We hear much these days about how history should be taught. Although the Civil War was fought and supposedly ended 160 years ago, after the last cannon was shot and formal surrender was signed, a new war began. We are living through it still.
Forgive me for quoting William Faulkner once again, but he said it so well, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” The past may not be dead, but there were definitely efforts to bury it, and Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and author, Howell Raines, set about over six decades to un-bury some of that past, resulting in his most recent book, SILENT CAVALRY: HOW UNION SOLDIERS FROM ALABAMA HELPED SHERMAN BURN ATLANTA – AND THEN GOT WRITTEN OUT OF HISTORY, published by Crown.
Howell Raines was born in Birmingham, AL in 1943, and as you will hear, his people go way back in the hill country of northern Alabama. You can be forgiven for not knowing that they voted not to secede from the union during the Civil War, and that they were mocked with the moniker “THE FREE STATE OF WINSTON.” They had hoped to be neutral and left alone by both the Union & the Confederacy, but when the latter legislated the first military conscription in our country’s history, and ruthlessly hounded the 22 counties of northern Alabama to purloin their young men, thousands of them fled north and volunteered for the Union army, where they were formed into the bi-racial 1st Alabama Cavalry, and served with distinction. Howell Raines documents the significant role they played in restoring our union, as well as the collusion between northern and southern elites to erase their story.
Howell Raines began his journalism career, 60 years ago as a reporter for the Birmingham Post-Herald. In 1971 he became the political editor of the Atlanta Constitution. He became the NYT national correspondent based in Atlanta in 1979, becoming the Times editorial page editor in 1993 in New York City, where he was known for “the aggressive, colloquial style of his editorials.”
His books include a novel, WHISKEY MAN, set in Depression era Alabama and based roughly on his own family history; and an oral history of the civil-rights movement, MY SOUL IS RESTED: MOVEMENT DAYS IN THE DEEP SOUTH REMEMBERED. We spoke with him via Skype on January 22, 2024.
Our guests today on Forthright Radio are two journalists from the non-profit on-line news organization, The Intercept, Jon Schwartz and Elise Swain.
We watched in horror on October 7, 2023 as Hamas gunmen launched surprise attacks on Israeli military and civilian targets along the Gaza border during the Jewish holiday of Simchat Torah. It came 50 years and a day after Egyptian and Syrian forces launched an assault during Yom Kippur to retrieve territory Israel had taken during the conflict in 1967. The New York Times reports that there were about 1,200 deaths, including 766 Israeli civilians, 36 of them children, and 373 members of the security forces, plus approximately 250 Israeli civilians and soldiers taken hostage, including 30 children. The attack is considered the bloodiest day in Israel’s modern history, and the deadliest for Jews since the Holocaust.
In response, The Israeli Defense Forces launched and sustained brutal retaliatory bombings and near total restrictions on water, food, fuel and other necessities for life, vowing to continue til Hamas has been destroyed. As of January 11, 2024, more than 23,000 Palestinians have been killed, the overwhelming majority of them women and children. Unknown numbers of others remain buried beneath the rubble of the obliterated homes, hospitals, mosques, schools, churches, and other crucial infrastructure.
International efforts for a cease fire have been thwarted by the US Government in the United Nations, even as President Biden has gone around Congress to send more US weapons to Israel.
Meanwhile, South Africa has brought a case to the International Court of Justice, accusing Israel of genocide in Gaza. In the United States and around the world, huge demonstrations continue to occur in support of g an immediate and sustained cease-fire. Many of these demonstrations are organized by Jewish peace groups, such as Jewish Voice for Peace, Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, Rabbis for Ceasefire.
These things and much more, leave me uncharacteristically unable to process the emotions that arise. The horror, the knowledge that through my government, without whom this could not and would not continue, I am complicit, my feelings of helplessness to affect change. So, the piece that Jon Schwartz and Elise Swain published on The Intercept on Christmas Eve, Merry Christmas! We All Belong in the Hague, spoke to me and moved me to invite them to Forthright Radio.
Elise Swain is Photo Editor of The Intercept. Prior to this role, she was an associate producer for the Intercepted podcast, while working across various mediums for The Intercept, including writing, photography, video, illustration, and audio. Before joining The Intercept, she worked as a freelance artist and has a BFA in photo and video from the School of Visual Arts. She is based in Brooklyn, New York.
