Eugene Jarecki Interview

John: I'm John Pedigrew, it's April 3rd, 2014, we're at the Digital Media Studio at Lehigh University and I'm sitting with author and filmmaker Eugene Jarecki interviewing him as part of my oral history project on the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars. Eugene is a author and filmmaker including a work, he's done a work on the military industrial complex, a film entitled Why We Fight from 2005. And a book The American Way of War, Guided Missiles, Misguided Men, and a Republic in Peril from 2008. 2008, so I'd like to speak with Eugene about, draw 1:00from his expertise that he gained while working on these projects. But first and foremost I'd like to speak with Eugene as an American citizen basically who has been concerned, as many of us have, about the post-September 11th wars, their origins and deep seated historical structures and processes as well as as a response to the September 11th 2001 attacks. And to see where those subjects take us in the next 50, 60 minutes. So to begin with Eugene, in your film Why We Fight you asked a number of people on city streets and elsewhere in the United 2:00States why we fight or why are we fighting. Actually that would be my first question. What was the specific question that you asked? Grammatically how was it constructed?

Eugene: I'm would introduce myself to people and tell them I was making a film about America at a time of war and before asking them anything else I would say to them well why are we fighting?

John: Why are we fighting?

Eugene: Why are we fighting? And why do we fight sometimes I would say. And to either question, why are we fighting, why do we fight I always got the same answer, freedom. And it was a bizarre phenomenon to hear that repeatedly. That in a free country, if you asked a few hundred people, everybody would give you the same answer, this highly propagandized word freedom. 'Cause nobody had really thought that hard about it and coming out of the television morning noon and night out of the 24/7 news cycle, was coming this idea we are fighting for freedom. They envy our freedoms, Operation Iraqi Freedom. It was a very much misused word because of course war is a complicated messy 3:00business. Freedom may at some point be part of it but isn't always, rarely is in fact. And very often, freedom is one of those euphemisms used by aggressors to frame the experiences of those they are oppressing. No better example than in my own family's history of Nazi Germany where (speaking German) was written on the gates of the camps during the Holocaust, "work shall make you free." The Nazis of course no strangers either to misusing the notion of freedom and framing it the way they see fit, using it for its common value. I mean who can be against freedom? When in fact many other deeper, darker motivations may be going on. So when I would ask people and they would say freedom, I would say well, that's not enough for me, talk more about that. And then right away as they talked, clouds would gather and you would realize that they had a much murkier sense of what we were doing, for example in Iraq and Afghanistan than in previous wars in their lifetimes and before. So for example, that fighting for freedom concept that we really derived from our time in World War II of liberating 4:00oppressed people, and we have seen it in a couple of historical incidents in our history, that was something that's very present on the mind but it wasn't being found in the war at hand. Very quickly people would say well I've also heard it's about oil. Or I've also heard it's kind of like the Neocons in Washington and they've got big goals for the world and they're trying to stop China or they're trying to get control of the oil, or they want the natural gas reserves. I mean all of those kind of arguments and it came to a head when I met a young boy and I asked him why do we fight? And he said freedom, in this wonderful way right out of an old Hopper painting and sort of Mark Twain Tom Sawyer looking kid. And I said OK well what do you mean by that? And he said well, I also heard it's about Halliburton. That was his second remark. And I thought to myself how far we've drifted from our moorings as a country, moorings in first principles, when a nine 5:00year old child knows the word Halliburton and has it so close to the top of his mind that he's heard murmurings that maybe we're fighting for profit, for the profit of a few, for the profit of major corporations in what I was then making a film about which was the military industrial complex. So I found that the military industrial complex was all around us and people were increasingly aware of it and they were increasingly aware that the reasons have become very murky. The waters have been muddied about why we go to war. It's not clear like we once thought it was. Even if it wasn't so clear back then as we thought it was, a lot clearer then than it is now. Whereas Susan Eisenhower whose grandfather is the central figure in the film, Dwight Eisenhower, Susan Eisenhower appears in the film and she said to me very beautifully at one moment, she said what troubled her most about America's role in the world, and the impact that the Iraq war was having on that and the way we were perceived is she said it just troubled her so very much to imagine that we'd gotten to a point where our 6:00motivations themselves were so open to question. Instead of working as a leader among equals in the world, instead throwing our muscle around, and then having it found out later that there were no WMDs, that was a lie. It was a lie driven by people who did have special relationships to the industrial sector of the making of our weapons and so forth.

John: What motivated you to travel around the country and ask people why are we fighting and to make this film itself?

