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Talking about a Revolution
TED RALL CONTEMPLATES AN ANTI-AMERICAN MANIFESTO
Interview by Tim Johnson · Tuesday, September 28, 2010
Cartoonist and columnist Ted Rall returned from Afghanistan a few weeks ago, talkin’ about a revolution. Not in Peshwar—but right here in America. The latest book by the Pulitzer Prize finalist, The Anti-American Manifesto, calls for the overthrow of the government, only this time from the left.
Cascadia Weekly: Why an “anti-American revolution?” Isn’t revolution an inspiringly pro-American thing to promote?
Ted Rall: It’s not particularly important that we need a revolution—or book—to have any particular name as much as we need an alternative point of view for what passes for mainstream politics.
Most Americans would probably agree that the political system is broken. Most would probably agree it can’t be reformed from within. if you believe those two things, then the system must be replaced by outside action. It doesn’t stand to reason to keep hoping against hope that someone, someway, somehow will reform our broken systems. We’re faced with very dire problems—economic, environmental and others—that just can’t wait for some kind of future, theoretical reform.
As Sartre said, “Faith is the death of thinking.”
We need to stop having faith in a system that doesn’t work any more and start thinking about ways to change that. We need a revolution.
CW: Why shouldn’t we just throw in with the revolution the tea parties are talking about?
TR: The tea parties are being played by many of the same forces that support the broken system. The tea parties are being played by Republicans in the same way the left has been played by the Democrats.
The difference is the left has been coopted by the Democratic Party for decades. Committed progressive activists have been at this and thinking about this much longer. But many of the people in the tea party are new to politics, particularly at the grassroots level. They’ll realize at some point they’re tools and fools.
Their primary objective seems to be getting Republicans elected. But Republicans are at work on getting Republicans elected. Why do you need a tea party? I’m taking about something else very radical.
CW: But the left is depressed, morose and disengaged. They’ve been dissed, and have taken their ball and gone home.
TR: The left sits everything out. The left has been sitting on its collective ass since the Kent State shootings [laughs].
Yes, the left is disorganized and demoralized and moribund. Once the opportunity for real radical change vanished, the real radical left just got burned out. More recently, younger progressives have gotten discouraged by trying to operate within a broken system. The tactics that worked in 1966 don’t work in 2003, 2010.
This book is an attempt to kick the left in its lazy ass.
CW: What gives hope that real change is possible?
TR: Many of the classic battles of liberalism have been won, in terms of equality and social justice. The health care bill was one of the final pieces of this. Who could have guessed 20 years ago that we would today be on the threshold of upholding gay marriage, and the some supporters of that effort would be staunch Republicans?
What’s really missing in the United States, as distinct from other places, is a class consciousness that rich people really need to be separated from their positions of political power. This is an idea that is really universal among liberal outside of the United States.
The propaganda of the right—of rugged individualism and libertarianism—has been very successful.
And, let’s face it, the left doesn’t know how to talk to real people. It doesn’t have the language to communicate in the way the right does.
Most Americans actually do agree with the tenets of the left. Equality, progressive taxation, limits to corporate power….
CW: Agree with every specific, but not with every generality.
TR: Sure.
I have ideas about what this revolution might look like, how it might unfold, what a successor government might look like, but I intentionally kicked that can down the road in this book because I think that dialogue has to happen. I wanted to describe the influences to that dialogue—the economic crisis, the paralysis and malaise—that have created a revolutionary moment that can cause us to think about living our lives in a system other than what’s passing for free-market capitalism, in a world where corporations don’t rule everything.
The typical counterargument is always, “What about peaceful change?”
And my response is, “If you can point me to one example of successful, radical, peaceful change—in the history of the world—I will eat every copy of this book.”
All radical change comes about as a result of radical action.
CW: But you’ve intentionally avoided describing some utopia at the end of that radical action.
TR: Yes. It is possible to think of a political system outside of the two-party pseudo-paraliamentary system, the gangster capitalism, that we have in the United States.
That’s really what the book is about. The book doesn’t get into “How to start your own revolution.” It’s more about, “Hey, you can start your own revolution!” as a way to get people to start thinking about how our systems can be made stronger and better.
