Danny Sjursen & Oliver Stone Discuss Patriotic Dissent | Heyday Harvest 2020

hello to everybody who's tuning in for this uh great event here uh for heyday books and i'm really glad that you're tuning in and that you're interested in you know my latest with hey day and they're among their whole great uh corpus of work that they've put out this year in a strange time of pandemic uh you know my latest patriotic descent america in the age of endless war has been a a great project i'm so glad to do with heyday and for this you know brief little chat here i'm really glad to have uh the great director vietnam veteran you know critic intellectual thinker oliver stone with me we have had some really interesting conversations over the past few months and we're going to chat a bit about the themes of patriotism and both of our works and it's uh it's been first of all an amazing opportunity uh to have the space and and to some extent the prompt in a weird sense from from hay day from steve wasserman in particular to write this book and i've been thinking about a lot of these issues throughout my own experience in iraq and afghanistan and teaching back at west point a lot of evolving views and i've constantly been ruminating on patriotism and really the the genesis and i think this is an interesting thing i've published a book with another publisher a university press and never before did i get a challenge or an assignment from you know an editor at a website truth dig bob sheer and a a member of a press up in berkeley who basically said during a conversation about patriotism its philosophy i made the comment at a trip in l.a with steve and bob and said i don't think we're going to end the endless wars until we at least reframe the philosophy of patriotism and both bob and steve bob said well then you need to write it and bob turner stephen said and you need to publish it and steve said how fast can you write it uh and so that's been pretty interesting uh the start point for a lot of it was bob shearer's constant question of maybe a provoking if you know bob sheared all is patriotism toxic and frankly i think most authors write a book and they already have their thesis in mind even if it's a scholarly work uh i actually wasn't so sure how i was going to answer this or what the book would be i thought about saying patriotism is talking toxic we should throw the whole baby out with the bathwater in the end in the book i come down on the side of in a time of crisis it would be obscene not to aspire to a different kind of patriotism that tries to be the best version of ourselves and this is an interesting moment for this book to come out it was not planned this way but maybe the title should have been patriotism in a time of pandemic to play on the spanish author's novel but this journey you know of early writing uh early descent uh that i've taken along with heyday it brought me into contact with a lot of interesting people it's not the only reason but there are a lot of connections and and one of those folks over the last few months uh is the great oliver stone who had been connected to bob shearer uh previously in life and in one sense i think his work if i may order uh life and work has at varying levels been you know an analysis uh a commentary on some of the same themes among others of patriotism americanism the human condition itself whether it's platoon or salvador to born on the 4th of july heaven and earth and even the untold history sort of non-fiction documentary that was really such a great work to his own new book which is out now you know relatively new chasing the light and we've spoken so much about this a memoir that really leads up to to your 40th year or just a little bit older than i am now so with that you know that's a long way of saying to what extent oliver and we've had these conversations but maybe not on this exact inflection you know how has your our career and life experience been influenced by evolving views on patriotism americanism nationalism sure yeah thank you danny nice build up there uh i think your approach is very intellectual and i i respect that on you you you surprised me uh when i first met you here was a soldier who had been in afghanistan who was able to write about it in a very clear-cut and strong protesting manner i was that's obviously i respected you for having served for having believed and having felt like you were duped and then the more you investigated it it seemed like you were getting more and more you realized where the garbage was and the rubbish we hear and that's very important because people don't go far enough they say oh that war was a bummer this was that blah blah blah and they drift off into some kind of semi obsolescence you stayed with it you attacked it and you keep going after it and there's numerous examples of corruption in war and i think you pointed out many of them in vietnam uh i was young and 21 22 and i served i i didn't complain i went there and i volunteered my father was conservative lieutenant colonel in world war ii and i bought the whole uh story line about communism in asia uh but of course what i saw was with my own eyes and experience as a soldier was different than what was written about propagandized to me about why we were fighting it there was no sense of fighting an ideological foe that was threatening the united states it was a local affair oh fought over independence of vietnam they'd been fighting this war for centuries it's an old war for independence it went against the chinese it went against the french and then it went and the japanese and then it morphed into an american war it was completely fraudulent in its beginnings in its origins and our intention and what we were talking about we had to lie our way into the war we all know about the tonkin golf incidents and the numerous other things that occurred under lyndon johnson but this is not the place to discuss and the patriotism issue came up later not in the war i found in the war itself there were two different groups of people generally breaking it down into the the elias faction let's call it red state blue state if you want people who really believed that we had to just go through with this and many of them i found were racist against the vietnamese and were willing to kill them rather rather without thinking there was another element that was against that it was many of them were black soldiers too because it was not their war they felt and here they were fighting oriental people and killing them and why they were sort of what it just was part of the senselessness of it they didn't see the concept driving the war of patriotism so i would say there was a big divide in in vietnam as there may be in in later wars but i think it was because well you you can talk about the modern wars i'm talking about the vietnam when at that point the issue of patriotism became an issue and that was an ugly one because you go back to the states and love it or leave it was the idea you know if you don't like it get out all these kids 200 000 of them went up to canada and they were to avoid the draft and frankly they were men of conscience they actually