Eugene: I had stolen the title of the film from the famous films made by Frank Capra during World War II called the Why We Fight films. And those Why We Fight films were meant to really give men in uniform and the American homefront a sense of what it was that the war was about. Remember there'd been an America First movement, there'd been reluctance to enter the war in Europe. And the Why We Fight films were meant to give Americans and soldiers a sense of purpose, a cause. And he does those films beautifully, and you really believe in that cause. 7:00America represents the greatest hopes of humanity, America itself being a melting pot of kind of motley crew of racially mixed, ethnically mixed, religiously mixed people, quite the opposite of the monolithic Japanese, the monolithic Germans with their Aryan aspirations for a German world. And so those films speak to something deeply human and deeply common in all of us, a shared humanity. And as such they're some of the greatest films I know and they're certainly some of the greatest propaganda I know. To the extent that America since that war has I think really lost her way, the films, when you watch them now, they seem naive. They seem like they are emblems of a time where either the country was simpler and purer in our motivations or we were better at covering it up. And I'm not sure which 'cause history has always been somewhat complicated. But there's no question that for the average American today there has been so much of a complication of the American story of why we fight wars. So to give you an example Eisenhower, in his farewell address 1961, warned Americans famously 8:00against the dangers of the military industrial complex, a term he coins that night. He had meant to say military industrial congressional complex, and that's how it had appeared in previous speeches including the corruption of congress as part of the military industrial complex. But he had opted to take that word congressional out of later drafts of the speech 'cause he didn't want to offend the members of the then Democratically seated congress, like he was making an attack on them. So he took congress out, which is a shame because for Americans to truly understand the way the military industrial complex hijacks American life, you have to understand that it hijacks it by hijacking your member of congress. Basically it's a system of organized bribery where congresspeople do the bidding of industrial interests and the bidding when you're a war company is to either expand defense budgets, or in more dangerous cases even go to war. But I think in Eisenhower's day he wasn't saying that if you give the defense makers free reign you'll always go to war 'cause arguably defense makers 9:00just want to make more weapons. There's no reason to make the scandalous claim that they're war mongers. They may just want a great deal of the production of weapons, and in fact, during wartime, there is a great deal of production of weapons but in peace time nobody really looks at that production so much. Whereas wartime expenditure starts to get a lot of attracted eyes to it and controversy about the validity of the war. So I don't know that arms makers want us to go to war any more than they want us to just keep making weapons. And what you need to make weapons is you need to promote fear. In order to have the reason to make the weapons. We need this plane to bomb that country that has it out for us. Or we need this kind of technology to track terrorists who are plotting attacks on us and so forth. So fearmongering is part and parcel with that and it was around in Eisenhower's age. He was accused of having fallen behind the Soviet Union in missile development, what was called the famous Missile Gap, he was accused of a missile gap between the United States and Russia. He knew no such gap existed in fact he knew we were ahead of the Russians in missile development but it was the Democrats at that time, 10:00because no one party owns this corruption, it's bipartisan corruption. The Democrats at that time were accusing him of the Missile Gap even though they knew better. Just 'cause it sounded good politically and would get them elected and embarrass him. And when he said at the time in the Oval Office "God help this country, when somebody sits at this desk "who doesn't know as much about the military as I do," he was largely worried that the defense makers would create imbalanced expenditure on defense. I don't know that he had in mind that it would lead to war. But that means he didn't count on Halliburton, and he didn't count on Blackwater. These are not ordinary defense contractors in the original sense that they make weapons that might one day be used in battle. These are military service corporations. They serve military on the ground. They need war in order to make the meals run the toilets, clean the latrines, run the lights. All that infrastructural work that relies upon a constant state of war. And so the military industrial complex in the modern era has become a far more frightful thing even than Eisenhower warned about. Much more of a kind of hydra that you can't stop. And so when I went around the country talking to 11:00people about why we fight, I was trying in the tradition of Capra to take a real temperature of Americans about what they understood about what was being done to them by those in power.

John: I could take issue with the similarity between your motivation and that of Frank Capra's having seen both your film and his films during the second world war in that your effort does have a truth seeking drive in it that is clear in the final product itself whereas Why We Fight by Frank Capra seems to be from beginning to end a tool to mobilize the United States, a very heterogeneous group of people.

Eugene: Sure but to be honest, if you'd asked me whether I could mobilize the American people to oppose the Iraq War just as he mobilized the American people to fight World War II, I would'a loved to motivate people that way. In other words, he had a very strong opinion. And I don't know that if I'd been Frank Capra at the time, with the lens of that moment in history, whether I wouldn't have thought absolutely this is the right war to enter. Absolutely let's ask questions later. We've got to stop the killing of Jews, Gypsies, communists, you know trade unionists and so forth. There was a tremendous reason to enter the war in Europe and a tremendous reason to fight World War II. That doesn't mean it may not also be true that we did it corruptly which we did. And we had a very corrupt way of entering the war, a very corrupt way of ending the war as you know from the horrendous bombing of Hiroshima and other actions. So many things can be true but it is the case that when I went around the country, I did feel I was doing Capra's work. I felt if he were gonna make a film today, being a believer in human freedom as he was, being a believer in the best, highest values of the United States, as he was, he would've seen those 13:00values as imperiled by America herself today as he once saw them imperiled by foreign countries then. So I think the Capra perspective, which is a very populist loving of the American people perspective and Capra again made It's A Wonderful Life, he made a movie that teaches us to distrust predatory bankers and industrialists who want to make Pottersville out of Bedford Falls. This is a guy who loves small town America and fears the onslaught of industrial cynics. And their very callous way of playing with human life, I think he would've looked at the Iraq War the way I did.