ONWARD, TO AFGHANISTAN
CW: On the subject of nation building, you’ve recently returned from Afghanistan. I think the common view of you is you’re a cartoonist who writes columns on the side. But this really solidified your bona fides, and you write with the authority of someone who’s been there. What have you learned by going to Afghanistan?
TR: Well, this was my second major trip there. The first was in 2001. I’ve also traveled extensively throughout the region, central Asia and south Asia.
The real reason I traveled there is I enjoy it. It is interesting. I enjoy it. And secondarily, it gives some kind of depth to my critique.
When I was a kid, I used to think capitalism was a really evil system, but it wasn’t until I worked on Wall Street, working there firsthand, that I became more confident in my belieft that, yes, capitalism is a really evil system. [laughs]
In Afghanistan, it is really much the same.
There’s really no substitute for seeing thing for yourself.
The journalism that we’re getting from Afghanistan, which is completely obsessed with the soldiers and running around the border lands near Pakistan, really misses the story of the Afghan people—really, why things have gone awry there.
When we don’t have access to good journalism, we have to go create it ourselves.
CW: What does the general public need to know about Afghanistan that, in your view, is not widely reported?
TR: That’s another book!
I think the number one thing people need to understand is Afghanistan had nothing to do with 9/11. Pakistan had something to do with 9/11.
They’re next door to one another, but they are completely different countries. People should view them that way.
The American public doesn’t widely know that bin Laden wasn’t in Afghanistan on 9/11. And they don’t know that there were no al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan on 9/11, except two that had been closed two years earlier.
Meanwhile, there were hundreds of training camps in Pakistan on that day, and bin Laden was also in Pakistan on that day.
So, importantly, there was no reason for our venture in Afghanistan, other than geopolitical.—to put pressure on Iran, on India and China, to build a power base in central Asia and to secure an oil pipeline, which never had a chance of being completed.
I don’t believe Americans fully understand that in the years of our occupation, no women in Afghanistan have been liberated. There’s not a single girl going to an Afghan school today that would not have been going to that school under the Taliban; or that there is a single woman wearing a burkha today who would not be wearing a burkha under the Taliban. Nothing has really changed.
Sharia law is still the law of Afghanistan; and the Taliban judiciary is still in place, still issuing judgments in Afghanistan.
CW: What should we know going forward?
TR: Mostly that the stories being told are malarkey.
I think the biggest problem American has is in continuing to view Afghanistan as a military problem. In fact, we shouldn’t be fighting a military campaign. If we want to acheve something, we should be a nation-building campaign. We shouldn’t have sent soldiers; we should have sent construction equipment.
A major part of what caused the terrorist attacks was blowback in response our Cold War policies in that part of the world that, to a very large extent, severed and wrecked that country.
CW: Yet Americans hate the idea of foreign aid almost as much as they love and worship soldiers and the military. How does our support for adventurism and foreign wars loop back and contribute to the problems you outline in your book?
TR: I think your readers are probably sophisticated enough to understand that America’s actions today are simply leading to terrorist reaction in the future. But just from a pure financial standpoint, it’s a tremendous waste of our national energy and resources.
At the end of 2002, the World Bank estimated that it would cost about $20 billion to build Afghanistan from the ground up. We have already spent $227 billion in Afghanistan alone, and we’re not even close to rebuilding that country if it even can be rebuilt at this point.
We could have built that country many times over if our plan was to rebuild that country. Just as importantly, we could have rebuilt this country many times over—its bridges and roads and energy systems—with that same amount of money.
I mean, even if you don’t care about people and all you care about is money, that is a tremendous waste.
At the end of reading my book, I hope readers get a sense that this maybe is the most radical book they have ever read. I hope they get that.
I really wanted to turn our Zombie Empire upside down. This is a system that does not deserve support. It is a system that deserves radical change.
CW: Reading it you get a sense, you can see a break coming, inevitable. The big question is what lies on the other side. And I think your book tries to lay that out.
TR: Yes; a progressive society, or the theocracy of a Handmaid’s Tale? We know change is coming and the big question is, “Who’s going to be running the show afterward?” Is it going to be forces who make the Tea Party seem like soft, squishy liberals? Or will it be us, a peaceful and prosperous, democratic nation?
