at one time. There were no plans for gradation, no plans for a limited response, a gradual response. It was to shoot it all off at once. So at least 600 million, partly depending on certain wind effects. So that was terrifying to them, and that does not even include the effects of Soviet weapons in their targets in Europe and the United States. Dan at that point did not know about nuclear winter, because he would have realized that almost everybody on Earth would have been killed from that kind of mass detonation, but Dan soon starts to discover other things because he becomes the leading expert on command and control of nuclear weapons. What he discovers over this period is, first of all, there is no longer just one finger on the nuclear button as people have believed that Eisenhower had delegated authority to the theater commanders to use nuclear weapons if Eisenhower if the president were incapacitated or if they thought it was necessary and they were out of communication, but then had discovered in some of his other studies during this time was that these commanders were out of communication with the White House, the Pentagon often hours a day, partly because of weather conditions, partly because cables got cut. So this idea that the president was the only one who could authorize the use of nuclear weapons was a falsehood that Dan understood. Then he also understood that Eisenhower gave them the authority to subdelegate this same authority. So if the heads of the numbered armies and air forces, for example, there are others in the field, were out of touch with their commanders and they thought it was necessary to launch, then they had the authority to launch also under certain circumstances. So what Dan realized is that there was not one finger on the nuclear button. There were probably at least dozens, maybe scores of fingers on the nuclear button. Beyond that it kept on getting worse. Beyond that, he understood that America’s policy at this point, especially in NATO, was to not only threaten to launch, but actually if European countries were being threatened, the United States could launch a preemptive attack against the Soviet Union and later against China. Paul Jay Which wipe out much of Europe. Peter Kuznick Which would be suicidal and Dan understood the insanity of this. That’s why when he talks about the doomsday machine, he means it quite literally. He means that there are the rational, thinking people behind our nuclear strategy, which was the heart of our defense policy that we built up into this vast machine, because you know, and I put a lot of this in Untold History, much of which I learned from Dan, and that when Eisenhower took office, we had approximately a thousand nuclear weapons and they were in the hands of the civilians, but Eisenhower quickly starts transferring them to the military control, and when Eisenhower was budgeting cycle is finished now, not even his budget cycle, his presidency is finished in January of 1961. We now have no longer a thousand. We now have close to 23,000 nuclear weapons. When Eisenhower was budgeting cycle just finished, the U.S. has 30,000 nuclear weapons. So Eisenhower’s warning about the military-industrial complex was not a metaphor and it’s not an abstraction. Eisenhower knew this because he created the military-industrial complex for the crazy reason that he was afraid that by unbalancing the budget that we would run this huge deficit and that would wreck the American economy. He thought that nuclear weapons were cheaper than conventional weapons, and so he downplayed the army try to control the defense budget and to do so with the cheaper means of defending the United States with nuclear weapons, but it’s the beginning of this total insanity, which consists to this day and that’s what Dan’s dedicated his life to, combating. The reality is that we’ve created this insane doomsday machine. It’s not only irrational and indefensible, it is suicidal. Paul Jay And so much of this nuclear war mythology, which the missile gap is one of the big pieces of, is a foundation of the whole rationale, justification for the military-industrial complex and so much of it is just bullshit. And apparently Kennedy was told this while he was campaigning for president. Is that true? He was told there really wasn’t a missile gap, but he keeps saying it as part of his election campaign. Is that right? Peter Kuznick I don’t think so. Allsopp was the one who was advising Kennedy on this, and the numbers he was giving him were totally insane, but also the same thing with the demands from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, you know, and the strategic command, they wanted 3000 more ICBM’s, McNamara said the lowest number he could convince them to accept was the increase of a 1,000 ICBMs. How did that look to the Soviets? How did that look to the Kremlin? They knew that the United States had a vast superiority ready and its saw the United States was going to add a thousand more intercontinental ballistic missiles to the arsenal. In the Kremlin, they were convinced that the United States was preparing for a first strike, that there’d be no other reason if they had such a vast superiority already to massively increase the number of ICBMs unless they’re preparing for strikes. Paul Jay And they were. Peter Kuznick Well, they had plans to do so. Kennedy thought it was absolutely insane when Kennedy was briefed upon this, he commented to Dean Rusk “and we call ourselves a human race”. You know, Kennedy hated this as did Khrushchev, and we’re very lucky. Kennedy once said, I’d rather my children be red than dead, the opposite of Eisenhower, who said I’d rather be atomized than communized, and if Eisenhower had been in office during the Cuban missile crisis instead of Kennedy, we wouldn’t be here today having this discussion. Had Barack Obama been in office instead of Kennedy, we wouldn’t be having this discussion. We are lucky that probably the only president who would have resisted during the Cuban missile crisis, any president we’ve had since Roosevelt was Kennedy. Paul Jay All right. Let’s hold the Obama peace, because that’s rather interesting and we’ll get to that. My understanding is in this period, which I guess is around 1960 or just after Kennedy gets elected, that the Army and Navy were saying that the Soviet Union might have had 100 to 200 ICBMs. But the Strat, the Air Force Strategic Air Command, led by Curtis LeMay, who’s the guy who firebombed and nuclear bombed, Japan, he was telling the White House and others that the Soviet Union might have a thousand ICBMs, and then Ellsberg finds out that the actual number is four and that that changes his whole head. He describes himself as quite a militant cold warrior up until that point. He was a cold warrior from the beginning, as was his father, who was a lifelong Republican and Dan did think that the Soviet Union was the enemy and they had to be resisted. He initially thought that the threat of nuclear war did not come from the United States. The danger of nuclear war came from the Soviets, and so his initial strategy was, what do we have to do to preempt a Soviet nuclear attack on the United States? So the missile gap is relevant in that context, and he discovers, as you say, that the United States has 40 ICBMs. The Soviets only have four, initially, at the time of the Cuban missile crisis, the gap was even much faster than that. So Dan discovers that early and that’s starting to change his thinking and that original psyop that he studied where the United States is going to launch everything and lead to about 600 million deaths, lrther reinforced his thinking on this. That was Dan’s initial interest, as a nuclear war planner when he went to work for McNamara in the Pentagon in 64 and he started to work on Vietnam, but his real concern was with nuclear war and how to prevent nuclear war, and a lot of this concerns about Vietnam are, again, in the context of preventing nuclear war. Paul Jay Well, elaborate that. Peter Kuznick Well, it was interesting. The more studying I did on this period, the scientists especially, the Chinese test their nuclear bomb in 1964, and so the American strategy in Vietnam is even back in 54 when the French were being defeated at Dien Bien Phu. According to Operation Vulture, Nixon and John Foster Dulles offered the French three atomic bombs to use against the Vietnamese at Dien Bien Phu. Paul Jay OK, hold on. The Americans offer the French nuclear weapons and in other words, suggesting they should. Peter Kuznick Well, yes, the United States and Nixon thought so. Eisenhower thought so and others thought so, but they wanted to get the agreement of Britain and France before they would do this. And the British and the French, fortunately, were much more rational than was Eisenhower and Nixon at that point. You have to remember that Eisenhower, his goal was to erase the line between nuclear weapons and conventional weapons. He said this taboo is limiting what we can do. But American policy by 54, the New Look defense policy was to rely on nuclear weapons in our first line of defense. This is one of the insanities of Eisenhower. Eisenhower was not a warmonger. He’s not bloodthirsty, but his policy was suicidal or as Dan likes to say, a homicidal policy, and we knew that from the mid-50s. That’s why in 1955 that Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein issue their famous Einstein Russell Manifesto. The last thing that Einstein ever signed was the letter to Bertrand Russell signing on to this manifesto. And what it says basically is that if there was a nuclear war and London and New York and Moscow were wiped out, that within a few hundred years the human species would recover, but the real danger in a nuclear war with hydrogen bombs is that all of humanity would be wiped out, and so that’s their warning. They and I think it was nine other leading physicists and philosophers around the world signed off on this and Dan was aware of this, but thought that the real threat at that point was coming not from the United States, from the Soviets, which he learns later is not the case. But Einstein’s nuclear policies. It was back in 1947 that Lewis Mumford wrote that editorial, that statement, gentlemen, you are mad. That these look like normal human beings going to the office with families and children and dressed in suits and ties with the name of president and secretary of defense and general. He says they go to the office and they carry out these plans for annihilation, for human extinction. They’re madmen, you know, but it’s been rational people with rational plans who seem like normal human beings who are bent upon this compulsion for mass extinction, and that’s the craziness that Dan has been campaigning against his entire life ever since. This makes him, you know, why we love him so much. Paul Jay And when he releases the Pentagon Papers, his plan is to reveal all this insanity about nuclear strategy, and then the documentation gets wiped out in a hurricane because it was buried somewhere. Peter Kuznick Dan had not only copied the Pentagon Papers, he had copied everything else that was top secret in his desk at Rand, and so he had thousands and thousands of pages on all of America’s insane secret war plans. Our nuclear war plans. Dan thought that after the Pentagon Papers crisis was over, he was going to then release all of the nuclear papers, and that was what he thought was even more important than the Pentagon Papers about the Vietnam War. But he knew that the FBI was going to come and arrest him because of the Pentagon Papers leak, so he gave these other papers to his brother, his brother Harry, an older brother, and his brother also realized that when Dan got arrested, he was going to come and search his place. And so he put them in a cardboard box inside of a green plastic garbage bag, then decided to bury them in the local dump and he buried them under a stove so it could be identified where they were and can get them again when he was ready to. But then there was a tropical storm that summer and all of the things in that dump got misplaced. The stove was 100 yards away from where it was originally, and they couldn’t find all the nuclear papers, and they searched for a year and a half and they got all kinds of digging machines and everything and got thousands of bags, but not the right ones, and so they never found it and never found all these. Since then fortunately, a lot of them, or some of them at least have been released and declassified. One of the things about them, he might not remember when you and he talked about yesterday. He has a photographic memory of every document that he ever saw 60 years ago. So in Dan’s brilliance, you know, came in number three in his class at Harvard, and Kissinger, who describes him, as you said, for being the most dangerous man in America, had publicly given him credit for having taught me more about Vietnam than any other living person, and that everybody recognizes Dan’s brilliance. And going along with that is this precise photographic memory when it comes to all the things that happen and the documents. He was able to recreate a lot of this over the years. Paul Jay And this ends up in his book Doomsday Machine. And I should, for all transparency’s sake, explain that I’m working with Dan on a documentary series on exactly that book on Doomsday Machine. So. How does a man who’s a Marine? Who’s a cold warrior. Who’s life up until this point is devoted to the military-industrial complex. How does he get to a point where he releases the Pentagon Papers, is ready to release the nuclear secrets, and willing to go to jail for it? Peter Kuznick Well, Dan had a deep sense of morality, fortunately for the world. And he also had an abhorrence for lies, mendacity, and deception. He’s really a democrat a small d democrat and believes that people and policymakers need to have access to information. Dan believes in transparency, believes in honesty, believes in decency, and has an abhorrence for war and killing. And so when he saw that firsthand, when he talked about Vietnam, he went to work in 1960 for his first day at work for MacNaughton in the Pentagon was August 4th, 1964. And that was the day the Gulf of Tonkin incident, and he saw what was happening and he saw that initially, they thought there was an attack,  but as more and more intelligence came in, they realized that it was very dubious that there was any attack. Paul Jay Peter, for younger viewers that don’t know what we’re talking about, just a quick 20 seconds on what the Gulf of Tonkin incident was. Peter Kuznick The Gulf of Tonkin incident was U.S. ships, two U.S. ships in these waters off the coast of Vietnam had allegedly come under attack, and the belief from the North Vietnamese and the belief was this was aggression on the part of North Vietnam in response to which the United States launched attacks on North Vietnam. This was August 4th, 1964, but it very quickly became clear that from the commander on board the USS ships there, that there were all kinds of interference, that things that they thought were an incoming attack were not an incoming attack. But we decided to launch this anyway, and McNamara and Johnson issued a series of statements that were baldfaced lies about what had occurred that night and the intelligence was coming and Dan realized beforehand that it was very, very dubious and that they were using this as a pretext for escalating and expanding the war in Vietnam. To give it a little more context, Dan and McNaughton, his boss, were asked to come up with a series of statements that were basically a series of lies that could be used in defense of American policy of aggression there. That was Dan’s first day and first night. He stayed up all night in the Pentagon working on this, following the incoming intelligence reports. So Dan effectively shifted when he went for MacNaughton in August of 64 from the nuclear issues to Vietnam, and so he started to get all the intelligence reports. He asked for everything, and every day they would bring in a stack of reports taller than he was. So eight feet of reports, mostly top-secret reports about what was going on in Vietnam. So Dan had a front-row seat to the lying, the mendacity. You have to remember that during the Johnson administration they developed the term called the credibility gap because Johnson would. You know, we talk about Trump and Trump’s seven-plus thousand lies about everything. Johnson might not have been quite the pathological liar that Donald Trump was about everything. When it came to Vietnam Johnson lied constantly. And among these things. That Dan was discovering during these years, because he goes to Vietnam first in 1961, goes back to Vietnam in 1965, and there he is working for the infamous Ed Landsdale, the master counterinsurgent, there. And he becomes