John: It's interesting in what is an anti-war film, very roughly described, your film, Why We Fight, your first two reference points are Frank Capra and his Why We Fight propaganda series in support of World War II and Dwight Eisenhower--

Eugene: Yeah.

John: The commanding general for the United States effort in World War II.

Eugene: Well the most provocative impression I could have of the Iraq War was through the contrast I saw between it and the first principles articulated in the Why We Fight films, freedom, dignity, human rights, all that stuff. And now we were looking at a war clearly driven by things like oil, against a country of Iraq, in response to 9/11 when not one of the hijackers was from Iraq. This was a folly war. This was a war of choice, a sport war. Frank Capra was looking at a war that felt that the world was under siege. And Dwight Eisenhower was saying as the general of that war, the cost of war is so immense that you must analyze the reasons for going to war to the Nth degree. Eisenhower who before D-Day and the invasion of Europe wrote an enormous sort of mea culpa in the advance of the thing in case 15:00it was a huge disaster that he would take personal responsibility for it. During the course of his time as general in the European theater, he used to write, specifically he would cordon off a certain number of letters home to next of kin that he would himself write because as he said at the time, he never wanted to stray too far from the consequences of his decision making. And to see the contrast between a man from the battlefield like that becoming president and being concerned about our mad rush to war and the likes of Richard Perle or Paul Wolfowitz or Donald Rumsfeld making decisions from air conditioned chambers thousands of miles from the battlefield with a complete callous disregard of the consequences of their decision making. That contrast was so repulsive and so horrendously destructive to my ideals about America that there was no way to make a film about the Iraq War without letting it be underscored by that contrast.

John: When we look at this term, the military industrial complex a relatively new variation on it among some critics of the pentagon in the early 21st Century and the post-September 11th wars is the military industrial entertainment complex with the point being that with Hollywood and its nexus to the Pentagon and now the emergence of commercial video gaming joining those two, that is the Pentagon and Hollywood that there is more than ever a large pleasure palace effect that is in motion, at work in our country, in the United States to portray war as being exciting, adventurous, the stuff of hyper masculinity. In short, a source of pleasure itself. Did you find anything in 17:00that vein in your

Eugene: Sure.

John: Talks with people?

Eugene: I mean there's no question that we know that there is a very profound joint venture that exists between Hollywood and the Pentagon. And that it dates back quite far. We see the earliest example of it in DW Griffith and I think the movie Wings which was the first time that American aircraft were incorporated into a Hollywood production. And we see it all through the ages, movies like Pearl Harbor, movies like Top Gun in which special deals were made to make those battle scenes, those combat scenes in the air as profound as possible. And why does the Pentagon want that? They want to underscore the power of our military for popular consumption. They want more people to be recruitable so they want people to take an interest in the glamorous life of being Tom Cruise and hopping into the cockpit of a high 18:00powered fighter plane. So they have an interest in the folklorization of so much of their hardware and so much of their life ways and the hardware makers of course get an absolute two hour commercial out of it. People leave the theater saying I didn't know a plane could do that. So people who go to the theater include members of congress and people they know and their families. So when that member of congress hears a plane come up for review, should we keep the F-17 or not? They think well how could you get rid of it? It's in that great movie. In other words it's become a part of the American tapestry. And so the relationship between Hollywood and the Pentagon of course leads one, I mean one can go crazy with the sort of different formulations of such and such industrial complex. We have a pharmaceutical industrial complex. I've just made a movie about the prison industrial complex. Pretty soon we'll have Rubik's Cube industrial complexes, it goes on 19:00and on but I think that it is a fair one here to say that there is a complex between the military, the military itself, the military industry which is different, the makers of technologies, and then the entertainment sector. Because all have a vested interest in more and more of these movies that tilt toward violence coming out. I walked down the hallway of a major multiplex recently and saw all the movies that were being offered. And one after another was, you could fill in the blank. It was the planet is under siege from some alien who looks more and more weird with each passing movie who has an invincible quality about it and the only thing that's gonna win in the end is American firepower. Look at the movie Avatar, they spent all that creativity on those people with the blue faces and their bodies and all that other stuff. And in the end it's just the good old US of A with their good old ever growing gun. You know Men In Black has made a joke about this gun getting bigger and bigger and bigger and it's just how much bigger a gun do we need? And if we need the biggest gun we'll 20:00get the biggest gun. And then we'll win, and for a society as we yesterday saw yet another tragedy of gun violence in this culture, I think it's the wrong time in history to find yourself on the side of history where you're promoting escalating gun violence and yet Hollywood has chosen to do that. And they're in a joint venture between themselves, the makers of those guns, and an American military that sees its bread buttered by more preparedness and by more actual combat. And the losers in this equation are the American people who have their taxpayer dollars being wasted on this conflagration of interest, who then get their sons and daughters sent into harms way down roads to nowhere that leave them maimed and suffering from the kind of PTSD that this gentleman had yesterday who killed himself and others at Fort Hood. And all of this happens at the expense of a healthy society. Eisenhower talked about the need for balance in and among national programs. That if you just keep mortgaging everything in your house to keep building a bigger and bigger gun, what you end up with at the 21:00end of the day is an empty house guarded by a very big gun. And the stupidity of that was clear to Eisenhower and has somehow been lost on successive generations since him but I for one have been trying to restore that sanity that came from his time. And I am certainly a foe of the military industrial entertainment complex and its predatory relationship to the American people.