Before joining First Look Media, Jon Schwarz worked for Michael Moore’s Dog Eat Dog Films and was a research producer for Moore’s “Capitalism: A Love Story.” He’s contributed to many publications, including the New Yorker, the New York Times, The Atlantic, the Wall Street Journal, Mother Jones, and Slate, as well as NPR and “Saturday Night Live.” In 2003, he collected on a $1,000 bet that Iraq would have no weapons of mass destruction.
We are especially grateful to David Rovics for permission to include songs from his recent collection, NOTES FROM A HOLOCAUST IN STANDARD TUNING, in the web post of this edition of Forthright Radio. You can find more of his songs here: https://soundcloud.com/davidrovics/sets/gaza
The heading photo is of an American flag flying behind barbed wire and fencing at Guantanamo Bay on June 27, 2023 by Elise Swain. Used with permission.
Her latest book, TRUE WEST: MYTH AND MENDING ON THE FAR SIDE OF AMERICA, was published this Fall by Torrey House Press. She received a doctorate in Environmental History from Montana State University in 2017, her dissertation focused on Mormon settlement and public land conflicts. She has studied various religious traditions over the years, with particular attention to how cultures view landscape and wildlife. The rural American west, pastoral communities of northern Mongolia, and the grasslands of East Africa have been her main areas of interest. She is the president of the Board of Directors of Wild Earth Guardians.
Although TRUE WEST focuses primarily on the intermountain west, what goes on in this region is having tremendous effect on our national politics and well-being. Just two days ago, the Colorado Supreme Court decided in favor of a suit brought by CO Republican and unaffiliated voters, working with Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, CREW, against CO Secretary of State Jena Griswold and Donald J. Trump, taking advantage of a CO law that allows voters to challenge a candidate’s eligibility. In this case the eligibility was challenged under Section 3 of the 14th amendment, claiming that the former president had engaged insurrection , based on his actions surrounding the Jan. 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol attack by his supporters at his urging. As you will hear in this interview with Betsy Gaines Quammen, recorded in the Beyond the Deep End Studio on the Winter Solstice of 2023, extremist organizing in this region over more than a decade contributed to that insurrection. We share it with you now.
Stuart A. Reid is an executive editor at Foreign Affairs magazine, and his book, THE LUMUMBA PLOT: THE SECRET HISTORY OF THE CIA AND A COLD WAR ASSASSINATION, is published by Knopf. You might wonder why we would focus on events in The Congo back in 1960, when there is so much happening right now.
Adam Hochschild, author of King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa, writes: “This is the book we’ve needed for years: a thorough, judicious, eloquent account of one of the twentieth century’s pivotal moments. Patrice Lumumba’s murder was a tragedy not just for his young and troubled country, but also for the way it stimulated Washington’s illusion that America could rearrange the world to its liking. Stuart Reid captures this ominous turning point with the clear-eyed wisdom it deserves.”
Beyond any of these considerations, the story of Patrice Lumumba is the tragic, heroic tale of a man born into dismal, colonial circumstances, with the indomitable thirst for knowledge and the chutzpah and savvy to rise to become the first prime minister of his country, the former Belgian Congo, and who, within within mere months is assassinated under the direction of the CIA.
Our guest, Stuart Reid, spent 6 years researching and writing this very engaging narrative. In addition to my appreciation of that, I am doubly grateful to him, because after engaging in an hour long interview, which I was then horrified to discover had not been recorded for unknown reasons, he graciously agreed to do a second interview, which I offer to you now.
Articles, etc., pertinent to this interview:
Stuart A. Reid is an executive editor at Foreign Affairs magazine, and his book, THE LUMUMBA PLOT: THE SECRET HISTORY OF THE CIA AND A COLD WAR ASSASSINATION, is published by Knopf. You might wonder why we would focus on events in The Congo back in 1960, when there is so much happening right now. Adam Hochschild, author of King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa, writes: “This is the book we’ve needed for years: a thorough, judicious, eloquent account of one of the twentieth century’s pivotal moments. Patrice Lumumba’s murder was a tragedy not just for his young and troubled country but also for the way it stimulated Washington’s illusion that America could rearrange the world to its liking. Stuart Reid captures this ominous turning point with the clear-eyed wisdom it deserves.” Furthermore, Yuval Noah Harari, author of Sapiens, said this in a recent interview with Ari Melber about why it’s important to study history.