friendly with John Paul Vann, who is a very honest critic of the war, and then Dan is in charge of doing assessments of the pacification programs in the countryside. He stays in Vietnam as a civilian until 1967. Then he gets hepatitis and has to return to the United States. So between the documents he was reading and his on-the-ground experience, Dan was learning firsthand, was that what we were saying about the war and the reality of the war were two different things. Then in 67, Dan is asked to work on the Pentagon Papers, which was a secret study of the war from 1954, even earlier up through 1968. That was commissioned by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. Dan had worked  through Rand on the first volume, but he actually got access to the entirety of this top-secret document that he stored in his safe at Rand. So what Dan was learning over these years was that we were saying that not only could we win the war, which was not true, but that we were winning the war. And for example, when Dan was in Vietnam, he met with McNamara in 66 and he briefed McNamara. McNamara wanted to know what Dan was finding on the ground and Dan told him that we were not only not winning, that we were losing ground. That is the best we could say. It was a stalemate, a quagmire. The worst was we were putting more and more troops in and getting nowhere, and McNamara agreed with him and he said that the situation is worse. It’s much worse than it was a year ago, and then McNamara gets off the plane, gets in front of the microphones, tells the press and the others who were there, we’re winning the war. Things are improving. Conditions are getting better. Dan saw first hand that kind of lying, repeatedly, as did others. There were at least a thousand people Dan said who knew the reality was the opposite of what was being said. And what was being said? We were winning. In reality we were not. So when Johnson talks about putting in another twenty-five or fifty thousand troops and he says, and that’s all we have planned, the generals and Dan and others knew that they had plans to put in one hundred and fifty thousand more troops, but they were lying to the American people. They were lying to the Congress and that this is not the way a democracy is supposed to work. So Dan understanding the horrors of what we were doing, the futility of what we were doing, the immorality, and the mendacity, Dan knew he had to do something. So his thinking was changing, and he met Patricia, who he is madly in love with and Patricia was covering the war as a journalist and also helped influence Dan. They went to anti-war marches together and Dan knew that he had to act and figure out ways to act. So he told everybody he spoke to that this is wrong, it’s immoral, it’s a lie, that we’re actually not going to win and we should get out immediately. He was opposed to the bombing. He hated the thought of the bombing. He hated the troop escalation and knew that this was a losing policy and we were lying to the American people. So then he works on the Pentagon Papers and by 1969, he’s at his wits end about what to do to try to help end the war. So Dan decides to copy the Pentagon Papers. This is two years before they were released, and then Dan tries to get them to congressmen, to senators. He tries to get to friendly people, to Robert Kennedy. He wants Charles Mathias, Fulbright, other senators, to get them to release this publicly, put it the congressional record, go before the public and say that we’ve been lying and lying and lying, but everybody’s got their reasons for not doing it. So finally Dan decides that the best way to do it is to go to The New York Times. He contacts Neil Sheehan because he knew Neil from Vietnam. He knew that Neil was strongly opposed to the war and so he trusted Neil Sheehan and gave him access to these records, the Pentagon Paper because what the Pentagon Papers showed is that administration after administration after administration had been lying about the war and that the public didn’t know this and much of Congress didn’t know this. Dan thought that leaking the Pentagon Papers would probably not end the war, but it might help nudge the country in that direction. And so finally, even though Neal was playing dirty and dishonest with Dan about what The Times was planning, The Times, finally, I think it was June 13th, 1971, finally starts publishing the Pentagon Papers. They didn’t even give Dan any warning that they were going to do so, which was very, very immoral. It was not hard to figure out that Dan was the likely source for this. The FBI was already onto him for this.  Dan and Patricia, go underground. Part of the story that’s not very well known is that the papers were for a time stored in Howard Zinn’s living room in Boston and working with Dan to distribute them to the newspapers was my friend Gar Alperovitz, who wrote the book Atomic Diplomacy, which really was one of the great books about the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. And Gar is still very, very active through Democracy Collaborative and other things on nuclear issues and on economic transformation. Gar is still out there doing great work, but his role in all this didn’t come out until a couple of years ago. So they get it to The New York Times. The Times starts publishing it. The Nixon administration freaks out and they get the Supreme Court to issue an injunction on The New York Times to halt publication. And so Gar then brings them to The Washington Post and then The Washington Post starts to publish and then The Boston Globe. So then The Post is shut down and the Boston Globe and then The Globe is shut down and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and they’re shut down. Paul Jay Shut down by injunction from the government Peter Kuznick Yes to stop the publication. They finally get it to 19 different newspapers that are publishing parts of this and the Supreme Court lifts the injunction and says that they do not have a right to stop the publication. Paul Jay Now, what’s the historic significance of the release of the Pentagon Papers and how much did it have an affect on eventually ending the war? Peter Kuznick Well, it’s interesting because Nixon and Kissinger freak out and if you watch Oliver’s movie, Nixon’s got a lot of this and they decide that they’re going to destroy Dan Ellsberg, right? Nixon says, we’re going to show him going to the bathroom in front of the American people and we’re going to destroy him, and in those meetings there, Kissinger apparently mouthing Colson, talks about different things about Dan, all these lies, but then he says that Dan Ellsberg is the most dangerous man in America as you said in the introduction. Dan had known Kissinger at Harvard. He had lectured in Kissinger’s classes a couple of times. Kissinger had tremendous respect for Dan, but Kissinger was such a slimy and duplicitous, two faced lying, kind of power hungry creep in all of this. So then they create the plumbers unit. The plumbers unit was set up to stop the leaks and the leaks were coming from Dan initially, but it was the things that they did to Dan that ultimately bring down the Nixon administration. So the plumbers unit, they also wiretapped Dan’s phones illegally. They broke into his psychiatrist, Dr. Fielding’s office to get more compromising material. They put a hit on Dan of 12 Cubans from the CIA who go back to the Bay of Pigs, who are told to compromise Dan totally, to incapacitate him totally, is what their objective was. Fortunately, they didn’t get to him that day, but it was those things that ultimately brought down the Nixon administration. A lot of the other things in Watergate, Nixon could have probably defended himself against on national security grounds, but they found all of these other things. It was based on that. So when the trial finally comes in 1973, Dan and Tony Russo faced one hundred and fifteen years in prison for what they had done under the Sedition Act or the Espionage Act of 1917. They prosecuted Dan and he was facing 115 years. A life sentence for trying to stop the Vietnam War. But it ultimately happens is this is what brings down the Nixon administration, which is fortunate because Nixon intended to restart the bombing, but because of the Watergate investigation and scandal, he wasn’t able to do so, and we were finally able to end that war. The American part of it, in 1973, the overall war in 1975. The war, as you know, was horrific. Robert McNamara came into my class. He said he accepts that 3.8 million Vietnamese died in the war. As I say, and I think you and I have discussed that, I ask my students, what they know and they don’t know that much about it, but they have almost all been to the Vietnam Memorial walls and those black granite walls, marble, two big walls, 492 feet long have the names of fifty-eight thousand two hundred eighty Americans who died in the war. The message of the Vietnam Memorial is that the tragedy of Vietnam is that fifty-eight thousand two hundred eighty Americans died 492 feet long. If those walls contain the names of all the Americans, all the 3.8 million Vietnamese, the more than a million Cambodians, Laotians, the Thais, the Brits, the Aussies, everybody who died in that war, it would be more than eight miles long, and that’s what should be the memorial to the Vietnam War. And that would be an anti-war memorial like the Okinawa Memorial that has the names of everybody on all sides who died in the fighting in Okinawa, but the Americans are not quite there yet, but Dan was there. He saw the tragedy and was willing to risk his life in order to stop that war. Paul Jay Now, Dan is, as I said early on, is still as active as ever campaigning against the threat of nuclear war, and he says he thinks the threat is as dangerous now as ever. This idea that because the Cold War with the Soviet Union’s over somehow nuclear weapons aren’t a threat anymore is a complete illusion that it’s still very dangerous. So let’s talk about the current situation, but start with the comment you made about Obama, that if Obama had been president during the Cuban missile crisis, we might not be talking today. Peter Kuznick Well, the thing about Kennedy was that from the Bay of Pigs on. Kennedy had been sort of a war hero in World War Two in the Navy, and after the Bay of Pigs, he refused to send reinforcements to back up the bomb in Cuba and he had told them beforehand he wouldn’t, but he got berated by top officials in the Pentagon, Lemnitzer and the CIA, who thought that under that pressure, Kennedy would have to cave in and send in the military support for the invading Cuban exiles and CIA exiles in the Bay of Pigs, and he refused to do so. After that, he developed this deep mistrust and he talks about later those CIA bastards, those Joint Chiefs, sons of bitches. He said the first advice I’m going to give my successor is don’t trust the generals. Even on military matters, they don’t know what they’re talking about, and he says at one point, if somebody comes in here and they want to talk to me about economic policy or an insurance issues, he said, I have no trouble contradicting them, but you assume that the military and the intelligence people have the superior knowledge and insight. They don’t. You can’t trust them even on these things. So Kennedy had a deep mistrust, and during the Cuban missile crisis, he was often the only one in the room who resisted bombing and invading Cuba, and that’s why I’m saying that Obama, I’m not saying Obama is a bad guy or was bloodthirsty. It is bizarre that he won the Nobel Peace Prize while fighting two wars and bombing multiple other countries, but Obama just never stood up to the generals that way. Obama just did not have the backbone. Obama gave in time and time again, even though he knew, I’m sure that this was a mistake. But then, and I know, perhaps more than anybody, have been making an issue of the fact that we’ve known since 1983, but the reality is since 1950, 52 probably we’ve been living with the threat of a nuclear winter and that Sagan and the other scientists publicized this in 1983 and they talked about what would happen in the event of nuclear war in which the cities would burn and the cities would burn, and that would send up millions of tons of smoke and soot into the stratosphere. If it was in the troposphere they would get washed away, but in the stratosphere they wouldn’t, and within weeks it would circle the entire globe, and soon block seventy percent of the sun’s rays from hitting the earth, the temperatures on the earth would plummet, agriculture would be destroyed. We have about a 60-day stockpile of food around the world. And after that, the starvation and disease would begin and that perhaps not everybody on earth would be killed, but over a period of years, probably 90 to 99 percent of people on earth would perish as a result of what we call nuclear winter. And I’ve been working with people to expand these studies now, and what we realize now is that, if anything, the threshold for nuclear went that Sagan and others were talking about back in the 1980s was too low, that even though there were scientists paid by the defense contractors and others who tried to deprecate and deny the theory of nuclear winter at that point say, well, maybe it’s only nuclear autumn and it’s exaggerated and that not everybody would die. The same kind of attacks by, quote-unquote, scientists against carcinogenic effects of nicotine. The effects on the ozone layer that we see now about climate change, the same kind of lying refutations happened in the 1980s against nuclear winter, but scientists have begun doing those studies again. What the recent studies show is that the risk is even greater than we realize. The recent studies show that a limited nuclear war between India and Pakistan, in which 100 Hiroshima-sized nuclear weapons were used, that that limited nuclear war, which would kill up to two billion people all over the planet because of partial nuclear winter. And we know the reality is not that there are 100 nuclear weapons, there are close to 14,000 nuclear weapons left, and they’re not Hiroshima size. They’re between 7 and 70 times the power of the Hiroshima bombs. So we know that we’re lucky, and this what Dan has been warning about more eloquently than anybody. This idea that we’re still living with insanity, with the threat of annihilation, with the doomsday machine that we’ve created, and that if we created it, we can dismantle it. We’ve gotten rid of 80 percent of nuclear weapons, maybe more than that, but the United States and Russia have more than 90 percent of the existing arsenal and that many of them, a couple of thousand of them are pointed at each other on hair-trigger alert, and that’s the first step of the insanity. Get rid of those intercontinental ballistic missiles, stop planning for a new generation of intercontinental ballistic missiles to replace the Minuteman 3. Dan wants to do that. He wants to get rid of the first use policy and replace it with no first use. Obama was supporting no first use back in 2013 and did want to eliminate America’s first use policy, but he got pushback and he got pushback from our NATO allies. He got pushback from countries like Poland. And he said, well, if we get rid of our first use, then Japan is going to develop its own nuclear weapons and Poland is going to develop their own nuclear weapons. And so we can’t do it, and again, Obama didn’t stand up and fight for that. So, you know, Obama was a decent guy in a lot of ways and knew better. He just did not have the backbone of a Kennedy when push came to shove at that kind of crunch time, and now Biden, you know, as much as I admire much of what Biden is doing when it comes to domestic policy and his pro-labor stand and some of his economic policies, his new infrastructure plan might not be as big as I would like or his pandemic plan, but he’s on the right track on these things. When it comes to foreign policy he’s sadly, I think on a very, very dangerous track right now. Paul Jay And there’s a new nuclear arms race, the Americans, the Russians and now the Chinese, apparently a whole new generation of nuclear weapons, at least a trillion dollars being spent by the U.S. and Russia, and one expects that China, which has been a bit more moderate on these issues, may not continue to be so, and we’re back into the crazy nuclear weapons race with all the promise or possibility of accidents, never mind deliberate use. Peter Kuznick And that was Obama’s plan. That was the corrupt bargain that Obama made, and he authorized a trillion-dollar modernization program over 30 years. Paul Jay It’s been reported that Biden was opposed to but there’s not a pipsqueak out of the Biden administration now of undoing it. Peter Kuznick And then during Obama’s time, they estimated it was at least $1.2 trillion. Now, the estimate is that it’s going to cost at least $1.7  trillion, and the craziness is that it’s not just the U.S., that every single nuclear power. All nine are modernizing their nuclear arsenals to make them more efficient and more deadly. By more efficient means single weapons can kill more people. I don’t know why I’m laughing. Oh, it’s not laughing out of it being funny, it’s laughing out of desperation. When we feel helpless, sometimes we laugh, but look at what’s happening. March 1st, 2018, Vladimir Putin announces in his State of the Nation address, he announces that Russia now has five new nuclear weapons, all of which can circumvent the American missile defense. After the US abroga