John: I'm interested in the opposite of the sanity of which you speak and to my mind you had a very valuable opportunity to travel across the country, this, I take it was in 2003 and four.

Eugene: Yeah.

John: As the film was released in '05. And to get a read on American people after September 11th 2001 as their country was already in war, 22:00one war in Afghanistan, preparing for another one. I guess by the time you were interviewing United States had already invaded and occupied Iraq. But what I'm interested in is your read on the American people. Yes their individual responses to your questions, why are we fighting, but whether there is something that gripped the American people, or combinations of them at least that is something akin to war fever and enthusiasm for this great historical moment. An act that is in part, yes in response and seeking vengeance for the September 11th attacks but that perhaps pulls the country together in a way that is not always together in times of peace. And did you get a feel for that kind of enthusiasm for a country at war?

Eugene: Yes I think that all people have operating inside them forces of compassion and peace and forces of conflict and violence. And John Lennon was interviewed in 1969 in an interview in which, that's now been made into a wonderful short film that I saw called I Met The Walrus, great film about Lennon. And at one point during the interview he says, you know he says there's no sense going around saying I want peace and then beating up your mate. He says because we're all, he says we're all Hitler inside. We're all Jesus inside. The point is to just work on the good bit of you. And if you recognize that there's darkness in the human nature and that there's great light in the human nature, the technique of those in power is very often to fearmonger people into the frenzy where they let loose their darker nature over their brighter nature. And so it's a very standard operation of the powerful. The Germans pretended that the Jews had burned the 24:00Reichstag in order to work the German people into a frenzy where they would rubber stamp the annihilation of the Jews. And he did other things that scapegoated the Jews. And that kind of scapegoating we see in society after society throughout the world. We now saw it in the Iraq War, we saw it in Afghanistan. We see it time and again. And what you're doing is unleashing the worst in us against the best in us and certainly we do discover in those periods that boys will be boys and that people have a tendency to solve problems probably going back to primal realities of the human creature, they have the tendency, they have the capacity to solve problems through violence. It has been though, a component of the Enlightenment and the Magna Carta, the evolution of democracy, and notions of human rights and dignity from antiquity until contemporary times where we see also a driving force that comes out of the peace seeking public, the peace seeking electorate who in fact by and large I think don't want war, understand far better than ever before its absurdity and cost. They understand 25:00that they increasingly live on a shrinking planet, and that the planet cannot afford these absurd internecine rivalries that make no sense. Most of the problems we face on this planet need to be solved by a collective of countries and their peoples. Violence goes across borders, disease knows no borders. Climate of course knows no borders. How often are we now seeing some horrendous climate event happen in one place or another. And all kinds of countries have to come to the aid, this plane that disappeared from Malaysia has what, 25 countries looking for it in the Indian Ocean? And that's a symbol of what the world looks like increasingly more than it did before. And the internet's a help. You know it's much harder to get people to go and beat up some other country when they don't know what those people look like, talk like, what their food tastes like, what their house looks like. When you've been on Etsy or Ebay and you've bought some foreign object from some foreign place and you had a nice interaction with a person who's kind of a little bit like you, it makes it a lot harder to just get 26:00you worked into a frenzy. But there's no question that history has been the long story of it being always possible to work people into a frenzy. I would hope that the shrinking nature of the planet and the increasing spread of communications and travel would make that more difficult, and I do sense that there's a bit of hope in that, a glimmer of positivity in the way humans themselves are increasingly reaching out to one another even if their governments are falling behind that curve.

John: Do you describe yourself as a pacifist?

Eugene: I suppose I'd have to. I think it has an old ring to it that maybe has fallen out of fashion now where that sounds like it goes in the same category as tree hugger or liberal or something like that. I'm kind of an Eisenhower Republican which is to say that Eisenhower was far to the left of today's Democrats. He had a view of the world that was far more devoted to people, and far less devoted to corporate power than today's Democrats who just like their Republican partners are completely in the pocket of our industrial interests, the 27:00industrial interests that have so much hijacked the business of the country. Eisenhower was concerned about that in a way that you would never hear a Democrat except the most progressive one talk about today. So I don't even know where I would fit today. I'm an independent. I don't belong to the Democratic Party period. I don't belong to the Republican Party period. I do believe that the country has been divided into blue and red, war making and peace seeking, black or white, and I don't think life happens that way. Life is purple, it's a mix of blue and red. Wherever you go you meet people that say I'm a social liberal but I'm an economic conservative or I'm economically liberal and I'm, and so forth. These variations abound. And I certainly have a wide variety of ways of thinking in my heart, and among them I think that there are better ways to solve problems and I would teach my children that when they're at school than to resort to violence, wouldn't you?