TED RALL CONTEMPLATES AN ANTI-AMERICAN MANIFESTO
Interview by Tim Johnson · Tuesday, September 28, 2010
Cartoonist and columnist Ted Rall returned from Afghanistan a few weeks ago, talkin’ about a revolution. Not in Peshwar—but right here in America. The latest book by the Pulitzer Prize finalist, The Anti-American Manifesto, calls for the overthrow of the government, only this time from the left.
Cascadia Weekly: Why an “anti-American revolution?” Isn’t revolution an inspiringly pro-American thing to promote?
Ted Rall: It’s not particularly important that we need a revolution—or book—to have any particular name as much as we need an alternative point of view for what passes for mainstream politics.
Most Americans would probably agree that the political system is broken. Most would probably agree it can’t be reformed from within. if you believe those two things, then the system must be replaced by outside action. It doesn’t stand to reason to keep hoping against hope that someone, someway, somehow will reform our broken systems. We’re faced with very dire problems—economic, environmental and others—that just can’t wait for some kind of future, theoretical reform.
As Sartre said, “Faith is the death of thinking.”
We need to stop having faith in a system that doesn’t work any more and start thinking about ways to change that. We need a revolution.
CW: Why shouldn’t we just throw in with the revolution the tea parties are talking about?
TR: The tea parties are being played by many of the same forces that support the broken system. The tea parties are being played by Republicans in the same way the left has been played by the Democrats.
The difference is the left has been coopted by the Democratic Party for decades. Committed progressive activists have been at this and thinking about this much longer. But many of the people in the tea party are new to politics, particularly at the grassroots level. They’ll realize at some point they’re tools and fools.
Their primary objective seems to be getting Republicans elected. But Republicans are at work on getting Republicans elected. Why do you need a tea party? I’m taking about something else very radical.
CW: But the left is depressed, morose and disengaged. They’ve been dissed, and have taken their ball and gone home.
TR: The left sits everything out. The left has been sitting on its collective ass since the Kent State shootings [laughs].
Yes, the left is disorganized and demoralized and moribund. Once the opportunity for real radical change vanished, the real radical left just got burned out. More recently, younger progressives have gotten discouraged by trying to operate within a broken system. The tactics that worked in 1966 don’t work in 2003, 2010.
This book is an attempt to kick the left in its lazy ass.
CW: What gives hope that real change is possible?
TR: Many of the classic battles of liberalism have been won, in terms of equality and social justice. The health care bill was one of the final pieces of this. Who could have guessed 20 years ago that we would today be on the threshold of upholding gay marriage, and the some supporters of that effort would be staunch Republicans?
What’s really missing in the United States, as distinct from other places, is a class consciousness that rich people really need to be separated from their positions of political power. This is an idea that is really universal among liberal outside of the United States.
The propaganda of the right—of rugged individualism and libertarianism—has been very successful.
And, let’s face it, the left doesn’t know how to talk to real people. It doesn’t have the language to communicate in the way the right does.
Most Americans actually do agree with the tenets of the left. Equality, progressive taxation, limits to corporate power….
CW: Agree with every specific, but not with every generality.
TR: Sure.
I have ideas about what this revolution might look like, how it might unfold, what a successor government might look like, but I intentionally kicked that can down the road in this book because I think that dialogue has to happen. I wanted to describe the influences to that dialogue—the economic crisis, the paralysis and malaise—that have created a revolutionary moment that can cause us to think about living our lives in a system other than what’s passing for free-market capitalism, in a world where corporations don’t rule everything.
The typical counterargument is always, “What about peaceful change?”
And my response is, “If you can point me to one example of successful, radical, peaceful change—in the history of the world—I will eat every copy of this book.”
All radical change comes about as a result of radical action.
CW: But you’ve intentionally avoided describing some utopia at the end of that radical action.
TR: Yes. It is possible to think of a political system outside of the two-party pseudo-paraliamentary system, the gangster capitalism, that we have in the United States.
That’s really what the book is about. The book doesn’t get into “How to start your own revolution.” It’s more about, “Hey, you can start your own revolution!” as a way to get people to start thinking about how our systems can be made stronger and better.