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Dan fearlessly risked everything in his unwavering quest for social justice and opposition to war. He was not only a cherished friend but also a guiding light for me and countless others. I feel honored to have had the opportunity to engage in extensive interviews with Dan while working on our film, “How to Stop a Nuclear War.” I will miss his wisdom and radiant smile, but his warning to the world will be delivered. Please click to watch our interview on the occasion of Dan’s 90th birthday and a collection of our interviews. – Paul Jay  To view more interviews with Daniel Ellsberg, click here. This interview was originally published on April 7, 2021. .kt-post-loop_f15fae-d3 .kadence-post-image{padding-top:0px;padding-right:0px;padding-bottom:0px;padding-left:0px;}.kt-post-loop_f15fae-d3 .kt-post-grid-wrap{gap:30px 6px;}.kt-post-loop_f15fae-d3 .kt-blocks-post-grid-item{border-top-width:0px;border-right-width:0px;border-bottom-width:0px;border-left-width:0px;border-top-left-radius:0px;border-top-right-radius:0px;border-bottom-right-radius:0px;border-bottom-left-radius:0px;}.kt-post-loop_f15fae-d3 .kt-blocks-post-grid-item .kt-blocks-post-grid-item-inner{padding-top:10px;padding-right:25px;padding-bottom:25px;padding-left:9px;}.kt-post-loop_f15fae-d3 .kt-blocks-post-grid-item header{padding-top:0px;padding-right:0px;padding-bottom:0px;padding-left:0px;margin-top:0px;margin-right:0px;margin-bottom:0px;margin-left:0px;}.kt-post-loop_f15fae-d3 .kt-blocks-post-grid-item .entry-title{padding-top:5px;padding-right:0px;padding-bottom:10px;padding-left:0px;margin-top:0px;margin-right:0px;margin-bottom:0px;margin-left:0px;font-size:16px;line-height:17px;}.kt-post-loop_f15fae-d3 .entry-content{padding-top:0px;padding-right:0px;padding-bottom:0px;padding-left:0px;margin-top:0px;margin-right:0px;margin-bottom:0px;margin-left:0px;}.kt-post-loop_f15fae-d3 .kt-blocks-post-footer{border-top-width:0px;border-right-width:0px;border-bottom-width:0px;border-left-width:0px;padding-top:0px;padding-right:0px;padding-bottom:0px;padding-left:0px;margin-top:0px;margin-right:0px;margin-bottom:0px;margin-left:0px;}.kt-post-loop_f15fae-d3 .entry-content:after{height:0px;}.kt-post-loop_f15fae-d3 .kb-filter-item{border-top-width:0px;border-right-width:0px;border-bottom-width:2px;border-left-width:0px;padding-top:5px;padding-right:8px;padding-bottom:5px;padding-left:8px;margin-top:0px;margin-right:10px;margin-bottom:0px;margin-left:0px;} To His Last Breath, Daniel Ellsberg Fought to Save the World  Part 2/2 – Chomsky on Ellsberg and the Danger of Nuclear War Chomsky on Ellsberg and the Danger of Nuclear War – pt 1/2 Chomsky und Ellsberg über die derzeitige Bedrohung (Ukraine & Taiwan) “Take Arms Against a Sea of Troubles” – Chomsky and Ellsberg pt 2/2 Chomsky and Ellsberg on the Present Danger Is Russian War in Ukraine “Similar” to 1962 U.S. Blockade of Cuba? – Daniel Ellsberg (pt 2/2) Risking Nuclear War to Avoid Humiliation – Ellsberg (pt 1/2) Drone Whistleblower Hale is a Hero – Ellsberg and Chomsky Rising Fascism and the Elections – Chomsky and Ellsberg Why is Biden Risking Nuclear War with China? – Chomsky and Ellsberg Chomsky and Ellsberg on the Death of Gorbachev A Warning From Chomsky and Ellsberg Chris Hedges, Edward Snowden, Noam Chomsky, Paul Jay and Daniel Ellsberg on Assange Daniel Ellsberg on Nuclear War and Ukraine Daniel Ellsberg on Assange Extradition Hearing Ellsberg on Milley, China and the Danger of Nuclear War Daniel Ellsberg at 90 – “It’s Still Possible to Save Humanity” Daniel Ellsberg on the Assange Extradition and Growing Fascism Chomsky, Walker and Ellsberg Defend Julian Assange The Doomsday Machine Still Exists – Daniel Ellsberg Convert Military to Green Production, or Perish – Daniel Ellsberg on RAI Pt 13/13 Dismantle the American Doomsday Machine – Daniel Ellsberg on RAI Pt 12/13 The Doomsday Machine and Nuclear Winter – Daniel Ellsberg on RAI Pt 11/13 A Strategy of War Crimes, Killing Civilians to Win a War – Daniel Ellsberg on RAI Pt 10/13 The Discovery That Should Have Changed the Cold War – Daniel Ellsberg on RAI Pt 9/13 Once Fired, There’s No Calling a Nuke Back – Daniel Ellsberg on RAI Pt 8/13 U.S. Refuses to Adopt a Nuclear Weapon No First Use Pledge – Daniel Ellsberg on RAI 7/13 U.S. Planned Nuclear First Strike to Destroy Soviets and China – Daniel Ellsberg on RAI Pt 6/13 Russian Doomsday Machine an Answer to U.S. Decapitation Strategy – Daniel Ellsberg on RAI Pt 5/13 The Largest Act of Terrorism in Human History – Daniel Ellsberg on RAI Pt 4/13 Truman Delayed End of WWII to Demonstrate Nuclear Weapons – Daniel Ellsberg on RAI Pt 3/13 Hitler Wouldn’t Risk Doomsday, But The United States Did – Daniel Ellsberg on RAI Pt 2/13 The Doomsday Machine: The Big Lie of the Cold War – Daniel Ellsberg on RAI Pt 1/13 Transcript Listen Donate Subscribe Guest Music Paul Jay Hi, I’m Paul Jay, and welcome to a very special edition of theAnalysis.newson the occasion of the 90th birthday of Daniel Ellsberg. Ninety years ago, Daniel Ellsberg was born, and he has lived a life ofmeaning. Many of us strive to change the world, but few have the opportunityand the courage to change the course of history. Dan’s release of the PentagonPapers at great personal risk helped end the Vietnam War. His book, TheDoomsday Machine Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner, reveals theinstitutional madness of American nuclear war strategy. Dan continues to fightfor truth and to awaken people to the existential danger of nuclear weapons. I interviewed Dan’s friend, historian Peter Kuznick, about the importance ofDan’s life’s work. I encourage you to watch that. But now, in his own words, is my interview with Daniel Ellsberg on theoccasion of his 90th birthday. So at 90 years old, why don’t you take it easy?What keeps you fighting? How do you summon the strength when sometimes it seemsmany are just not listening? Daniel Ellsberg Hope. Hope that we can surmount the challenges that are facing us, thechallenge of ceasing a moral catastrophe that we’re already involved in, whichis that we have allowed doomsday machines to exist in our country and elsewherein the world and that we’re on a course toward climate catastrophe as well. Theproblem is to avert the physical catastrophes, not full extinction in eithercase, but catastrophic results for humanity. If we go on the way we are, if ourpolicies continue as they are, my hope is expressed in action. As a friend of mine, Joanna Macy, says, “Hope isn’t a feeling or anexpectation, it’s a way of acting, and it’s a way of acting as if we had achance.” I think that’s what we do have. We really do have a chance to changethis and to allow a more humane future to evolve. Paul Jay  To what extent is that hope an act of faith rather than rational analysis? Iknow you’ve told me you’re not all that optimistic when you think about itrationally. Daniel Ellsberg I think, by the way, to say one has faith suggests that you’re sure you feelsecure in the belief that something will save us, either human or external. Idon’t have that kind of religious faith as some do, and I don’t have that faithin humanity or in my own country as much as I used to in the case of my owncountry. So I don’t think it’s a question of any guarantee that we’ll getthrough this without an absolute catastrophe that has not been seen in humanhistory or prehistory. I think that’s not only not guaranteed, it’s not evenlikely, but I don’t think it’s impossible. And given that, I think the way of acting that’s appropriate in thatpossibility that we can eliminate the doomsday machines and change the courseof putting fossil fuels into warming the atmosphere of the Earth, causing it’sa question of either nuclear winter with the doomsday machine ice on our lakesand killing all our harvests or fire in effect with the climatic rise intemperature that will make large parts of the world uninhabitable for humans,even though it doesn’t lead to full extinction. So I think both of those areactually likely, but not certain. And if we act in a way to explore as much aswe should to explore, search and invent, imagine ways of changing this course,it is possible to do it. Let me go on that. The notion of faith is often always associated withreligious terms, especially with miracles. Well, I’m old enough to have seensome miracles, secular miracles in the world. I was 60 when one of thoseoccurred. Now, I’m 90. In 1981-83, about forty years ago, if anyone had askedwhat is the chance that the Berlin Wall would be down in ’89 (in eight years),or if they dared say in ‘83 or ‘85, the answer would not have been that it wasunlikely; it was impossible. It’s not really thinkable, so the question wasn’tasked, but it did happen. A few years later, Nelson Mandela, who had been in isolation for 27-29 years,became the president of South Africa without a violent revolution. I remembermy friend Tony Lewis of the New York Times reading a column saying inwords that were very unusual for a columnist, it’s impossible that there willbe political change in South Africa without a violent revolution, and that’swhat was regarded, but it did happen. So that’s the good news. Miracles of thatsort, and I could name others that I’ve experienced in my own life, in the lifeof this country; they are possible. The bad news is it will take a miracle likethat for us to escape the consequences of what we’re actually doing and programmingright now: in nuclear weapons, in the possibility of wars between nuclearstates like the U.S. and Russia, for that matter, India and Pakistan, and inreducing to zero by 2050, less than 30 years from now, fossil fuel emissionsinto the atmosphere. That’s the goal, to keep this as habitable a planet as itis now. That’s not happening. The emissions are going up. They show every signof going up now. So, it will be a very great transformation of our country. I’mworking on the assumption at 90 that I perhaps wouldn’t have had at 50 that itis possible to see change like that. Paul Jay I’ve got an eight-week-old grandson. What can you say to kids that arecoming into this world now? What might the world look like when he’s 90? Daniel Ellsberg When you ask that question, it makes me feel almost like the wickedstepmother or the fairy godmother—something in the fairy tales who comes andcurses the newborn child in some way. I certainly don’t mean to curse them—quitethe opposite. I think you as a grandparent, and I know you are following theadvice I’m about to give, but I think what I have to say to the grandparents isthat this child will grow up in a world much, much less hospitable to humanlife than exists right now or has existed for millennia. If humanity exists at all in numbers greater than a hundredth of somethingof the current population, the result of nuclear winter, these are very badprognostications, and I think that you won’t change that future unless you, asyou are, Paul, but not everyone, not every grandparent, unless you are willingand able to face the difficulty of this and which are the forces and theinterests that are invested in keeping things on the course that they are, inother words, toward disaster. Because I don’t think unless we name those forcesto some extent and recognize them and find ways to organize and enlightenpeople and to challenge them, they will have their way and will stay on ourcourse as it is. Which let me sum up, I’m saying I think your grandchild is born on theTitanic and we haven’t yet hit the iceberg, but we all of us at this time are,of course, on that same ship or what Nikita Khrushchev called our arc duringthe Cuban Missile Crisis, aptly,  and we’re heading into ice, andindeed, the captain of the ship has been warned of the ice ahead, as was trueon the Titanic historically and so far has chosen to go full speed ahead on adark night into that warned ice instead of as other ships in the same vicinitydid with the same warning, stopping dead in the water for the night so as tohave daylight when moving or to move ahead very slowly. So it would be sure to see any obstacle in the way or simply to go south andextend the voyage, which was acceptable for virtually every ship except theTitanic, which wanted to set a speed record and couldn’t afford to go south ifit were to do that or to stop in the water. And so full speed ahead. What was needed then was a kind of mutiny by the captain against the wishesof the head of the White Star Line, who was on that ship and wanted a speedrecord, or against the captain who wanted to be on the board of White Star andmade these foolish, reckless choice of moving ahead, the first mate did havetheoretically actually a power to say that’s not acceptable we can’t have that.A kind of mutiny, saving the lives of the people, knowing, by the way, thatthey did not have lifeboats enough for even more than a third of thepassengers, because for many reasons, the first-class passengers needed patiosoutside their cabins from which lifeboats had to be removed in the design. Exxon, Chevron, Aramco are inducing our politicians who they pay withcampaign donations and other ways and their influence on the president in termsof jobs and again, campaign donations and whatever to allow them to continueexploring for oil that should remain in the ground if our current civilizationis to continue and to get it up, and without a mutiny in Congress and pressureon Congress and the president to change that policy, the basis for hope woulddisappear. I’m assuming that there is a possibility of doing that difficult asit is. On the nuclear aspect, Northrop Grumman, which has just won a contractto develop a ground based strategic deterrent, new intercontinental ballisticmissiles, which should not exist and have been a danger to humanity for atleast the last half century, an inexcusable, unconscionable danger of bringingabout the nuclear winter if used. And it’s not only Northrop Grumman. They beat out Boeing for that contract.They are subcontracting, of course, to Lockheed, and we have General Dynamicsand Raytheon, Big Five, actually, who were pushing the idea of a $1.7 trillionmodernization, revitalization, as they say, of a doomsday machine that can destroynot all life on Earth, not even all human life, probably, almost surely, but 90percent of it, seven billion people, if we exercised our current war plans in awar against Russia. Now, as I say, it’s a moral catastrophe that this country built such amachine and it was a moral catastrophe for the world and for Russia when theyimitated it about a decade later, two of them poised on hair triggers, the hairtrigger being the ICBMs on both sides that are vulnerable to being attacked bythe other and subject to warning, tactical warning that each side has investedbillions and billions to achieve that has often proved false, that they areabout to be attacked, and therefore, the president [of the United States] andpresident of the Soviet Union, Russia now, has to decide in minutes whether touse them or lose them. Use them to do what? To hit the other side’s ICBM. Thewarning is telling us they are already on the way not to quit. Or to do itearlier. If we had a war in the Ukraine where it’s likely to escalate, nuclearwar is coming. Do we use our ICBMs now before they’re destroyed or later? Thatis a question that is wrong for any human to be asked, you know, to have thecircumstances. Abraham Lincoln said if slavery is not wrong, then nothing is wrong. If theexistence of a doomsday machine, I again, I’m talking about an elaborate systemdeveloped by major corporations that profit from it and politicians that profitfrom it in jobs and a general ideology that endorses this, including media, ifthat’s not wrong, then nothing is wrong. It is wrong. It is wrong for us tomaintain that, and that is what we’re doing, Democrat and Republican alike onthis issue, there’s no major difference between the parties. It’s a bipartisan policy to be prepared, ready, totally ready to the orderof a president or someone else who has succeeded, a president who’s just beenkilled somewhere or put out of action. Many fingers could launch this. It’simpossible to paralyze by human attack, to paralyze the system, and it’s asystem, as I say, which we’ve known for 30 years now, will have the effect, iflaunched, of destroying about 90 percent, perhaps 99 percent, probably not 100within a year from starvation because the harvests have been killed for years,perhaps a decade, and the river system dies and the lakes and whatever else. And yet there’s hardly any discussion of this. I’m reminded really with thefire on the one hand which will be the cause of the smoke that will cause thenuclear winter. For up to this time, the amazing fact has been revealed thatthe Joint Chiefs of Staff never calculate the effects of fire from theirattacks, that they’re planned and readied because it’s too hard to calculate.Supposedly not really true, but it depends on wind. It depends on the load ofthe cities that will be set on fire, that particular target. So, it’s too hard to calculate compared to fallout or blast or promptradiation, but actually another thing, they then failed to calculate for 40years into the nuclear era was smoke, the effect on smoke, where there’s fire,there’s smoke, And in the case of nuclear weapons causing fire, they will causefirestorms of of a kind we tried to produce very widely in firebombing by theBritish and the Americans in Germany and then the Americans in Japan. We only achieved it three times. Hamburg, Dresden and Tokyo, a firestormthat would cause intense temperatures on the surface, and kill everyone withina given area, 100,000 people in one night in Japan, in Tokyo, March 9th and10th. They tried to create firestorms in 60 other cities after that, but didn’tget it, killing about 900,000 Japanese civilians before Hiroshima, butHiroshima caused the firestorm that you can do every time. The firestorm has the unanticipated effect, they didn’t calculate it, ofcausing the smoke to rise into the stratosphere, to launch it upwards into thestratosphere where it won’t rain out. Do it to one city, effect of that, likeTokyo or even Hamburg and Dresden, the effect is not really perceptible on theearth. Do it to 100 cities.  