Beyond any of these considerations, the story of Patrice Lumumba is the tragic, heroic tale of a man born into dismal, colonial circumstances, with the indomitable thirst for knowledge and the chutzpah and savvy to rise to become the first prime minister of his country, the former Belgian Congo, and who, within within mere months is assassinated under the direction of the CIA. Our guest, Stuart Reid, spent 6 years researching and writing this very engaging narrative. In addition to my appreciation of that, I am doubly grateful to him, because after engaging in an hour long interview, which I was then horrified to discover had not been recorded for unknown reasons, he graciously agreed to do a second interview, which I offer to you now.
LUMUMBA (2001) From the director of I AM NOT YOUR NEGRO. Made in the tradition of such true-life political thrillers as Malcolm X and JFK, Raoul Peck’s award-winning LUMUMBA is a gripping epic that dramatizes for the first time the rise and fall of legendary African leader Patrice Lumumba. When the Congo declared its independence from Belgium in 1960, Lumumba became the first Prime Minister of the newly independent state. Called “the politico of the bush” by journalists of the day, he became a lightning rod of Cold War politics as his vision of a united Africa gained him powerful enemies in Belgium and the U.S. “Peck, who assayed Lumumba’s life in a 1991 documentary, now paces the doomed man’s story like the genuine thriller that it is.” – Ella Taylor, L.A. Weekly Available for free on Kanopy.
Dannagal Goldthwaite Young is a professor of communication and political science at the University of Delaware. In addition to being an award winning scholar, she has also been an improvisational comedian. Her 2020 TED Talk (link below) explaining how our psychology shapes our politics and how media exploit these relationships has been viewed over 2 Million times. She publishes extensively in the popular press with essays and Op-eds in outlets including Vox.com, The Washington Post, and The Atlantic. Her earlier book is Irony and Outrage: The Polarized Landscape of Rage, Fear, and Laughter in the United States.
Her book, WRONG: HOW MEDIA, POLITICS, AND IDENTITY DRIVE OUR APPETITE FOR MISINFORMATION, was just published by Johns Hopkins University Press.
As Jaime Settle, author of FRENEMIES: HOW SOCIAL MEDIA POLARIZES AMERICA, writes of it ‘Powerful, distinctive, and utterly compelling, Wrong argues that the way we satisfy our needs for comprehension, control, and community is shaped by our social identities, which are at the core of both the supply and demand for misinformation. Because politicians and the media know this fact, they behave strategically in order to structure politics through this perspective.”
We spoke with Dr. Young on November 7, 2023 via Skype.
Links to articles/videos pertinent to this interview:
In this edition of Forthright Radio our guest is journalist, author, environmentalist, Greg King. I first became aware of Greg’s work back in the late 1980s, when we who lived in the remnants of the once great redwood biome organized to protect what remained of that ecosystem from voracious predatory capitalists, who proudly vowed to “log to infinity.”
Greg King in All Species Grove 1987 (courtesy of Greg King)
Greg is the fifth generation of his family to live in Sonoma and Mendocino Counties of northern CA, – his ancestors having arrived in the 1860s and owned what was then one of the largest redwood mills, the King-Starrett mill in Monte Rio. The The King Range Mountains were named for his great-great uncle, John King, who lived north of Westport in Mendocino County, due to his hospitality to the government surveyor before his mapping that steep coastal range in the Lost Coast. Long before Greg was born, the last of the great redwood forests in Sonoma County were cut, but there were second growth stands and massive stumps of 20’ or greater diameter which served as his childhood playground. After graduating from UC Santa Cruz in 1985, he joined the staff of the West Sonoma County Paper, now called the Bohemian, where he won his first of two Lincoln Steffens Investigative Journalism Award.
Investigating Louisiana-Pacific’s “logging to infinity” in his neighborhood led him to the Maxxam Corporation’s hostile takeover, financed by junk bonds, of Humboldt County’s Pacific Lumber Company and the ensuing accelerated destruction of the last intact, ancient redwood groves in private hands to pay off the debt. Exploring these untouched forests with the largest, oldest trees on the planet inspired a reverence and awe unlike anything he had ever experienced. The rest, as they say, is history.
In his book, THE GHOST FOREST: Racists, Radicals, and Real Estate in the California Redwoods, he describes how he left his home and promising career to devote his life to identifying and protecting those few remaining giants and the biome centered on them. He is credited with mapping the remaining groves, including The Headwaters Forest, as well as pioneering tree sitting to prevent logging of redwoods in Humboldt County.