did something they didn't want to serve and they left and of course that was a big issue people wanted to punish them and eventually they were pardoned by i believe carter president carter but that was when you i started to hear this love it or leave it business and i've heard it all my life now because i became a critic of the of the country not only of vietnam but eventually of our policies of warfare in general and our aggression and our trying to police the world and being an imperial empire basically with 900 bases all over the world almost every country and then the cia working as a a softer version of the military but not really uh as a as another kind of an army capitalism's invisible army they called it and they did a great job of subverting governments spoiling elections doing all kinds of hokey pokey hanky-panky stuff and upsetting the process of natural process of people's wishes being expressed in various forms of elections and uh the world has been we lost there must have been an america before world war ii i believe that was it was more isolationist but we we minded our own business somewhere in world war ii the internationalists the globalists got control of this government's policy and they have been basically ramming it down our throats for 70 80 years and it's in the name of democracy it's in the name of freedom these are very vague terms and very subjective terms i've found in my lifetime uh so patriotism is an issue that has really haunted america and blinded it and we're now in these wars that have nothing to do with our well-being as a country or our national security nothing at all they're trying to tell us that we have to control everything from china to russia on all borders and we have to lay down an international order well that won't work clearly it won't work because it's right it's already it's leading to so many problems where we have engaged we're now in state state of alert against venezuela against cuba against iran against north korea against russia which is most dangerous of all and china i i see and at the same time i'm i'm enough of an american to really wonder why is there no peace party in this country why what happened to this when john kennedy was president i i liked what he said at the peace speech in june 63. he said i'm talking about peace he says i'm not about a pox americana governed by weapons of war but a real piece for everybody a piece that can work for the russians a piece that can work for the chinese he was broad in his generosity and that was a vision of america that really works it's it's not enforcing peace it's letting it happen because it's a natural state there will always be disputes yes but as franklin roosevelt once said these have a tendency of going away these disputes let them pass let live and let live roosevelt and kennedy were much more in the american tradition for me than the presidents that have fallen because essentially i feel the american government has been captured by the intelligence agencies and the war state the the pentagon that's where the big money is uh the lobbies the people who work for them the contractors is enormous business trillions of dollars spent every year and uh it's it's we're in a grip of that it's a form of slavery we have no talk of peace in our country no talk of peace we only talk about enemies something is fatally wrong with this concept of quote patriotism you know so much of what you said oliver is is is resonant because on one angle i want to say wow you know the vietnam war to most people was ancient history i was kind of historically inclined even child so it was it was there for me but i think about how we're an intergenerational connection we fought in wars of two different generations and yet so much has kind of repeated itself and that's a bit of a cliche because there are changes and i think what you said about the lack of a peace movement uh is is very important and and that's a big change to a certain extent from your generation and it involves the way we frame patriotism because if patriotism is just pageantry if it's just hegemony if it's just my country right or wrong uh this this is a this really ties into more chauvinist nationalism which is an accident of birth and the fact that that didn't go obsolete when a million soldiers died in the first four months of world war one uh is is crazy but you mentioned a time before world war ii and and just two days ago i was giving a speech at the the graveside of smedley butler the marine general who some people have heard of but a lot of folks have forgotten right out there and uh why is there no smedley butler today is a corollary to why is there no peace movement today and in one sense you could say because the draft has taken a lot of responsibility from the people so now i served really in a praetorian guard type of professionalized nearly a foreign legion except with our own people and lots of immigrants interestingly but the or the this was actually organized this event by libertarian anti-war veterans who were self-styled republicans some of whom like trump and that's interesting because i think it shows that there's a lack of a mainstream sort of democratic party or mainstream peacenik kind of group so that that ground has been seeded and i think that that's particularly dangerous but there are rumblings i mean there are reasons for hope in the sense that there are rumblings among soldiers across the boundaries even in this volunteer force it seems that the volunteer army was was designed in order to just become the tool of the pageantry pastry one of the three types i showed and i wanted to ask you a little bit about some of your films as they relate to this but one of the things that i noticed about soldiers coming back and you said how you know you and i have certainly had a different uh timeline of of when we got active in in descent but also different experience in terms of officer enlisted but we were both ground troops with using our boots mostly and we both saw that the gap between what they told us and what we needed to do what we were really doing was different i found that about you know most soldiers who've come back in this professional force today and this may have been similar to vietnam where you know about 40 of them are they still hate and they're racist against the afghans and uh and the iraqis which is odd because they're patriots too just for their own country about fifty percent though of my and i'm talking about hundreds of guys that i still know are just apathetic you know they don't believe we're gonna win but they're just like professional nihilist sort of like nothing can be done and really only a small crew is a participatory and so i wanted to ask you know kind of as our last little bit here you know in some of your take platoon and born on the fourth of july for example they're very different but they run into some of the same themes you know one is more about the journey it's more about the journey from belief to seeing the gap and follow through to actually getting active in dissent through ron kovic who we both know uh and have the pleasure to know but platoon of course