When I started working on war plans fifty years ago, 60 years, 1961, theJoint Chiefs intended to hit every city in Russia and China, over 100,000 andmany less than that, hundreds of cities. The effect of that would be to putenough smoke and soot into the stratosphere where it would go around the globevery quickly. Within days, or a week or so, it would cut out 70 percent of thesunlight and cause Ice Age conditions on the earth. So fire followed by ice. So Frost. I actually saw Frost recite his poem in1961 at the inauguration of John F. Kennedy, the wind blew the leaves, theleaves of his speech, away, and I remember this is a little embarrassingbecause he was old, but of course, he had already written the poem Fire andIce. I don’t think that’s the title of it, but it goes. Some say the earth will end in fire, some in ice, from what I’ve tasted ofdesire. I tend to favor fire, but from what I know of heat, ice is also greatand will suffice. For destruction. Ice is also great and will suffice.  Anyway, that’s what we’re building toward, and that existed in 1961, andreally it’s existed as a U.S. capability for about 10 years before that. So Isay again, there’s no excuse for the continued existence of this. For one manor one nation to have the capability to do that, and the climate issue is verymuch the same. So at 90 and finally the answer to your question, I’ve learned agood deal of disillusion about my country and about my species, as well aslearning how wonderful it is to live here, to be alive, and I’m still neverless conscious of that than I ever have been. Wonderful here with my wife of 50years and our children. My son lives in the house and look at this in California,and yet in a world where most people do not have the privileges and the luxurythat we have. Or the security, I could think, although actually what I’ve described it’snot a whole lot of security looking toward the future, but from day to day, nocomparison with most people in the world, and yet with all that harm andoppression and inequality going on, I do choose to want to keep it going, tokeep it going, to postpone at least until we evolve in some cultural way in away that will make it possible for us to make the world less insecure, lessinhumane for everyone. Paul Jay Denial of the threat of nuclear war is very comforting. Facing up to it.It’s very disturbing. You are the least in denial of anyone I know. Yet youmaintain a sense of joy. You always have a twinkle in your eye. You laugh andyou smile easily. Most people when I start talking about this, they say ah thisis too depressing. How do you keep your sense of joy throughout all of this? Daniel Elllsberg Well, here my wife of 50 years here now being married and being with her,lying with her at night is heaven on earth. So, I know what heaven is, and theother side of that is that. Hell, it’s possible on this earth, as a matter offact, all the people doing these things, I think hardly any of them do notconvince themselves that they are making things less bad than they otherwisewould be if other people were running it, that they have good intentions, butthey are the kind of intentions that pave the road to hell. And that’s the road we’re on. Well, how do you smile on that road? You know,and curse me? One of my favorite books. Very much so. When I was a kid was abook called Scaramouche by Rafael Sabattini. And I always remember the first line of that about a Frenchman in the 18th.He was born with the gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad. Well,what we’ve been talking about here is he was not wrong.  The epigraph from my book recently chosen from Nietzsche, one of them twoepigraphs. Madness in individuals is something exceptional, but in groups,parties, nations and epochs, it’s the rule, and again, I think that’s whatwe’re seeing, the sort of availability of humans to madness in any way. It’s capable we’re all capable of it, I think all humans are capable notonly of participating in something mad out of a sense of group teamwork goingon, delusional beliefs generally and being obedient, being loyal, beingpatriotic, being courageous, all things that we generally regard as virtues,but they all have a dark side in that they can be put to work serving very badinterests in general, and that’s where we are. So for many of us, obviously,life is simply, as I said earlier, very privileged. My life, has always been a life of privilege compared not only to mostpeople in the world, but most people in America, and it’s a privilege and myfamily to have my wife with us together, to have friends who are also joiningme in this effort is joyous, and there’s a lot of things to laugh about. At thesame time, I can’t let go of this feeling, the belief I have, that it’s notimpossible to avert these catastrophes that we’re facing and that it’s possibleeven to challenge the hoax that entraps so many people. The Ro Khanna and Markey effort to stop the ground based deterrence, thecontinuance of which I think would mean that we were doomed to have a hairtrigger on the Doomsday Machine indefinitely, and I don’t think we wouldsurvive that indefinitely. The programs of the new administration needimproving actually in terms of climate, but they are an immense change andreally offer hope, an actual visible basis for hope that the emissions will godown. My hero Greta Thunberg, who enlarged a vigil at the Swedish parliamentwith Patricia and I actually participated in one very snowy, very cold morningonce in Sweden with about 50 or 60 people had encouraged millions, actually amillion or so in a couple of weeks later, a couple of months later and a yearlater, several million, many million people protesting in a strike on a schoolday, going from school, basically and striking. But she could not be clearer in saying success is not measured in thesenumbers of people or even in her ability to speak to parliaments and to theU.N. and to Davos and so forth. She said the emissions are going up and that isthat what we’re looking at, and that’s failure so far, a willingness in words.She’s shown this amazing moral courage and willingness to face not only thepossibility of failure, but the existence of failure of very many times and yetto keep at it, as she does with the others. And that’s what that’s what I’m privileged to be able to do. To keep at it.It’s possible and if it’s possible, it’s worth devoting one’s life to trying tobring that about. Paul Jay Thanks for joining us, Dan, and happy 90th birthday and thank you forjoining us on theAnalysis.news. Select one or choose any amount to donate whatever you like any amount $5 $15 $25 $50 $100 $500 $1,000 Custom Amount $ Make this donation each month (optional) User my donation to help support the upcoming documentary "How to stop a nuclear war" (optional) Donate with Credit Card var gform;gform||(document.addEventListener("gform_main_scripts_loaded",function(){gform.scriptsLoaded=!0}),window.addEventListener("DOMContentLoaded",function(){gform.domLoaded=!0}),gform={domLoaded:!1,scriptsLoaded:!1,initializeOnLoaded:function(o){gform.domLoaded&&gform.scriptsLoaded?o():!gform.domLoaded&&gform.scriptsLoaded?window.addEventListener("DOMContentLoaded",o):document.addEventListener("gform_main_scripts_loaded",o)},hooks:{action:{},filter:{}},addAction:function(o,n,r,t){gform.addHook("action",o,n,r,t)},addFilter:function(o,n,r,t){gform.addHook("filter",o,n,r,t)},doAction:function(o){gform.doHook("action",o,arguments)},applyFilters:function(o){return gform.doHook("filter",o,arguments)},removeAction:function(o,n){gform.removeHook("action",o,n)},removeFilter:function(o,n,r){gform.removeHook("filter",o,n,r)},addHook:function(o,n,r,t,i){null==gform.hooks[o][n]&&(gform.hooks[o][n]=[]);var e=gform.hooks[o][n];null==i&&(i=n+"_"+e.length),gform.hooks[o][n].push({tag:i,callable:r,priority:t=null==t?10:t})},doHook:function(n,o,r){var t;if(r=Array.prototype.slice.call(r,1),null!=gform.hooks[n][o]&&((o=gform.hooks[n][o]).sort(function(o,n){return o.priority-n.priority}),o.forEach(function(o){"function"!=typeof(t=o.callable)&&(t=window[t]),"action"==n?t.apply(null,r):r[0]=t.apply(null,r)})),"filter"==n)return r[0]},removeHook:function(o,n,t,i){var r;null!=gform.hooks[o][n]&&(r=(r=gform.hooks[o][n]).filter(function(o,n,r){return!!(null!=i&&i!=o.tag||null!=t&&t!=o.priority)}),gform.hooks[o][n]=r)}}); Never miss another story Subscribe to theAnalysis.news – Newsletter Email(Required) Name(Required) First Last Δdocument.getElementById( "ak_js_1" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); gform.initializeOnLoaded( function() {gformInitSpinner( 10, 'https://theanalysis.news/wp-content/plugins/gravityforms/images/spinner.svg', true );jQuery('#gform_ajax_frame_10').on('load',function(){var contents = jQuery(this).contents().find('*').html();var is_postback = contents.indexOf('GF_AJAX_POSTBACK') >= 0;if(!is_postback){return;}var form_content = jQuery(this).contents().find('#gform_wrapper_10');var is_confirmation = jQuery(this).contents().find('#gform_confirmation_wrapper_10').length > 0;var is_redirect = contents.indexOf('gformRedirect(){') >= 0;var is_form = form_content.length > 0 && ! is_redirect && ! is_confirmation;var mt = parseInt(jQuery('html').css('margin-top'), 10) + parseInt(jQuery('body').css('margin-top'), 10) + 100;if(is_form){jQuery('#gform_wrapper_10').html(form_content.html());if(form_content.hasClass('gform_validation_error')){jQuery('#gform_wrapper_10').addClass('gform_validation_error');} else {jQuery('#gform_wrapper_10').removeClass('gform_validation_error');}setTimeout( function() { /* delay the scroll by 50 milliseconds to fix a bug in chrome */ }, 50 );if(window['gformInitDatepicker']) {gformInitDatepicker();}if(window['gformInitPriceFields']) {gformInitPriceFields();}var current_page = jQuery('#gform_source_page_number_10').val();gformInitSpinner( 10, 'https://theanalysis.news/wp-content/plugins/gravityforms/images/spinner.svg', true );jQuery(document).trigger('gform_page_loaded', [10, current_page]);window['gf_submitting_10'] = false;}else if(!is_redirect){var confirmation_content = jQuery(this).contents().find('.GF_AJAX_POSTBACK').html();if(!confirmation_content){confirmation_content = contents;}setTimeout(function(){jQuery('#gform_wrapper_10').replaceWith(confirmation_content);jQuery(document).trigger('gform_confirmation_loaded', [10]);window['gf_submitting_10'] = false;wp.a11y.speak(jQuery('#gform_confirmation_message_10').text());}, 50);}else{jQuery('#gform_10').append(contents);if(window['gformRedirect']) {gformRedirect();}}jQuery(document).trigger('gform_post_render', [10, current_page]);gform.utils.trigger({ event: 'gform/postRender', native: false, data: { formId: 10, currentPage: current_page } });} );} ); “Daniel Ellsberg (April 7, 1931 – June 16, 2023) was an American political activist and former United States military analyst. 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Part 1 of his analysis of foreign intervention in Haiti presents a scathing critique of French, U.S., and Canadian powers who have dismantled Haitian democracy, as well as looted the country for c"} Jafrikayiti is an artist, author, activist, and radio show host, and works for Solidarité Québec-Haiti. Part 1 of his analysis of foreign intervention in Haiti presents a scathing critique of French, U.S., and Canadian powers who have dismantled Haitian democracy, as well as looted the country for countless decades. He argues that political leaders who are appointed by western powers, such as the current interim Prime Minister Ariel Henry, are illegitimate figures who continue to do a disservice to Haiti’s political institutions. Furthermore, Jafrikayiti explains how the exploitation of Haiti cannot be understood without examining the racial underpinnings of imperialism and capitalism. 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Brazil: Hope for the First Time in a Very Long Time Peru’s Systemic Political Crisis Deepens as President is Arrested Lula Wins in Brazil but “Will Have to Tread Very Carefully” After Bolsonaro’s Failures, Why was Brazil’s Election so Close? Chile’s Devastating Vote A Paradigm Shift for Colombia Reversal of Fortune for Colombia’s Left? Does Nicaragua Under President Ortega Deserve Progressives’ Support? Burying Neoliberalism in Chile Honduras: The End of the Nightmare? A Second Pink Tide in Latin America? – Pt 2/2 Haiti, Aristide, and U.S.-Backed Coups Biden Reneged on Cuban Campaign Promise – James Early Haitian Ruling Families Create and Kill Monsters US Institutions Encourage Coup Impunity in Bolivia The Left Wins Peru’s Presidential Election Colombia Enters a New Phase of Popular Mobilization Biden Continues the US War on Cuba Peru: Left vs. Far-Right – Dramatic Choice in Presidential Election Ecuador’s Socialist Loses as Left Splits Lula Returns as Covid Runs Wild in Brazil Biden’s Venezuela Policy: Continuity with Trump Haiti: Canada & U.S. Support Coups and Dictators A New Beginning for Bolivia Haiti’s Century of US Coups, Invasions & Puppets – Abby Martin US Media’s Sins of Omission in Ecuadorian Election Coverage The Mixed Record of Mexico’s AMLO, Two Years In Venezuela’s Socialists Win Election Despite Declining Support Peru: Mass Protests Against Hypercapitalist Narco-State Force Presidents’ Resignations Venezuela’s Opposition Split Over Election Boycott Bolivia: Barricades and Crisis in a Crisis Transcript Listen Donate Subscribe Guest Music Talia Baroncelli Hi, I’m Talia Baroncelli, and you’re watching theAnalysis.news. I’ll shortly be joined by Jafrikayiti for an in-depth conversation on the current situation in Haiti. But first, please go to our website, theAnalysis.news, and consider donating to the show. You can also get onto our mailing list; that way, you’ll be notified every time there’s a new episode. Also, go to our YouTube channel, theAnalysis-news. Hit like on all the videos you want to watch, subscribe, and hit the bell; that way, you’re notified every time a new episode is published. I’ll be back in a bit with Jafrikayiti.   Almost two years ago, the autocrat Jovenel Moïse was assassinated by a conglomeration of Colombian mercenaries and other Haitians opposed to his regime. Most recently, Rodolphe Jaar, a Haitian-Chilean businessman, as well as a convicted drug trafficker and U.S. informant, pled guilty to conspiracy to commit murder before a U.S. court. Since then, the country has not been in a position to hold independent elections, and Haitians continue to be deprived of access to clean water or to enjoy a dignified standard of living.   Why is this impoverished country experiencing this instability in the first place? Haiti’s woes can be traced to a long history of foreign intervention in the country. Up until the end of the 18th century, Haiti was a slave society under the control of colonial France. The Haitian Revolution was an incredible moment in modern history where black slaves overthrew their colonial masters. The Haitian Constitution extended social and political rights to all black people on the island but also to indentured Polish and German workers who supported the cause.   