John: Yes.

Eugene: So if you would, and I would, who would come in here who would say no I think resorting to violence is the right idea? They'd say 28:00sometimes there's no choice. OK, well I understand that one. I understand that you are to try peace seeking solutions as far as you possibly can before resorting to violence which is why a war like the Iraq War, a war of choice, a folly war like that was really just dreamed up long before 9/11, and then the men who dreamed it up had the audacity, the extraordinary lack of morality to exploit the events of 9/11 in which I lost friends and family to exploit that for the purposes of launching the war they had already preconceived. I cannot imagine a more disgraceful public act than that. Because not only is it making war, not making it the last resort, it's making it the first resort. It's making it something you had in mind before there was even a problem.

John: One of the most dramatic and effective scenes in your film, Why We Fight is after a long build up to the initial bombing of Baghdad 29:00on March 19 2003. With two pilots flying stealth bombers to take out Saddam Hussein in Dora Farms. You, to my mind, rather miraculously have scenes on the ground in Baghdad interviewing Iraqi civilians who suffered through the bombings the night or days before, day before. I'm actually curious, this is more of a technical point about how you were able to get people on the ground interviewing those Iraqis at 30:00the beginning of a major war. You have field correspondents. From the credits I see that perhaps they were the ones doing that work. But what was your thinking in the juxtaposition between this rather dramatic arc of these bombers, they're oppressive machines flying at dawn. You interview the two lead pilots who are committed, dedicated to their work. You are not, to my mind, criticizing them or trying to get the viewer to look at them or their mission in an particular way. And then the cut to these people bleeding in rubble obviously destroyed 31:00by those bombs.

Eugene: Well, in the spirit of Eisenhower again, who wrote those letters home to next of kin so that he would have to feel the pen and ink pain of telling someone that they'd lost a loved one in battle. I wanted to connect those pilots to the consequences of their actions. But much more important than them because they're just functionaries, I wanted to connect the decision makers who had sent them into that mission with the consequences of their decision making, and that's George Bush who I thought had committed a war crime in the launching of the film. I could argue that very strongly against anyone who'd like to do so. Dick Cheney who did commit war crimes in the launching and the management of the war. Donald Rumsfeld who did the same. These are men who took control of a policy at a very sensitive time in American history. And if we don't pursue accountability for men who play fast and loose with both domestic federal and international 32:00standards and norms that govern the rules of war then what do we have those rules for? We can't just have them for our enemies otherwise we have a foolish international system that people won't respect and then they'll play the kind of games with it that we see happening right now. So there's no surprise here that when Mr Putin annexed Crimea in recent weeks, he was able to point to the apparent hypocrisy of the United States in its sudden sense of oh the outrage. When of course he stood by and watched the United States play enormously fast and loose with what a just cause is for military action in its own day, a war far more destructive than so far what we've seen in Crimea. It doesn't need to be said. So I think that showing those images was meant to force us all also as Americans to know that those decisions that we make, so long as we stand by and idly accept them, so long as we elect people who make such decisions, and so long as we for example 33:00allow politicians to sneak by on tough on crime rhetoric or tough on terror rhetoric and not ask them what would you do if the rubber met the road? What is your view of war? What kind of a war do you think makes sense? I mean Mr Obama suggested that he would come in and close Guantanamo with all of its actions in torture, didn't do so. He claimed he would pull out of this conflict or that conflict and then we got a million reasons why those had to continue. One after another we watch American policy makers toe the line for the industrial and political interests that sustain themselves on a state of steady war and the American people have to realize that until they change that, those wars are theirs. That blood is on their hands. They cannot just write it off to Dick Cheney, they cannot just write it off to Donald Rumsfeld and so forth. I think those men need to be held accountable. But the American people need to hold ourselves accountable for that which we allowed to happen, and until further notice, until we develop an absolutely demanding public outcry for a sustainable way of 34:00operating in this world as a country, as a leader among equals and not as a bully, we will continue to get the very government we deserve.

John: What about the fact that our constitution has broken down, and that the key provision of the constitution regarding war, "the congress "shall declare war" has not happened since World War II?

Eugene: Yeah.

John: And indeed US presidents are able to commit and project such power in the going phrase of the day without that key democratic component?