is more brotherhood at the ground level but the thing that was interesting about platoon to me is that you complicated that notion of brotherhood most of the time it's oh it doesn't matter if you're fighting for your country because you just love your brothers but you showed that there was a tribal and civil war aspect in the film and in your experience and uh you know briefly you know how how did that complicate your view of you know patriotism what this is all for fighting for your country because you didn't just fall for the platitude no but i never felt i never fell for the west point thing which they always hear about either because i didn't i was not educated in the military i just went in as a young man and i was trying to survive and be good and do do my job and i became a good soldier eventually although i never told you but the first time i saw of yet an nva at night running towards me across a rice paddy i froze totally all my training went out the window the first time i saw one and the guy in the next hole fired his claymore so that kicked off the thing and uh thank god because i i don't know if i i was i was just frozen how could i kill another human being he was running at me and well he didn't know i was there he was just in this direction and he was a night ambush and uh i got wounded that night but that was i was just thinking about the other day how how difficult it is to make that first kill to to do something you know it's not it's not natural it's not a natural thing to fire a rifle and kill somebody make no mistake there were many days i tell people that you're not a coward or a or a hero every day all the time most of the time you go back and forth because the number of times i hid behind my humvee and pretended to talk on the radio and the next day maybe i did well what i saw in platoon and i was in four different platoons three of them were combat plates 25th infantry and then first cavalry and uh it was every it was all over the place it was this divide there was people of a certain type who preferred to smoke marijuana and hang out and listen to music and i thought they kept the situa they kept the they kept the atmosphere human in other words you'd go back to the rear not in the field you'd go back to the rear and you'd have some moments of r r relaxation you could hang out with guys in your troop smoke dope listen to some to motown or in some cases psychedelic rock and hang out and that kept that was so important to the morale of certain people then there was another group that came back and what'd they do they played poker and they and they drank a lot and they acted pretty macho they thought people who smoked grass were really stupid and and something was wrong with them and they were alien to them but there was a good split in these platoons i mean we had a lot of black soldiers and a lot of them smoke dope i mean so did i i got into it and it kept me human kept me i came back from that war yeah i was still a human being and some of those guys came back to that war they were really screwed up because they never allowed themselves to have human feelings towards not only the enemy but towards the civilians killing civilians or hurting civilians was often outlet for people who couldn't get to the enemy they couldn't find the enemy the enemy was out there remember mili those guys never had contact with the enemy they were blown up by the enemy they were mined they were ambushed if you remember the story of the 199th they got to that town that that village that day and they were in a bad mood man they were told there was nba nobody was in the village except nva and what'd they do they slaughtered 500 plus people women children in that village not one enemy shot was fired at them that was a degree of built up rage and that is only because of they just couldn't find the enemy that they were supposed to be finding they wanted people to shoot at them but nobody was shooting at them so you create the uh you create the violence and that's often the case i know in afghanistan there was a lack of presence of the enemy at one point i know that they were patrolling them play heard they were patrolling the places they were going back through and through these villages and creating tension where there was no tension in other words they'd won the war early on but they didn't know it and they they they they stayed on until the enemy began to appear as if willed into being [Music] i mean that that's great because it i think what it demonstrates to me is that you know afghanistan i once described on the 10th anniversary of 911 they sent a reporter from reuters to me to my little outpost because you know i was from new york and i had a firefighter family so who better to get the comments and i got in some trouble because i was the first time i was ever in print uh in any newspaper i said you know i don't see any connection 911 here in southern afghanistan i'm not fighting al qaeda how can you hate teenage farm boys with guns and i was quoted as saying that and i couldn't really get any real trouble but the uh my colonel said oh did you really have to say that you couldn't just give them what they wanted you had to complicate things uh and i think that you know as we wrap up here you know your your work complicated everything from the start because you experienced it and your thinking did and you said you know you have chris taylor speaking and saying that we didn't fight the enemy we fought ourselves and the enemy was in us and so as i'm you know thinking about this patriotism issue today everyone talks about tribal times divided country and i think the point is that our soldiers are not above that they're not some adulated separate class um but at the same time you know i am i'm never optimistic but i think there are cautious reasons for hope to a certain extent in that you know 73 of afghan veterans are against that war now for a variety of reasons and i think the question is whether you know we're gonna fight internally and let ourselves be duped or if the at least some of the military folks are gonna form a vanguard of descent and try to catalyze folks towards a new view of it and understanding that like martin luther king said we shouldn't you know confuse disloyal you know disloyalty and descent but um well yeah as always you know we love we love talking about these issues and and oliver and i can go on about this probably indefinitely no one has ever accused me of being uh too brief and i doubt that that's a singular experience for the two of us but thank you again to the audience the attendees for tuning in to a new kind of uh a festival but but hopefully also uh equally great and uh thank you for your interest in in my book patriotic descent and oliver's chasing the light and i think that just having these conversations and carrying them home with you is a step in the right direction keep an eye out because we're going to be active with these issues not just talking about them so thank you very much for coming

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Length: 23min 21sec (1401 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 10 2020