Beginning in 1791, Haitian slaves revolted under the leadership of General Toussaint Louverture. In response to this uprising, France abolished slavery throughout its colonies in 1794. In 1804, Haiti declared its independence from France. Yet independence came at a devastatingly high price.   In 1825, Haitians were forced to begin paying 150 million francs to the French government to secure their independence, purportedly for the damages caused to the French economy after losing its lucrative plantations in Haiti. Haiti ended up paying the equivalent of $21 billion U.S.D. for its independence. The country couldn’t afford to pay France all at once, so it was forced to take out loans from French banks and later from American Citibank at high-interest rates. It was only in 1947 that it finished paying back these loans to Citibank.   The French economist Thomas Piketty has estimated that France owes Haiti approximately $28 billion U.S.D. for its so-called independence debt.   The indebtedness of Haiti to American banks, as well as the prospect of confiscating Haitian resources, led Wall Street to push the U.S. to invade Haiti in 1915. Of the countless atrocities committed under the occupation, U.S. Marines stole Haiti’s entire gold reserve from its banks and left 15,000 people dead. The occupation of Haiti only came to an end in 1934. Indebtedness and corruption in Haiti were exacerbated by President François Duvalier, who set up the militia Tonton Macoute in 1959.   It wasn’t until the 1990s that Haiti’s political future was finally looking brighter. It held its first democratic elections in 1991, electing the liberation theologist Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Aristide’s focus on social justice and autonomy provoked the powers in Washington. Aristide faced not one but two coup d’états supported by the U.S. and its allies, the last one ousting him from office permanently in 2004.   Since then, a UN mission which brought cholera to the country, as well as a devastating earthquake in 2010, have depleted the country’s public coffers while its political elite profit from control of the country’s resources.   Joining me now is Jafrikayiti. He is an activist, author, radio show host, and artist, and he works for Solidarité Québec-Haiti. Thanks so much for joining me, Jafrik. Jafrikayiti Thank you for inviting me, Talia. Talia Baroncelli Since the assassination of Jovenel Moïse in 2021, which was almost two years ago, Ariel Henry has been the acting President of Haiti, but he was never elected. What do Haitians need now in order to return to some semblance of democracy? Jafrikayiti Well, I think, first of all, there is no point in referring to Ariel Henry as prime minister or president. In Haiti, a president is someone who is elected. The prime minister, which is his actual title, is appointed by the elected president but is not to come into office until they present their credentials to a Parliament, which we do not have.   In reality, what needs to happen in Haiti is that the governance of the country needs to return to Haitians. That means this ‘faire semblants (make-believe)’ that there is a Haitian government needs to cease. The United States, which is running the show, as well as Canada, the European Union, OAS, and the UN, who intervened and overthrew the last real Haitian government that Haitians chose back in 2004, need to acknowledge that this mess is theirs.   Haiti had 7,000 elected officials in 2004. They had their meetings here in Gatineau. They decided that the Haitian government had to be overthrown. They replaced them with thugs who embezzled billions of dollars. The country is in a mess. There is no government. Now they’re spending all of this effort trying to protect a semblance of governance. They are also pretending to be foreign to the mess that was created. They’re getting away with it in large part because the media does not ask those questions of Joe Biden, Justin Trudeau, and others. When they’re having these senseless conferences about how to fix Haiti, no one is asking them what happened to the real government of Haiti. I thought you guys overthrew that government in order to make Haiti better. That was the plan. That’s what they announced to the world.   After the earthquake, Bill Clinton got involved, and they collected billions of dollars in the name of Haitians. But at the same time, they imposed a set of criminals, such as Michel Martelly and Laurent Lamothe, on Haiti. Now, it would be comical if it wasn’t tragic that those same countries that rigged the elections, such as the 2010-2011 elections when Hillary Clinton went to Haiti and ordered the Director of the Electoral Council to change the results and take someone who was fifth on the list and put him in the second round to become president. These are the same people and the same government who rigged the elections in Haiti: Canada, the United States, and Europe; as part of this thing called the Core Group; they’re sanctioning the people they put in power.   Now, of course, those sanctions are invisible to us. They claim that they are taking sanctions against those people. I would say that for people who have been found to be in collusion with kidnapping gangs, the sanction for them is not to put their name on the list; it’s to arrest them. That’s what the Haitian people have been asking for. Give some help to arrest the criminals, the [inaudible 00:09:05] criminals linked to the Clintons’ who were put in power fraudulently, violently by foreign interference by the United States, Canada, and France. Arrest these people. Collect the money that they have embezzled out of Haiti. Some of it may be hidden in Haiti still, but some of it has found its way to the United States, Canada, and Latin America. We need to find those resources and bring them back to the Haitian treasury so the people can have a real government on the basis of processes decided upon by Haitians. Not by Joe Biden, not by Justin Trudeau, but by Haitians. Talia Baroncelli Would you say that these gang members who were supported by Hillary Clinton at the time and the American political elite, would you say that they’re also supported by Haiti’s own ruling elite, or how are they able to sustain themselves? Jafrikayiti Well, of course, there’s always been collusion between the folks that they are calling elites in Haiti and corrupt elites in North America. To be precise, people need to search for a term, BAM BAM. B-A-M, B-A-M. It’s the first name, the first letter in the names of six of the richest families in Haiti: Bigio, Apaid, Mevs, Brandt, Acra, and Madsen. Now, all of these folks have their roots in what they are calling today the Middle East.   Bigio was the richest man in Haiti and was actually the former representative of Israel in Haiti. He is reportedly the richest man in the Caribbean. We are talking about a billionaire who lives in Florida most of the time. Now, this guy owns almost everything that has to do with the Haitian economy, whether it is with banks or oil. Everything! This is not hearsay. In fact, the United States sanctioned him back after the 1991 coup. Again, whenever we say the word sanction, we need to realize these things are smoke screens for the general public. It just means that the United States government issued a statement saying that these individuals were involved, or there was suspicion that they were involved in the coup in Haiti, and then you don’t hear anything anymore. When these sanctions are lifted, we don’t even know about that. In reality, it’s a way for the United States to pretend that there is a distance between itself and those corrupt individuals in Haiti.   We refrain from using the term elite when we’re referring to these individuals because, for instance, some of them bought sugar refineries. They closed them up to import sugar from the United States to sell in Haiti. So they’re not really industrialists. These are people who have monopolies because whenever there is a real government in Haiti, they spend a few million dollars to overthrow that government. Then the criminals they put in power allow them to have contracts in the import and export business. So yes, they are among the richest, but they are not elite in the sense of people who are richer in a country who are investing in important sectors of the economy and giving back to society. Yes, they are directly linked to the gangs. That’s why Canada and the United States have put the names of Abdalah, Bigio, and Boulos on those lists.   Again, I’m saying that the kidnapping gangs that we’re talking about here, instead of kidnapping middle-class and poor Haitians who have family members in the diaspora who, when these people are kidnapped, are sending their meagre resources to get their families released. Sometimes they take the money, and they kill the people anyways.  Now, imagine if, for a number of months and even years, you had gangs in Montreal who were kidnapping blue-eyed, blonde-haired Canadians for months and years. Do you think the response of authorities in Montreal, in the province of Quebec, in Canada, would be to draw a list of people who are associated with those guys? And to say that, well, they cannot travel to country X, Y, and Z, or that they’re going to sanction some of their products, no. They would get arrested, and they would be punished. That’s what we’re calling for.  Gilbert Bigio can be a billionaire. We’ve heard that they finance elections. They contribute to elections in the United States, but that’s not a reason for them to be untouchable. These people need to be arrested, tried, and put in jail. All of the resources that they have taken away from the Haitian people, such as taxes that they’re supposed to be paying that citizens are paying, should go to the Haitian national budget.   What is evident to anybody who’s been to Haiti is that Haiti is a country that did not benefit from the Industrial Revolution. You can travel from east to west, north to south of Haiti, but you will not find a single tunnel. If you try to go from the little town where my father was born, Léogâne, to go to Port-de-Paix, where my mother was born, it will take you 6-8 hours sometimes. Not because it’s 800 or whatever kilometers away; it’s not. It’s barely 200 kilometers away. That’s because there are no roads. You keep on turning around and around a mountain, going up and down, etc. There is no infrastructure built. Of course, that’s because there were dictatorships in Haiti.   It’s not just that because we have not had only dictatorships, we’ve also had enlightened leadership, whether it is under our founder, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, or leaders like Louis Étienne Félicité Lysius Salomon, who was a genius in terms of finance and organizing, taking the Haitian currency from being one-thousandth of a U.S. dollar and bringing it at par with U.S. dollars in a span of about 20 years or so.   What happened when Louis Félicité Salomon was President? Well, you had gunboat diplomacy where countries came together, countries of Europe, including Sweden. Countries that people don’t think about when they refer to Haiti, but the ambassadors in Haiti came together. Britain, Sweden, and the United States all threatened President Louis Félicité Salomon of sending their warships and bombarding the National Palace with him in it if he didn’t pay reparations to some of the merchants who claimed that they were a victim of social unrest in the country. When you go and investigate, the social unrest in question was instigated by them.   In other words, Haiti is a country that has been at war. The war is not an internal war. The war that Haiti is facing has to do with global white supremacy. I know these terms are not familiar. People are not at ease with analyzing it, but they must because you will not fix the problem in Haiti with a band-aid. Haiti needs reparations. There’s no other way about it. Talia Baroncelli Well, the social unrest that you speak about, I’m assuming we can tie it to the money that Haiti had to pay back to France in 1825, this 150 million francs or whatever it was at the time. Some of it was reduced, but essentially they paid an equivalent of 90 million francs, which is a lot of money, like $21 billion U.S.D. Jafrikayiti Yeah. President Aristide estimated $21 billion back in 2004. More recently, the New York Times in 2021 estimated it to be $115 billion U.S.D. Talia Baroncelli That’s a lot of money. So perhaps some of these issues with debt and infrastructure can be tied back to that. We can speak about the issue of race, racial domination, and suppression, but without even needing to speak about white supremacy, we can speak about that moment in which Haiti was completely indebted to a country which had basically had to pay for its independence. As a result of that continued indebtedness, it was not able to then build up its own infrastructure. Jafrikayiti What is more important is the timing of this. This is the Industrial Revolution. That’s when everybody was building the infrastructures of their cities. If you look at the universities in the United States, in Europe, and in Canada, these were established around that time. It was during that time that, coming out of 300 years of enslavement, the people of Haiti were feeding the French economy. That’s ransom. It wasn’t just the French economy because by 1915, the United States had invaded Haiti, and it was the United States that was managing that so-called debt, collecting the money from Haiti and sharing it among French, German, and American banks.   The problem when you’re dealing with the history of Haiti, even if you were to do the analysis only based on economics, whether you want to or not, you are going to face the racial dimension. What happens is that nowhere can I see these examples of countries that are supposed to be in conflict with each other, such as the United States, France, and Britain, but they come together when it comes to Haiti.   We saw it in 1805. The French Foreign Minister of the time, Maurice de Talleyrand, wrote to James Madison and said to him, “The existence of a Negro people in arms is a terrible threat for all white nations.” He said it. That’s his words. In response, they started the embargo against Haiti. You can say, well, that’s in the past, but that’s what happened in 2004.   Does it make sense for a Canadian Minister like Jean Chrétien to organize a meeting right here in Gatineau, where I live, with foreign ministers of the United States, of France, and a few other people, but no Haitians, to discuss the fate of Haiti. These white men and women found nothing weird about their discussion to overthrow the President of Haiti, to put Haiti under UN tutelage, over two days of eating and drinking, and to do that, the very year of the bicentennial of the end of racial slavery in the Americas.   If you don’t understand the racial dimension of this, you will not understand why today it is Kamala Harris, Vice President of the United States, who is going to the Bahamas to get the so-called leaders of CARICOM to have a pre-meeting in a prelude to the CARICOM meeting that is supposed to take place later on this week in Jamaica, where they’re going to decide the fate of Haiti. You need to understand that.   To understand that, you need to go back to the beginning of the 20th century when the United States wanted to steal [inaudible 00:23:40] as a military base, which is in the northwest of Haiti. They found that the Haitians were being picky. They didn’t want to cooperate. So they recruited Frederick Douglass. Yes, the famous Frederick Douglass, the abolitionist. They knew how much Frederick Douglass had, just like most early African Americans, a lot of respect and empathy toward Haiti. They recruited Frederick Douglass and sent him to Haiti as the consul so that he could help the Americans, the Yankees [eankkes], to convince the Haitians. Even Frederick Douglass, when he was confronted with what the Americans were asking the Haitians, his conscience told him that he couldn’t do this. After two years, he quit.   