Eugene: Well America has been drunk on power since World War II. The victory in World War II inebriated the United States into a power drunkenness that wasn't just abstract. I don't speak about it just poetically. In 1947, after World War II, a brand new state was born in America, the National Security State which is the fundamental driving instrument of the country. Most people are thinking I've never even heard of that, what is that? Well it was the formation of the National Security Act, an act of government in 1947 that created several new 35:00instruments in the American government to deal with the new world order that we saw in the post war era, also looking out over the rising influence of the Cold War. And the National Security State created a few things that we now know as household names, the Central Intelligence Agency. There had been no Central Intelligence Agency before '47, there'd been the OSS, but we now get the CIA. It created the National Security Council. There had been no National Security Council before that. And it put in its place a National Security Advisor reporting directly to the president. It created the Department of Defense. People didn't know this, but there was no Department of Defense before that time either. You start to see the newly building Pentagon at that time and we suddenly have an entire defense department rather than just an Office of War within the State Department. So the idea that just those things all by themselves, the Defense Department, the Secretary of Defense, the CIA, the National Security Council and National Security Advisor, these are five instruments of government that 36:00have a huge impact, huge impact. And by the way I should add to that the formation of the Air Force, there had been no Air Force prior to this. That's six instruments. They all add a tremendous amount of power to the American government but all under the executive branch. 'Cause every instrument that I just named is vested in the executive branch. Today people don't realize this but the legislative branch has about 40,000 employees once you take the congresspeople and all of their staffers and ancillary workers under that branch. The executive branch has six million employees. So when the men who founded this country were doing so and looking for not only a separation of powers but a balance between those powers, and they wanted to make sure that each branch could exert check and balance power over to the other, how could you possibly do that when you've got six million in one and 40,000 in the other? With all of the attendant economic interests and career interests and leverage that that brings. And so ever since World War II we've been drunk on power and that drunkenness has taken a 37:00form of out of control executive authority. And that out of control executive authority is one part of our problem, it's by no means the only problem we have. But on the one hand we've got an over-glut of executive authority, and on the other hand congress aint arguing 'cause congress is already bought out by the same companies that the executive services by saying he wants to go to war. So everybody ends up agreeing in the end at something which the executive can push through and therefore make it less accountable to the American people.

John: Why do you think the creation of the Air Force is of particular importance?

Eugene: Sure because it makes long range deployability far more possible and it gets us into this era of more saccharine sterile war. Boots on the ground is always dirty, ugly, muddy. But aircraft, they propose sort of surgical bombing and precision bombing and all kinds of other mythologies which as I learned during the Iraq War are mythologies. You know precision guided bombs promise something that ends up not being delivered on because for example during the Gulf War we had a much smaller proportion of precision guided bombs than we had 38:00during the Iraq War. Precision guidance had come a long way since then and yet we saw far higher civilian casualty count per time in the battlefield. And the reason that's important is because why was the Iraq War more bloody for civilians than the Gulf War and the answer is simple. When you have a new car with fancy new brakes, you drive faster. You take risks that you wouldn't take before. So now that we have all this fancy high tech equipment, precision guidance equipment, what we find out is that the lawyers in the Pentagon think it's far more OK to approve certain bombing missions that in an earlier war they would've said that's too close to a school ground. That's too close to a residential area. Now if they say oh if you're so precise, go on in boys. You know we gotta do what we gotta do. And then you wake up the next morning to reports like the ones in my film of whole families that were decimated because a bomb was supposed to have hit Saddam Hussein but instead it hit a small family compound. And so it seems to me that the Air Force adds to this notion of precision cleanliness 39:00and it takes therefore war out of the public's deep consideration. I found during the Iraq War that I was very welcome at West Point with my film. And part of the reason West Point was welcoming and for example the Air Force colleges were less so is because the Army tends to notice war in a far more bloody way because it hits them so personally. You lose so many more men in Army situations than you do in aircraft situations because they don't get the benefits of the military industrial complex. They don't really get the fancy new hardware. They don't get to drop bombs from high altitudes and not really see the consequences of their decision making. They suffer from something much more up close and personal. They don't get the body armor they need, they lose their buddies and therefore they might be a bit more open to thinking is this a worthy war? Is this worth the blood and treasure that we're spending on it?

John: The title of your book again is The American Way of War. I believe you've touched on parts of it already but can you summarize what 40:00the American Way of War is--

Eugene: Sure.

John: In the early 21st Century?