ONWARD, TO AFGHANISTAN
CW: On the subject of nation building, you’ve recently returned from Afghanistan. I think the common view of you is you’re a cartoonist who writes columns on the side. But this really solidified your bona fides, and you write with the authority of someone who’s been there. What have you learned by going to Afghanistan?
TR: Well, this was my second major trip there. The first was in 2001. I’ve also traveled extensively throughout the region, central Asia and south Asia.
The real reason I traveled there is I enjoy it. It is interesting. I enjoy it. And secondarily, it gives some kind of depth to my critique.
When I was a kid, I used to think capitalism was a really evil system, but it wasn’t until I worked on Wall Street, working there firsthand, that I became more confident in my belieft that, yes, capitalism is a really evil system. [laughs]
In Afghanistan, it is really much the same.
There’s really no substitute for seeing thing for yourself.
The journalism that we’re getting from Afghanistan, which is completely obsessed with the soldiers and running around the border lands near Pakistan, really misses the story of the Afghan people—really, why things have gone awry there.
When we don’t have access to good journalism, we have to go create it ourselves.
CW: What does the general public need to know about Afghanistan that, in your view, is not widely reported?
TR: That’s another book!
I think the number one thing people need to understand is Afghanistan had nothing to do with 9/11. Pakistan had something to do with 9/11.
They’re next door to one another, but they are completely different countries. People should view them that way.
The American public doesn’t widely know that bin Laden wasn’t in Afghanistan on 9/11. And they don’t know that there were no al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan on 9/11, except two that had been closed two years earlier.
Meanwhile, there were hundreds of training camps in Pakistan on that day, and bin Laden was also in Pakistan on that day.
So, importantly, there was no reason for our venture in Afghanistan, other than geopolitical.—to put pressure on Iran, on India and China, to build a power base in central Asia and to secure an oil pipeline, which never had a chance of being completed.
I don’t believe Americans fully understand that in the years of our occupation, no women in Afghanistan have been liberated. There’s not a single girl going to an Afghan school today that would not have been going to that school under the Taliban; or that there is a single woman wearing a burkha today who would not be wearing a burkha under the Taliban. Nothing has really changed.
Sharia law is still the law of Afghanistan; and the Taliban judiciary is still in place, still issuing judgments in Afghanistan.
CW: What should we know going forward?
TR: Mostly that the stories being told are malarkey.
I think the biggest problem American has is in continuing to view Afghanistan as a military problem. In fact, we shouldn’t be fighting a military campaign. If we want to acheve something, we should be a nation-building campaign. We shouldn’t have sent soldiers; we should have sent construction equipment.
A major part of what caused the terrorist attacks was blowback in response our Cold War policies in that part of the world that, to a very large extent, severed and wrecked that country.
CW: Yet Americans hate the idea of foreign aid almost as much as they love and worship soldiers and the military. How does our support for adventurism and foreign wars loop back and contribute to the problems you outline in your book?
TR: I think your readers are probably sophisticated enough to understand that America’s actions today are simply leading to terrorist reaction in the future. But just from a pure financial standpoint, it’s a tremendous waste of our national energy and resources.
At the end of 2002, the World Bank estimated that it would cost about $20 billion to build Afghanistan from the ground up. We have already spent $227 billion in Afghanistan alone, and we’re not even close to rebuilding that country if it even can be rebuilt at this point.
We could have built that country many times over if our plan was to rebuild that country. Just as importantly, we could have rebuilt this country many times over—its bridges and roads and energy systems—with that same amount of money.
I mean, even if you don’t care about people and all you care about is money, that is a tremendous waste.
At the end of reading my book, I hope readers get a sense that this maybe is the most radical book they have ever read. I hope they get that.
I really wanted to turn our Zombie Empire upside down. This is a system that does not deserve support. It is a system that deserves radical change.
CW: Reading it you get a sense, you can see a break coming, inevitable. The big question is what lies on the other side. And I think your book tries to lay that out.
TR: Yes; a progressive society, or the theocracy of a Handmaid’s Tale? We know change is coming and the big question is, “Who’s going to be running the show afterward?” Is it going to be forces who make the Tea Party seem like soft, squishy liberals? Or will it be us, a peaceful and prosperous, democratic nation?
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