In the news, they were accusing him of betraying the Americans. Frederick Douglas replied and said, “Listen, I’m not a criminal. The Haitian people deserve to have a nation.” So whether you look at it from the past or present, the conflict in Haiti is all about black nationhood. These people are not regarded as individuals who are worthy of having their nation. That’s why today, they’re trying to put the black face to imperialism by recruiting CARICOM. Some countries in the African Union to put in front, and of course, people like Kamala Harris, Brian Nichols, or Karine Jean-Pierre, who is the spokesman for Biden with her Haitian heritage, have that responsibility to make stupidities sound intelligent about the United States foreign policy towards Haiti. Talia Baroncelli So essentially, you’re saying that the U.S. officials, as well as Canadian officials and other European powers, don’t want to entrust Haiti, a primarily black country, with the right to organize its own elections and to deal with its affairs in the way that it sees fit. What are the other interests there? What do these countries stand to benefit economically from Haiti? Besides subjugating the country based on racial oppression, what are the other motives there? Jafrikayiti The motivation is not only racial. Those things are not divided. Imperialism, for the past few thousand years, has been tied at the hip with white supremacy. No one else has had the ability to subjugate other peoples and steal their land on this planet as European people have. That’s why it’s always tied. But Haiti is what, in scientific experiments, you would call the control. If you cannot impose your will on Haiti, a country that has no army, that doesn’t even have a government; you impose your profits on Haiti, then where can you impose yourselves in Latin America?   You can see the situation with Venezuela. For the past decades, these folks wanted to steal petroleum from Venezuela, and they tried. Today, there’s still speculation as to how Hugo Chávez died. We remember him going to the United Nations, claiming to have smelled the presence of the devil at the podium. Well, Hugo Chávez might have been a colorful personality who made jokes and stuff, but Hugo was very serious about the need to put our world on a different path of genuine human brotherhood. That was why he created the Petrocaribe program. Many countries in the region benefited from that program in order to build minimal infrastructure.   What you have happening in Haiti is equivalent to what’s happening on a bigger scale in Africa. What is the current crisis everywhere? The Europeans and the Americans are screaming bloody murder because the Chinese are displacing them in Africa. The Chinese are building ports. They are building highways. They are building all kinds of infrastructure that the Africans have been saying for the longest time that they need. Of course, these Europeans, without tongue in cheek, have the audacity to pretend that they are there to protect the interests of the Africans, so they are warning them about the ‘bad’ Chinese as if 500 years of oppression cannot inform those stupid Africans of their own interests like Europeans have to tell them. Talia Baroncelli Right. A lot of people justify European colonialism, saying that, oh, it built the roads. So I’m not sure that the Chinese going in and actually creating infrastructure is a justification for another form of domination. Jafrikayiti I’ve recently been to Tanzania and Rwanda, and I’ve been to other parts of Africa. I can tell you the infrastructure that is currently being built is not what was there before. Clearly, some African countries have realized that we don’t need to have that relationship with France, with Britain. That’s not a relationship. That’s abuse. France doesn’t have all kinds of resources that it’s stealing from Ivory Coast, Mali, and all kinds of places. Now, they’re revolting.   Now, in the case of Haiti, it’s the same situation. Now, when Hugo Chávez came with the Petrocaribe program, it had the potential to show the world what could happen if, for a brief period of time, genuine Haitian leadership had access to capital. Because that’s what the Petrocaribe program was allowing the Haitian government to have: to have a budget that is not tied to the IMF and the World Bank, or in short, the dictates of the United States. When this money comes, these guys, they say, you cannot invest in education, you cannot invest in health care, and you cannot invest in basic infrastructure. You have to spend that money on what they call job creation for sweatshops and stuff like that. Basically, you tie your population to exploitation so that the companies, the multinationals coming from the United States, can continue to benefit from what they call comparative advantage. These were the terms used by Apaid, Boulos, those families that the United States subcontracted, the control of the neo-colonies.   If the Petrocaribe program was not sabotaged, we would have seen a level of development in Haiti that would have challenged the American system. So they crushed it. Often times people are asking, “Well, what’s in there that the United States needs or wants?” It’s not that they need. They don’t need anything. Christopher Columbus did not need what he was stealing when he came in 1492. He wanted it, and he murdered billions of people to get it. It’s not about need; it’s about greed. It’s also because they can.   Right now, the people of Haiti are in a state of vulnerability that even when they see the enemy show up at their door, they cannot stop them from showing up. Haitians are not stupid. When we hear, for instance, at the United Nations, Canada and the United States show up, and they call themselves the group of friends of Haiti. Of course, the so-called Haitian politicians are guilty of never standing up and telling these people to shut up and stop bringing this childish language to the table. I mean, I’ve never heard of the friends of the United States, the friends of friends, the friends of Canada, but they use that terminology for countries like Haiti, the Congo, and stuff like that. This needs to stop.   We need to have a space where people in Haiti can manage to develop enough real solidarity among the populations, whether in the Caribbean, in the Americas or among the populations of Europe, so that the populations can challenge their governments to abandon that paradigm. It’s the same thing that’s happening with the relationship with Africa.   Africa is a different situation because here, we’re talking about a continent that is rich in resources, whether it is gold, culture, or everything else. They need those resources. There’s been speculation about Haiti having rare minerals as well, like uranium and iridium and all of that. The thing is, even if this exists in Haiti, currently, there is not enough military might in Haiti under the control of Haitians to protect that. If the United States wants to steal that, it’s going to steal it, just like they do everywhere else in the world.   Whereas in the case of Africa, it’s getting more complicated. You have countries like Mali that are showing that they’re willing to get the weapons that they require in order to fight whoever shows up and tries to dispossess them of their resources.   Perhaps as a global community, we need to push the reflection to a different model. Why can’t Belgium buy the cocoa from Ivory Coast at a fair price? At the same time, the Ivory Coast is also producing chocolate. Why must we buy chocolate that is only made in Europe? Can we not make chocolate in Africa? It’s the same thing with regard to Haiti.   Yes, in a population that is impoverished, there is going to be cheap labor, but that’s not our ambition. Our ambition is not to be cheap labor to the planet forever. Our ancestors spent over 400 years feeding those Europeans. It has to end. We have Haitians who are doctors, lawyers, and engineers all over the planet. Why are we not living in Haiti? When you watch the flights, we are leaving Haiti by the thousands, and you watch the planes going inside of Haiti, white people. Talia Baroncelli Well, I wanted to pick up on a point you made earlier about imperialism and racism being so interwoven and linked because abolitionist Ruth Wilson Gilmore talks about capitalism being racial from the get-go and racial capitalism being an institutionalized hierarchy which was based on the labor of marginalized people. Not just people who looked visibly darker, but also Irish or Roma people in Europe, for example. So this racialized element wasn’t always tied to skin color. Tying that idea to Petrocaribe, we could maybe see that this would have been another way to fund Haiti without having to rely on institutions which have been the proponents of economic and racial capitalism, such as the IMF or the World Bank, which would implement structural adjustment programs or other conditions on Haiti for them to benefit from certain loans so that they would have to privatize their industries or open up their country to other imports.   Maybe we could speak a bit more about what the aims of Petrocaribe were and whether something similar is actually possible if other foreign powers were to stop being involved in Haiti. Jafrikayiti Absolutely. Petrocaribe allowed Haiti to buy petroleum from Venezuela at a cheap price, with a very low-interest rate. The condition was that Haiti, instead of having to pay right away, would have 25 years to pay. Therefore, the money saved can be used for investment that is productive, including in agriculture. When Haiti pays back Venezuela, it can also pay back cash or agricultural products. In a way, that was perfect.   When you talk about the Caribbean, Haiti is the country besides Cuba that has a sizable population. We’re talking about 12 million people. The other countries of the Caribbean, some of them, are way better off economically. When you’re talking about, for instance, Barbados, that’s a very small community in terms of population and size of the island. Haiti, being part of CARICOM, would have benefited a lot. I still believe that this model is what is needed.   I was fortunate enough to go to countries like Belize or Guatemala and saw how– they also have corruption, but they still manage to do a little bit of progress using Petrocaribe funds. The problem was what happened with the timing of Petrocaribe in Haiti, which was signed around 2006 when Hugo Chávez started to have discussions with President Préval. The money really started flowing around 2010, just before the earthquake. When the earthquake happened, of course, that was devastation. The physical devastation was nowhere as damaging as the arrival of the Michel Martelly regime. These guys, basically, jumped at that money, which came at the same time as all of these billions of dollars were being collected by Bill Clinton for the rebuilding of Haiti.   During that whole period of 2010-2012, Haiti was a Mecca for all kinds of crazy criminals who created fake companies. They’re going to build this. Companies that are created out of thin air. In Canada, I saw some of them. When they go to Haiti, the criteria for them to get a contract or not is how close they are to the Clintons. A lot of money was embezzled and wasted, but very little of it by the corrupt Haitians in terms of the rebuilding or the reconstruction money because all of that reconstruction money was under Bill Clinton’s control and the companies that are linked to him. It’s the Petrocaribe money that Martelly, the corrupt Haitian group that Hillary Clinton put in power, that’s the money that they stole.   When you hear this week that the United States government announces that they are taking sanctions against Laurent Lamothe, who was Martelly’s very close childhood friend who became his Prime Minister because he would have– there’s evidence that he might have taken $60 million. People who are really following this realize that we’re being taken for a ride. Laurent Lamothe, first of all, was an illegal Prime Minister because he doesn’t qualify as someone who had lived in the United States without having spent five consecutive years in Haiti before he became Prime Minister, which is illegal, but they imposed him. Laurent Lamothe, if you check the archives during the time that he was a so-called Prime Minister, the ambassador to Haiti at the time, the lady’s name is Pamela White, she was always seen with Laurent Lamothe and Michel Martelly. There’s just no way that the United States is now discovering the corruption of Laurent Lamothe. The corruption of Laurent Lamothe means that all of this money, and of course, $60 million is not the amount. Haitians say there needs to be at least another zero put in that number. But that money cannot have been stolen out of Haiti without U.S. complicity.   So the question is, who are the American accomplices of Laurent Lamothe? Of course, you cannot speak of Laurent Lamothe’s corruption without speaking of Michel Martelly, who was his partner in crime. Talia Baroncelli You’ve just been watching part one of my conversation with Jafrikayiti. If you enjoy this content, please consider sharing this episode and going to our YouTube channel, theAnalysis-news, subscribing to the channel, and hitting the bell; that way, you’re notified every time there’s a new episode. Also, please go to our website and consider donating to the show and signing up to our newsletter. 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He is also an artist-activist immersed in the Global Peace and Social Justice movement.” theAnalysis.news theme music written by Slim Williams for Paul Jay’s documentary film “Never-Endum-Referendum“.   Never-Endum-Referendum Artist Website Paul Jay’s Documentaries

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He is also one of the producers of a documentary feature film called The Last Seed, which was produced by the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation in cooperation with AFSA, Biowatch South Africa, and PELUM Ta"} Famara Diédhiou is the West Africa Program Officer at the Alliance for Food Security in Africa (AFSA). He is also one of the producers of a documentary feature film called The Last Seed, which was produced by the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation in cooperation with AFSA, Biowatch South Africa, and PELUM Tanzania. In this interview, Famara discusses why food security is not enough in a country such as Senegal, whose farming practices and dietary consumption have been negatively affected by agrochemical companies. He makes the case for food sovereignty, as well as the establishment of an agroecological approach to farming and rural planning which not only benefits local populations but also facilitates climate adaption strategies. What sort of socio-economic system would create the conditions necessary for this agroecological approach? 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Today I’ll be joined by Famara Diédhiou to speak about food sovereignty in Senegal, as well as different agroecological methods in farming. If you enjoy this content, please do go to our website, theAnalysis.news, and hit the donate button at the top right corner of the screen. You can also get on our mailing list so that you’re informed every time a new episode is released. Also, go to our YouTube channel, theAnalysis-news. Like all the videos you want to watch, hit the subscribe button, and hit the bell; that way, you’re notified every time a new episode is published. See you in a bit with Famara. Joining me now is Famara Diédhiou, he is the Program Officer for West Africa at the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa. He is the producer of a recent documentary feature film called The Last Seed, which was also produced by the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, together with the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa. So thank you so much for joining me, Famara. Famara Diédhiou Thank you, Talia. How are you? Talia Baroncelli You’ve had so much experience working in rural planning and in small-scale farming in Senegal. I know you’ve had over 12 years of experience working on these projects. I was wondering what your own personal view is on how important food sovereignty is in African countries, particularly given the context of European colonialism, which has plundered Africa’s resources for so many centuries on end. Famara Diédhiou Yeah, strong, great question, and a very large question as well. On the issue of food, one side of it is what is said in the media, by policymakers, and so on. On the other side of it, which is, for me, more relevant, what communities, people, and citizens are living day to day. I will take it from not only my childhood, but where I’m coming from, for instance, my village, and the same could apply to many other communities in Africa, not only Senegal. There was a time where I would say at least 75% of what you eat, you were able to produce it by your own. If you were not able to produce it by your own, it was very nearby that you could have access to it. Those types of products, there was a way to cook it. There was a way, if I can even say, to eat them, depending on your, if I can call it, diet. Not everything you are going to eat can you eat at any time. There are things you will eat at a certain part of the day. There are things you will eat at a certain part of the year, and so on, and so on. But more and more, we are about