Eugene: The subtitle of the book, Guided Missiles, Misguided Men and a Republic in Peril is all about the way in which runaway warmaking, runaway militarism challenges the very fabric of the American republic. This country was founded as a republic, and we were founded by people who broke off from an empire. To see us drift over a couple of hundred years to have become an empire ourselves and to repeat so many of the errors of past empires means you can expect also that we will fall the way past empires have fallen, and what a tragedy that'll be. Because we were an empire that also was a beacon of democracy and that's a very sad combination of factors to be in, it's my great hope that Americans will at some point wake up and kind of go through a crisis of conscience, a bit of soul searching on who we want to be as a 41:00nation in the world. As we stand now we're essentially the drunk fat Elvis. Do you remember Elvis? You know Elvis was great looking and young and he made wonderful music, and the world loved him. And so he became very popular and with that popularity came power, well that's like America's upbringing. We emerged on the world scene, we were young, we were attractive, we had Elvis. We had lots of other goodies to offer the world and people really loved us and so we became very popular very fast and that made us very powerful. And like Elvis, you know Elvis ended up with his power marooned up in some hotel room in Vegas starting to get addicted to quick fixes and addictions. Fast food, alcohol, barbiturates, all the stuff that makes you into the tragic fat drunk bloated figure that he became. And America has done much the same thing, we became drunk on power and we drifted away quite tragically from that which made us great in the beginning. And what I would say is that Elvis faced a choice. He was the fat drunk Elvis and his friends certainly saw him that way. And I'm sure someone once said to 42:00him, what are you doing to yourself, where is this going? What do you want to be? And Elvis had a choice, and he had a choice against those impulses in his nature that were being serviced by that which brings out the worst in us. You know that old battle between the good in us and the bad in us, Elvis was letting his weaknesses prevail and letting those perversions prevail that were carrying away the better parts of his nature, the better angels in his nature. And he ended up dying the fat drunk Elvis. And I think America faces the same choice. We are being eroded by our addictions and by our convenient solutions and by our addiction to electricity, technology, gasoline, loud race cars, brutal violence in movies, pornographic conditions surrounding the way we view sexuality and children and the rest. This is a society that other societies find shocking in our runaway disregard for first principles. And we have a choice, are we going to allow capitalism and its cutthroat view of the human species as its target rather than as something dignified, are we going to let that system keep running 43:00away with the American dream? Or are we going to take control of it again and say I do have lines I will not cross and I won't allow you to keep buying and paying for my government to the detriment of us having a collectively possible future.

John: When I screened your film Why We Fight two nights ago, we had a discussion following the film. And a number of people pointed out a significant difference between your film Why We Fight and your following film, The House I Live In which looks at the war on drugs and its effect on poor people in the United States in that the latter film has with it a website and is part of a very integrated effort to combat 44:00the Draconian laws that have put so many people behind bars for too long that is really a source of a social movement. The point two evenings ago was that there was no such website for the first film, Why We Fight. There may be particular detailed reasons for the difference but we came to the conclusion that unlike war on drugs as profound an effort to combat that war on drugs is that the military industrial complex is so huge. It is so diffuse through our society that there seems to be no movement, no effort, no website that can come 45:00close to measuring up to the monstrosity of what is controlling our republic. One, what do you think about that observation? And two, if there is reason for activism and hope where should we look for it?

Eugene: To be fair there is a website at the end of Why We Fight. I think it's www.whywefight.info but that doesn't matter because I understand the point and it is true that the world has evolved since then. For example, if you go to the Why We Fight website compared to The House I Live In website, it's a study in the world having become far more organized about how people who see a film and want to do something can click something and do something. That gets into the whole question about whether clicking is enough. But it might at least open the door for you into the community of people who are going down to the town square and marching and protesting and inconveniencing 46:00congresspeople and writing them a letter and making sure that they know that their vote, that the public's vote might be affected by the way they decide on one thing or another, so much a part of our democratic life should be that way. So we have become much more organized as filmmakers today who find more and more ways also through the social media landscape of taking a film farther than just the one night experience but rather building a community of people out of the making of these films that are charged with the spirit of the films and then take that into the next day and the next day with ongoing current events that will keep unfolding. We've seen major changes in the war on drugs since I made my film, and I'm proud that my film played a role in that, but part of the way that it did was that we organized ourselves so that when people would click with interest at the end of the film, we would lead them to groups all over the country, the ACLU, Families Against Mandatory Minimums, the Drug Policy Alliance and others, fighting against this behemoth and those people could then become boots on the ground holding screenings in their communities or doing stuff that has nothing to do with movies in their communities, 47:00protesting wrong incarceration laws, protesting stop and frisk in New York which we successfully overturned, protesting the Three Strikes Law in California which we successfully overturned. We've had a devastating effect in fact on the war on drugs in recent years. And the film became a tool in that endeavor and it did so by carefully plotting its course in the social media landscape, getting in the hands of congresspeople, getting in the hands of everyday people, showing it at prisons so that word would spread from the very belly of the beast out. That was less possible in the day and age that I made the military industrial complex film. And surely the military industrial complex is built at a slightly higher altitude than the prison industrial complex. Prisons are on the ground, aircraft are in the air, wars are fought in foreign countries, prisons are here. The consequences of your decision making in war happens to a subset of the American population, like the thousands who died in our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the more than 100,000 who were maimed in them, the people 48:00we never hear of, the PTSD sufferers, those who've been physically maimed. That is still a tiny population compared to the 2.3 million people we have behind bars in America and the seven million we have under the supervision of the criminal justice system. So it's more in your face and therefore it's easier to go up against it and point to its trespasses in your local community perhaps than it is to do with a military industrial complex. But the military industrial complex for sure is also attackable, and it's attackable at every base. It's attackable at every arms manufacturer. It's attackable on the steps of congress. It's attackable in your local politician's office where they vote on whether some company is gonna get the right to build some armament in your district. It's attackable with your vote on whether you vote for candidates who support wars, or whether they ask the tough questions about war being a last resort. You can go on and on, there's a lot of activism you can do. And it's not just clicktivism, you know clicking a mouse to do activism. You can get very involved and write your congressman, call your congressman, write your local politicians, call your local politicians. And support the groups that 49:00work to go against the war machine, and there are many of them. And those groups, you can find those groups all over the internet and websites like antiwar.com that not only gives a great deal of information about America's terrible addiction to war and the way it just sort of proliferates into any geographic direction it can make an argument for, it's called threat inflation. You just point it somewhere in the map and come up with why something about those people is worth going to war toward and we need a specific weapon for it. And before long you've got a new gun in development. That's an incredibly corrupt process that there is a lot of light being shed on it. And you can learn a lot about it by going to certain websites like that commondreams.org is another one that focuses very heavily on military issues, and then also read what those who are in the defense sector believe themselves. Jane's Defense Weekly that tells you what the latest greatest next thing that's gonna come your way from the military sector is and you can read between the lines on how the sort of plate 50:00tectonics of the defense business is starting to impact the ground you are walking on.