to have a standardized way of eating, which is completely disconnecting us from our, if I can call it, our reference of how food, how agriculture, and how a community should be. Now, this issue, of course, it’s happening in most of the places I know. Here is a small example. Look at the early years of the 2000s; there are places, if you go there, you wouldn’t see packages. If I say packages, the packaging of food, meaning bags, big bags, or boxes that were coming to package the food people were eating. People were just eating what they produced around them. Now, if you go to those places, all the trash, where they throw wrong material, what is not good, is full of plastic, is full of empty packaging. This is real proof and evidence of what people are eating, which is no longer coming from their own community. The issue of food sovereignty is crucial. It’s real. It’s threatening our communities. Where it’s harmful is that more and more, you can easily hear some populations saying, “No, you don’t need to cultivate now. You can go and buy it in the shop.” It means I’m not going to work for my food. I will work for a car. Then my food, where it’s coming from? How is it produced? I don’t care. This is for us, solving this way or this new trend of relationship with food is something that is what we call regaining our food sovereignty. I don’t know whether you get what I mean by that. Talia Baroncelli Yes. Famara Diédhiou We are more and more losing control of our food: the soil, the seed, the work we have to do ourselves, and what we should eat. All of this is slowly, slowly, slowly, and slowly disappearing, and we need to regain it. By regaining it, it means we are recovering our food sovereignty. Talia Baroncelli Well, based on what you’ve said, we can assume that because of industrialization, people are more separated or alienated from the land. They’re alienated from the food that they’re consuming, from the seeds even. So I wonder, these other approaches like agroecological approaches, which your organization would support, they’re more focused on smaller scale farming. But is this small-scale farming enough to actually meet the food needs of people, like the demand? Can it be scaled up, or is it something that has to be kept at such a small level? Famara Diédhiou In Africa, at the minimum, 50% of the population depends on agriculture. If I say agriculture, it’s not only farming crops; it’s both pastoralism, fisher folks, and crop production. A minimum of 50% of the population is relying on that. In that population, most of them are small-scale producers. Statistics have shown that more than 70%, around that, of the food that is consumed or produced in Africa is produced by those people: small-scale fisheries, pastoralism, and small-scale farmers. What does it mean? It means that there is a potential there. Unfortunately, most of our policies don’t support that, it doesn’t recognize the strength. They rather go for the narrative that’s saying that we need to scale it up. On the other hand, it doesn’t mean that in agroecological practices, you can’t scale up the level of production. There are a lot of examples, including in export products, where big companies were able to follow the requirement of agroecological production, and they met it. What is needed is first to recognize that the majority of African producers or African farmers, those working in the primary sector, most of them are small-scale. That’s where we need to add value and support. If we support them, then it can take the level of production to another level. Small-scale production doesn’t mean that the level of production is small. Here are two examples. Those who want to sell cacahuètes, for instance, or peanuts for export, most of them rely on small-scale producers. Hence, they are able to produce enough until exported. In a country like Senegal, Mali, and so on, rice and millets are part of the most consumed cereals. Most of those products are produced by small-scale producers or small-scale farmers. There is a potential there. We just don’t need to give it a negative connotation when we are talking about small-scale farmers. I was impressed, not impressed, I was strongly surprised when in a meeting in Germany, I remember the country, we were talking with some organic farmers, and one of them was saying, “I’m a small-scale producer with 250 hectares.” I could not believe it. I said, “What?” When he realized that I was surprised, he said, “No, I’m small. This guy has over 400 [hectares],” and they call themselves small-scale farmers. In Africa is not the case. In a country like Senegal, the average for a small-scale farmer is around two hectares or three hectares on average, and there is a potential. They can’t feed the world. What you should ask is whether those big companies, agrochemicals, and agro-industries, for years, for decades, they were saying, “We need to feed the world. We need to come up with a food security approach.” Hence, up to date, the number of those who are hungry is getting more and more, higher and higher. So it means what they wanted to give us as a solution is indeed a false solution. Talia Baroncelli What has been the role of agrochemical companies and pesticide companies in African countries such as Senegal? I think the film, The Last Seed, focuses on this and shows the nefarious presence of these companies. What are they actually doing, and how are they affecting the actual, maybe, genetic composition of these seeds? Famara Diédhiou If you talk about the genetic composition of the seeds, this will call upon the issue of GMOs. In Senegal, I don’t have facts and evidence saying that GMOs are around. I just heard some things about that. What I am sure of is that the agrochemical companies, seed agro-dealers are very present on the continent. If you go to the northern part of the country, Senegal, where there is rice production with irrigation from the Senegal River; there is a big quantity of tomato production alongside the Senegal River with irrigation. Most of the seeds they are using, if not all of the seeds they are using, are coming from the agro-dealers. Very few people, very few farmers are in touch with the Senegalese Association of Peasant Seed Producers. It’s very small inside the seed. What I mean by that is that all the farmers who use those seeds are 100% dependent on agro-input. A 100% dependent! When I say agro-input, I mean both fertilizer and pesticides, including the seeds they are using every year. What is the most dangerous about that is that we don’t have enough choice when it comes to rice eating. More or less, there are two or three varieties turning around what we call NERICA. NERICA stands for New Rice for Africa. Where is it coming from? It’s a breed between African rice (O. glaberrima) and Asian rice (O. sativa). African rice used to fall very quickly, and that sativa, something like that, and they mix it up. The fact that African rice is very tolerant to a lot of diseases was completely ignored. The fact that we had various types of rice, including red rice, black rice, brown rice, black and white rice, and so on, was completely ignored. The fact that the diversity of rice enabled us to be able to grow rice in various areas. Not all rice needs a big quantity of water. There is rice that can sustain itself where there is enough water. So all that diversity which lived in some of our cultural way of doing things, I’m very serious about that, is slowly disappearing. In the northern part, it’s industrial agriculture. In the southern part and in the middle of the country, it’s not industrial agriculture, but it’s family farming. It’s for saving the family first before we go to the market. In those parts, NERICA is getting slowly, slowly in, and it’s dangerous. One last example I’m going to give, in 2007, I go to a village and say, “Okay, we are working on this farmer’s innovation, but please keep your seeds because of this.” One of them, a very wise man, said, “You don’t understand what this boy is saying, but what he’s saying is very important.” This was 2007. In 2020, during COVID, the same village called me and said, “Famara, we don’t have seeds.” I said, “Which kind of seeds?” “Rice.” I said, “I believe your community is culturally linked to seeds, to rice. It’s not normal that you don’t have seeds.” They said, “We now realize what you were saying in 2007.” I said, “I was in a program and we were reproducing traditional varieties. The only seeds I have are traditional varieties. If you are happy, I can give it to you.” They said, “Those are the ones we want because the new varieties, NERICA, we are lost on it.” This is a fact. They are trying to rebuild their seed system. The agro-dealers are, I’m sorry to say, but slowly, in some parts, they are winning the game. They are achieving their goals. Talia Baroncelli Sorry if I can interrupt you. Is the issue that some of these seeds, because they’re hybrid or they’ve been changed in some way, that they’re not able to reproduce another batch of seeds past, say, one harvest, and that’s why farmers are then forced to perhaps buy more seeds, and they can’t rely on getting seeds from the harvest that they’ve been sowing? Famara Diédhiou Yes. Definitely. We need to recognize one thing. When they come with their hybrid seeds, it’s true, the criteria of those seeds is productivity. Yes, we need to recognize it. It is highly productive, but not forever. During the first two to three years, with all the requirements, you put this type of fertilizer; you need to use pesticides at certain times. If you collect the seeds and replant them after two or three seasons, the yield will decrease drastically. What is worse is most of the farmers are saying, “We cannot do anything with our land now. The land is dead. We need to recover it.” If it’s only production that was linking the farmers to the agro-dealers, this is where the issue is. But there are some other social aspects behind it. Standardization. You can only have one type of rice. The variation is very small. Either it’s a long grain or short grain, but the test generally is only one. It doesn’t mean they culturally value the traditional diets and so on. Talia Baroncelli How are these small scale farming methods that you’re speaking about? You said that just because they’re on a small scale doesn’t mean that they’re small. They can encompass large swaths of land and they can be sustainable. But how can they work toward or help implement strategies to prevent climate change? So climate adaptation strategies? Famara Diédhiou Yeah. If you look at the theory of change for the transition to agroecology. Talia Baroncelli It’s right behind you, actually. It’s on the picture behind you. The theory of change. Famara Diédhiou Maybe this one is for us, but in general, the one we worked on with other stakeholders. When we came and we went to the farming system, we say the change in terms of agroecology practice we will start with the farm level. After the farm level, we have a community level. Before the community level, we talk about the landscape: where all the farmers in a village or in a community say this area is where we are going to farm the rice, to grow the rice. There, they have approaches that will fight against water; when the water is depleting the soil, they have techniques to fight against that. When they say how to do so that there won’t be fire coming into that place, there should be techniques for that. Then it goes to the municipality. The municipality will come together with several landscapes and develop a strategy for that. This is just in terms of climate hazards: the force of the wind, the force of the water, and so on. Famara Diédhiou Now, when it comes to what to grow in order to face climate change, usually people will talk about short-term variety. The one that arrived very quickly and another one that needs time. There is a type of maize, for instance, that within 45 days you can harvest it. There are others that will need two months, three months, and so on. So the farmers, from what I know, in one single family, you will find that if they are growing rice, they can grow five different varieties. What is the rationale behind that? First, and usually, they don’t have just a single plot. If a farmer tells you that they have five hectares, it doesn’t mean that you will go to one place and see the five hectares. No. One will be here, two here, three over there until you have five. The fact that they have diverse places is so that when something happens here, it is what you say in English; I won’t put all my eggs in one basket. That’s how they do it. This is in terms of space. Now, in terms of varieties, they have varieties that are salt tolerant. They can have varieties that can be flat tolerant. They can have varieties that need a very small quantity of water, and so on. This is their strategy to fight any type of hazard. So whatever happens, there will be a place where they can harvest the minimum. These are the strategies. Now, let’s say that in the case where are no hazards and everywhere it works; yes, they have workforces at home. All the crops won’t mature at the same time. So they will take their force where it matures first, and slowly they will cover all the spaces without losing everywhere. But if they have only one type and one variety, it will ripen at once. Before they finish the harvest, one-third of all what they have cultivated, the rest will be destroyed either by the wind, either by the birds, or whatever else, or it will fall. So they have a strategy. We just need to recognize it and scale it somewhere. Talia Baroncelli What are the policy demands that you think are essential in order to effectuate small-scale farming and to have food sovereignty? Famara Diédhiou Yeah. One of our policy demands, including here in Senegal, there is a saying for those who want to change the land, land policy. They say, “Land for those who can exploit it. We say land for those who want to exploit it.” If you want, you should have access. They should not say if you can, because for them, I can, means I have a big tractor, I have a lot of money, I can build a bridge or a dam, but this doesn’t apply to us. Whoever wants should have access to the land and food rights. Then we come to agroecology practices. When we say agroecology practices, there are a lot of cases where the land is completely depleted and there are public programs that are trying to recover the land health. The method they are using to recover the land, they are not agrochemical. They use agroecological practices. They never use chemical fertilizers. They use agroecological practices to recover the land that is depleted. So instead of depleting the land because of a type of farming method, yes, use the agroecological method. You don’t have to recover, but you will maintain or improve the soil as you go. We have a program called ‘Healthy Soil, Healthy Food.’ Talia Baroncelli Well, this policy demand which you speak about, how everyone who wants access to the land should have access to the land, reminds me of a different conception of rights. So a socio economic prioritization of rights as opposed to other rights frameworks, which, for example, prioritize political voting, access to voting, to elections, to those sorts of political rights, to property and that sort of thing. What you’re talking about seems to shift the framework to other forms of economic rights, which are just as important as owning property or being able to participate in an election. So do you think a whole new system of rights and maybe a new economic framework is necessary to see this agro ecological perspective and mechanisms manifest? Is it possible under the current capitalist neoliberal framework? Famara Diédhiou No, not at all. I think there is a need for a shift. We’ve been living or experiencing capitalism, one economic vision, for almost a century. When the concept of agroecology came on board, it was not because of farming practices. Agroecology came for, of course, our practices to be changed, not productivity, productivity, productivity without knowing what we are doing. But also as policy. It’s a social movement; it’s politics. Under those politics, it’s against capitalism. When we say capitalism, for instance, if you want to farm, to do a farming project, if you go to a bank for them to lend you money, to have credit, the business model that you have to fill-in so that they can believe or rely on your project, it’s not done for agro inclusion. It’s done in a capitalistic way of thinking. This one needs to change. What type of finance? What type of investment? What type of vision for an agroecology approach? We’ve done some research. We are not yet done. What has appeared in a lot of countries, including the [inaudible 00:29:25], is that the finance structure within the bank doesn’t match with agroecological practices or agroecological vision. What should we do next? What should be the solution? Yes, we are still looking. In Burkina Faso, I’ve learned of an experience which could be fine, but we need to dig more and see if it’s the best. Then we scale it up everywhere for the world to come and learn from Burkina Faso. Talia Baroncelli I have one last question for you, and that relates to the impact of the war in Ukraine on African countries and on food sovereignty in a country like Senegal. How do you think a country like Senegal should insulate or protect itself from supply chain issues, from inflation, or from other global crises? Famara Diédhiou Those who know me will laugh when they are watching us. I spent time believing that the world in Ukraine has impacted us in Senegal. Until now, even when I’m talking about it, I’m not 100% convinced that this has really impacted us. This was the real cause of what we are suffering here in Senegal. The very first one, they said that there is no chemical fertilizer for our farmers. I said, “What?” Here in Senegal, we have at least two-three mining industries which have the material to produce fertilizers. How can it be that we depend on Ukraine, a country how many kilometers away? Just one country. Then after, they talk about the fuel. The fuel is more or less $2 a liter. I could not believe it. Then after, everywhere, any single food, commodity, whoever is saying, yes, it’s because of the war in Ukraine. Now, I accept it as it is. How should a country like Senegal protect itself or prevent such type of situations, which is not nice but bad situations? We call ourselves the Alliance for Food Sovereignity in Africa. This word sovereignty, the concept of sovereignty, when I started to work in the early 2000s, I remember policymakers don’t want the concept of sovereignty. They were talking about security. Fortunately, during the issue of Ukraine, we heard the French President, President of France, Macron, saying, “We need to recover our sovereignty.” We said, “Oh,” coming from the head of state. A few months later, our President said, “We need to recover our food sovereignty.” I said, “What? The policymakers are talking about food sovereignty and talking about local consumption, supporting our local industry, and so on.” What should be done is what we used to call for since we started to talk about food sovereignty. First is the land to the local people first. We are not against industrialization, but when it comes to industrialization, we support local companies. Food or products that are needed by the country should be the priority. There are some crops which are just for the external market. I won’t say just for the external market, but I would say maybe the primary target of those crops is the external market. We need the land for local people first. Second, any company, any industry that is going to work at a local level, owned by the local population, should have first priority and local consumption. Then we build the infrastructure we might need. Finally, then there should be a push-pull strategy. For instance, the government could say, “If Talia or someone wants to build or start initiatives if it has taken into account the five principles or element of agroecology agreed at the worldwide level, they will be tax exempt, tax-free. If they use 90% of them, they will be tax-free up to 10%. This we should create. I don’t know what you call it in English; where there is a public demand, public push. Talia Baroncelli A referendum? Famara Diédhiou No. When the country wants, for instance, to buy food or rice for a school feeding program, for instance, they could say, “Our priority is for the product that is agro-ecologically made.” Then people will go there, and they say, “If someone has done an innovation towards agroecology, there will be something like a price.” Now, for innovation in agriculture, in terms of packaging, in terms of feeding and so on. So a push-pull, intensive buys, and so on. This needs to be done for the people to recover its full sovereignty. Otherwise, wherever there is a no one, usually, if you dig behind it, there is the food industry behind it, and this doesn’t support us. Talia Baroncelli Well, you make a very interesting distinction between food security and food sovereignty because the term security always begs the question, security for whom? Is it for the state? Is it for the people, for the local populations? Or is it, in fact, security for other foreign powers who are so interested in getting certain exports from a country or acquiring resources? So I think the way you explain sovereignty really shifts the focus to control over local resources in such a way that benefits the local populations. Famara Diédhiou Yeah, local population first. Not only the food but including the economy. I’ll just give one example. I like facts. In Ghana, around 2013-2015, around that, in the middle part of Ghana, it’s called the Middle Belt, similiar to the US. In the Northern part, I forget the name. That year, the northern part, maize production was a catastrophe and not good. At the same time, the production of maize in the Middle Belt was at its top. They never had this level of production. As the world is, black, white, that clear, and so on, so it was easy to solve. Just take what is in the Middle Belt and take it to the north of the country. But there was a strong propaganda, very, very, very strong propaganda, saying that the maize in the Middle Belt is infected by aflatoxin. I can’t believe it. To see the people in northern Ghana saying that they were facing hunger, they went to the U.S. and brought maize from this U.S. aid to feed the north of Ghana. The Middle Belt remained there with their maize. I really wanted to do some research aboutaflatoxin, where aflatoxin is appearing. I had a lot of discussions with some scientists and academics about aflatoxin. Yes, it can be there, but I have a hypothesis in my head. It’s saying that this aflatoxin can appear at a big rate where it’s the hybrid seeds. So the traditional seeds or peasants seeds, I’m not sure if the aflatoxin could have occurred this often. We’ve grown in rural areas. We’ve been farmers for part of our lives. All that we are talking about, the cause or the impact or the consequence of the aflatoxin, we did not face it. At that time, we were not eating all of those hybrid seeds; that depends on inputs here. So if I have money, if I have time, I will put some research on that to see where aflatoxin is, we see more aflatoxin here or there, which practices and so on. I need some more proof from people to see. To come back to your question about food security, yes, our people first. The local consumption first. Local diet first. Then we go for other things. We know that we are globalization, yes. We are traveling here and there. Our food is traveling here and there. There are some things like if I go to the airport with my passport, the nationals should have a specific treatment. When it comes to food, the nationals also should have a specific treatment before we go to the others. Talia Baroncelli Famara Diédhiou, it was really fascinating speaking to you. I’m very happy that you were able to make time to speak about food sovereignty and the work that the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa has been supporting. Thank you very much. Famara Diédhiou Thank you, Talia. My pleasure. Talia Baroncelli Thank you for watching theAnalysis.news. If you enjoyed this content, please go to the website, theAnalysis.news, and get on the mailing list; that way, you’re informed every time a new episode is released. You can also donate to the show and go to our YouTube channel, theAnalysis-news. Hit like and subscribe to all the videos. See you next time. 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As a West Africa-based program officer under the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA), Famara Diédhiou is active in various networks to advance the food sovereignty struggle and African-driven solutions.” theAnalysis.news theme music written by Slim Williams for Paul Jay’s documentary film “Never-Endum-Referendum“.   Never-Endum-Referendum Artist Website Paul Jay’s Documentaries

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Paul Jay and Jyotishman Mudiar, host of India & Global Left, discuss and debate the war against Ukraine and the role of NATO and the US. Jay states, "NATO doesn't exist to invade Russia. NATO exists to assert American hegemony in Europe."

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Capitalism Has Never Been This Irrational – Paul Jay (pt 3/3) Donald Trump and the (Non) Prosecution of Presidential Crimes (pt 2/3) Debt and the Collapse of Antiquity – Michael Hudson (pt 1/2) Ukraine War & Pandemic Caused More Inflation Than Gov. Spending – Wilkerson Will Jan 6 Committee Investigate Christian Nationalism? – Gerald Horne Rising Fascism and the Elections – Chomsky and Ellsberg Biden’s Bill has Significant Funding for Climate but 10% of What’s Needed – Bob Pollin Why Give a Damn About Pelosi? – Paul Jay pt 1 Progressive Running Against a Corp Dem in Boeing Country Chris Hedges, Edward Snowden, Noam Chomsky, Paul Jay and Daniel Ellsberg on Assange JFK’s Canadian Coup Fascism and the Democratic Party – Paul Jay pt 3/3 Weaponized National Identity, War and an Orgy of Profits – Paul Jay pt 2/3 Paul Jay on 9/11 Trump Saved Christian Nationalist Billionaires a Bundle in Taxes Why I am Opposed to the War in Vietnam – Martin Luther King What U.S. Foreign Policy and Pro Wrestling Have in Common – Paul Jay Resource Limits to American Capitalism & The Predator State Today A Failed Coup Within a Failed Coup – Paul Jay Ellsberg & Assange: Exposing Lies of the National Security State – Paul Jay Why I am Opposed to the War in Vietnam – Martin Luther King In 2020, Trump Propped Up His Rural Vote with Massive Subsidies to Agribusiness – Tom Ferguson Pt 4/4 Jan 6th: The Real Threat is Christian Nationalism in the Military – Mikey Weinstein Is Biden Risking War by Pushing Taiwan Independence? – Larry Wilkerson theAnalysis.news in 2022 – Paul Jay In 2020, Elites Bailed on Trump, Not on Republican Party – Tom Ferguson Pt 2/4 Nuclear War is the Most Urgent Threat – Andrew Cockburn pt 2/2 Risking Apocalypse for the Spoils of War – Andrew Cockburn pt 1/2 A Perfect Storm for Democrats in 2022 – Tom Ferguson Pt 1/4 Julian Assange & the National Security State | Interview with Paul Jay – Part 2 Is the U$A a Democracy? with Tom Ferguson Why Are Tensions Rising in Ukraine? – pt 1/2 YouTube Censorship & the Threat of Nuclear War With Paul Jay Corporate Dems Won’t Push the Real Wedge Issue and Lose – Paul Jay Daniel Ellsberg on Assange Extradition Hearing Paul Jay on Assange Extradition Hearing Running to be Detroit’s Mayor – Against Democratic Party Machine A Conversation With Paul Jay – Pt 4 The Whole Country is the Reichstag Pt 2/2 – Paul Jay & Abby Martin on Afghanistan, 9/11 & Climate Change Pt 1/2 – Paul Jay & Abby Martin on Afghanistan and 9/11 A Conversation With Paul Jay – Pt1 A World Without Police A Failed Coup Within A Failed Coup – The Story YouTube Doesn’t Want You to See Bill Black pt 9/9 — The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One Full Interview – Powerful Christian Nationalists in Military See Trump as Vehicle for Authoritarian Religious State – Mikey Weinstein Confessions of a New York Times Washington Correspondent – Bob Smith Pt 2/2 Confessions of a New York Times Washington Correspondent – Bob Smith Pt 1/2 Washington Post Confirms Fear of Attempted Trump Coup – After Google Bans theAnalysis.news Ads Why the Right Attacks Critical Race Theory – Gerald Horne To Get Us Out of Poverty, We Need a Massive Infrastructure Plan – Ann Morrison / Wisconsin How Billionaires Pay Millions to Hide Trillions – Chuck Collins Unanswered Questions About the Jan 6 Coup Attempt – Paul Jay Liz Cheney & GOP: A Split Between the Hard Right & Far Right Reagan, the Media and the United States of Amnesia – “The Reagans” Part 5 “Why Should We Vote for a Party that Holds Us in Contempt?” – A Viewer Comment Is Biden a Transformational President? Rightwinger David Brooks Thinks So Should Trump Be Charged With Treason? Paul Jay on Talk World Radio Workers and Communities vs Amazon Is Trumpism Fascism? – Paul Street Google Bans theAnalysis.news from Advertising on YouTube January 6th was the Final Act of a Failed Coup – Paul Jay Progressives Must Revitalize the Labor Movement – Noam Chomsky Trump’s Treason and McConnell’s Mayhem – Paul Jay Reagan’s Racism the Model for Trump – Matt Tyrnauer (Pt3) No Honeymoon for Biden – Jeff Cohen Rashida Tlaib – Remove Members of Congress Who Incited Riot and Demand Real Change From Biden Financialization, Fascism and the Jan 6th Riots – with Paul Jay Matt Taibbi and Norman Solomon on the Progressive Movement and Rising Fascism Racism and a Failed Coup – Gerald Horne Did Trump Walk Into a Trap? – Wilkerson and Jay Polarization, Then a Crash: Michael Hudson on the Rentier Economy Democrats Stuck Between “BlackRock and a Hard Place” – Rana Foroohar and Mark Blyth Economics Not Culture Wars Drove Most Trump Voters – Thomas Ferguson Potential Biden Cabinet Picks Lean Right Election Crisis and the Electoral College Trump’s Coup, Biden’s Dilemma, and the Chinese Challenge – Foroohar and Blyth A Dangerous Moment for the Democratic Party – Matt Taibbi The Significance of the “Shit Show” Debate – Panitch, Day, Horne & Jay Why Criticize Biden Now, When Trump Fascism is a Threat? – with Paul Jay NBA Players Resolved to Fight Systemic Racism – Gerald Horne Biden Blurring Almost Everything – Thomas Ferguson If Biden Picks Rice as VP, It Strengthens His Worst Instincts The Promise and Limits of Black Lives Matter – Cedric Johnson Trump a Unique Danger; Unaccountable to Ruling Elites or Public – Phyllis Bennis Vijay Prashad: Cut the Umbilical Cord to the Democratic Party Convert Military to Green Production, or Perish – Daniel Ellsberg on RAI Pt 13/13 Dismantle the American Doomsday Machine – Daniel Ellsberg on RAI Pt 12/13 The Doomsday Machine and Nuclear Winter – Daniel Ellsberg on RAI Pt 11/13 A Strategy of War Crimes, Killing Civilians to Win a War – Daniel Ellsberg on RAI Pt 10/13 The Discovery That Should Have Changed the Cold War – Daniel Ellsberg on RAI Pt 9/13 Once Fired, There’s No Calling a Nuke Back – Daniel Ellsberg on RAI Pt 8/13 U.S. Refuses to Adopt a Nuclear Weapon No First Use Pledge – Daniel Ellsberg on RAI 7/13 U.S. Planned Nuclear First Strike to Destroy Soviets and China – Daniel Ellsberg on RAI Pt 6/13 Russian Doomsday Machine an Answer to U.S. Decapitation Strategy – Daniel Ellsberg on RAI Pt 5/13 The Largest Act of Terrorism in Human History – Daniel Ellsberg on RAI Pt 4/13 Truman Delayed End of WWII to Demonstrate Nuclear Weapons – Daniel Ellsberg on RAI Pt 3/13 Hitler Wouldn’t Risk Doomsday, But The United States Did – Daniel Ellsberg on RAI Pt 2/13 The Doomsday Machine: The Big Lie of the Cold War – Daniel Ellsberg on RAI Pt 1/13 The Rich Have an Escape Plan – RAI with Rana Foroohar Pt 5/6 Sociopaths Rise to the Top RAI with Rana Foroohar Pt 4/6 Clinton’s ‘Committee to Save the World’ Unleashes Wall Street – RAI with Rana Foroohar Pt 3/6 Apple, Market Manipulation and the Cult of Personal Finance – RAI with Rana Foroohar Pt 2/6 The Rise of Finance and the Fall of American Business – RAI with Rana Foroohar Pt 1/6 Harvey Weinstein, the Democratic Party and the Power of the ‘Creative Class’ – Thomas Frank on RAI (9/9) Obama Chose Wall St. Over Main St. – Thomas Frank on RAI (8/9) Clinton and Obama Helped Make the Democrats a Wall Street Party – Thomas Frank on RAI (7/9) Prisoners of Hope – RAI with Thomas Frank (6/9) From Ronald Reagan to Bernie Sanders – RAI with Thomas Frank (5/9) Clinton Democrats Hate the Left – RAI with Thomas Frank (4/9) Liberal Elite Doesn’t Care Much About Inequality – RAI with Thomas Frank (3/9) Clinton Attacks Sanders in New Book – RAI with Thomas Frank (2/9) Corporate Democrats Have a Vested Interest in Not Listening to Workers – RAI with Thomas Frank (1/9) Reaganism and Thatcherism were Intellectually Dishonest – Heiner Flassbeck on RAI Pt 1/5 Black Nationalism and the Peoples’ Movement – Glen Ford on Reality Asserts Itself Pt 3/5 Kennedy Was A Cold War Warrior to the Core – Glen Ford on Reality Asserts Itself Pt 5/5

Noam Chomsky discusses the history of nuclear agreements and arms control treaties, highlighting their gradual dismantling by successive U.S. administrations. He criticizes the U.S. for its withdrawal from treaties and the deployment of military assets near Russian borders. Chomsky also expresses concerns about the dangers of artificial intelligence and the need to address larger-scale threats while working on immediate issues. He emphasizes the importance of understanding the world as it is and taking tactical decisions to achieve tangible progress.