John: I don't know if it's the first word you'd use to describe yourself, but the more I get to know you, I consider you to be something of a patriot.

Eugene: It'd be hard to call me a patriot 'cause I don't believe in nationalism. My family fled Nazi Germany in 1939 on my father's side and my mother's family fled czarist Russia at the time where the czars were conducting their pogroms against Jewish people. So it would be very hard for me after that history to then endorse nationalism 'cause I've seen nationalism turn so wrong, and I think America's a deeply nationalistic country that runs a grave danger of thinking we are exempt from the dangers of nationalism because after all we are the 51:00world, as that song reminds us. And that we have all the colors of the rainbow here and a whole melting pot. Well that doesn't stop us from defining our agenda as a nation and perhaps committing crimes of war, crimes of economics, crimes of embargo, crimes of health policy, labor policy, crimes like NAFTA, crimes like how we addressed AIDS for so long and crimes within our own borders, racist crimes against people within that apparently colorful melting pot. And so it would be very hard to say patriot. But I am deeply true to the founding principles that form this country, that the country has, as a practical matter come deeply unmoored from some of those first principles concerns me enormously and I suppose you would have to say I am incredibly loyal to the founding principles of the country and I want to see those founding principles respected. Remember that those founding principles themselves are flawed, they are themselves a work in progress. According to the constitution of the United States, at that time, a Black person was 3/5 of a person. So before we put the 52:00constitution up on a pedestal where it can do no wrong and everything it does is right, it was for its time a radically progressive positive document in the development of the human story and as such I believe in it as an example. And I believe that remarkable example by those imperfect men and yet nonetheless, a majestic achievement calls on us to continue to follow in that example into the modern era and continue to develop this country as a work in progress to be a standard bearer and an example to the world, a leader among equals in a world that increasingly needs moral leadership. And I do think there is a great deal in the history of the American story that supports our having that role. But not if we continue to be a nationalistic bully with a runaway corporate sector that has us to go war when it's profitable to do so.

John: It's my plan to use this oral history project in public high schools in the local area to collect these interviews and put them into 53:00an interactive website and have the website a part of curriculum in public high schools in history and civics courses and the like. In conclusion, is there anything you'd like to say to 16 and 17 year old boys and girls in this area of Eastern Pennsylvania, some of whom, by the way, may be considering joining the military.

Eugene: Sure, sure.

John: After graduation.

Eugene: One of the hard things is that in an economically challenged country like the United States, for a lot of young people, going into the military seems very often like sometimes the best game in town. You may get paid better there, you may have better opportunity there than you have flipping burgers down the street. But you do have to think about the larger cost, the larger cost to your life, the fact that 54:00you're signing up for a machine that may, not always, that may be using your body, your mind, your soul for purposes that are not being advertised to you and no one wants to be a slave. No one wants to have another be their master, and certainly not to be slave to a lie. And so I would warn young people when they hear about war, first of all when they hear about the military, they must understand that militaries fight wars. The idea that they're just going to be sort of involved in some holiday civilian military activity is a dangerous illusion and suddenly they find themselves on the battlefield inheriting all the tragedies that war brings to any life. And so I would warn people to be careful that military activity is like joining a war. No matter what you think you're getting into when you get into it, and that means you also have to have a sensitivity to when the next war is being advertised and understand it is a soldier's duty as well to object to an illegal order. Part of the Army code is that you are supposed to defy an illegal order. The problem is is that the military has been 55:00corrupted over these years by this extraordinary power that's developed where there's no safe haven. There's no sanctuary given to someone who wants to protest. So a Bradley Manning who senses that we're doing the wrong thing in the field of battle, and goes and tries to let that information be known to the pubic is suddenly seen as an enemy rather than a hero because he was given no sanctuary to air his concerns in an organized way. Mr Snowden, he went to talk to people higher up than him and they had no interest in hearing about his concerns. So you know you have to remember that you gotta listen very carefully and if you think the reasons for going to war are being given to you and that it truly is a last resort to something that is an urgent threat to people and people you care about or people that in this global village we need to care about, then that's one thing. But if you feel like it might just be a hobby war conducted by the powerful for any number of reasons that are being held privately and not shared with you, it might be better to flip burgers than to