Greg King on traverse during a tree-sit in the middle of 1,000 acre All Species Grove, September 1987. Note sleeping platform on the tree in the background, tied under the lowest branch 150′ above the forest floor. (photo by Mary Beth Nearing, courtesy of Greg King)
What might have been merely a memoir became a shocking exposé of the all too successful efforts of financiers and industrialists via their creation of the Save the Redwoods League in 1917, to subvert the growing desire of the public to protect and preserve the remaining redwoods, by promoting instead small “beauty strips” along roadways to hide devastating clearcuts. As one of the first to delve into The League’s archives at U. C. Berkeley’s Bancroft Library, Greg followed the history back to the federal acts of the 19th century, that allowed well organized land fraud syndicates to place what had been 2 million acres of undisturbed ancient forests into private corporate hands. His research led him to the connections between the Save the Redwood League creators and the so-called “scientific racism” eugenics movement, which was so helpful to the Nazis in Germany, and which still plagues our nation even today. We spoke with Greg King on October 18, 2023 via Skype.
In 1996 more than 8,000 people protested ancient redwood logging at the Pacific Lumber log deck along Yager Creek, in Humboldt County. More than 1,000 were arrested. It remains the largest single-day arrest number for an environmental protest in U.S. history. photo by Greg King
On Wed., October 25, The Bozeman Film Society will be screening Butcher’s Crossing, which was filmed in just 19 days entirely in Montana, mostly on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation. Glacier National Park and Nevada City in Madison County were also locations. We spoke with producer, Molly Conners, about Butcher’s Crossing and producing it here in Montana.
Molly Conners is founder and CEO of Phiphen, an independently owned film, television, and digital media company focused on producing creative, smart productions for a global audience. Her films have been Emmy nominated, and she has produced or executive produced 35 feature films over the last 15 years that have earned a total of 4 Academy Awards and 11 Academy Award nominations. Some of Molly’s notable credits include the 2014 Academy Award-winner BIRDMAN, the 2009 Academy Award-nominated FROZEN RIVER, as well as the films: KILLER JOE, THE IMMIGRANT, JOE, and RULES DON’T APPLY.
Her latest film, Butcher’s Creek, is based on the seminal 1960 novel of the same name by John Edward Williams, with a screenplay co-written by director, Gabe Polsky. An epic frontier adventure, Butcher’s Crossing, is a riveting commentary on human nature, ambition, masculinity, and man’s relationship to his natural environment. Academy Award winner Nicolas Cage stars in this tragedy about the last of the buffalo hunters in the Old West. Young greenhorn, Will Andrews, played by Fred Hechinger, has left his undergraduate life at Harvard to find adventure in the wild west. He teams up with Cage’s character, buffalo hunter, Miller, a taciturn frontiersman offering a hunt of an unprecedented number of buffalo for their pelts in a secluded valley in the Colorado Rockies. Their crew must survive an arduous journey, where the harsh elements will test everyone’s resolve, leaving their sanity on a knife’s edge.
We spoke with Molly Conners on October 13, 2023 via Skype.
Robert P. Jones is the author of the book, THE HIDDEN ROOTS of WHITE SUPREMACY and the PATH to a SHARED AMERICAN FUTURE, published by Simon and Schuster.
His earlier award winning books include WHITE TOO LONG: THE LEGACY OF WHITE SUPREMACY IN AMERICAN CHRISTIANITY; THE END OF WHITE CHRISTIAN AMERICA; and PROGRESSIVE AND RELIGIOUS: HOW CHRISTIAN, JEWISH, MUSLIM AND BUDDHIST LEADERS ARE MOVING BEYOND THE CULTURE WARS AND TRANSFORMING AMERICAN PUBLIC LIFE.
In this latest book, he reminds us that the enslavement of Africans was not America’s original sin, but rather the continuation of a pattern of genocide and dispossession that began with the first European contact with the Indigenous peoples of this land. His reframing of America’s origins explores how the founders of the US could build a democratic society on the foundations of mass racial violence, and why this paradox survives today in the form of White Christian Nationalism. Through three stories from our history and current re-examination and reckonings by those living today, he has illuminated the possibility of a new American future in which we finally fulfill the promise of true democracy.
We spoke with him on September 20, 2023 via Skype.
Naomi Oreskes is Henry Charles Lea Professor of the History of Science and Affiliated Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard University. A world renowned earth scientist, historian and public speaker, she is the author or co-author of nine books, including the best-selling book, Merchants of Doubt, and a leading voice on the role of science in society, the reality of anthropogenic climate change, and the role of disinformation in blocking climate action.
Her latest book, co-written with Erik Conway, is The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market, published by Bloomsbury Press.
Andrew Seidel is a constitutional and civil rights attorney and the author of two books: The Founding Myth: Why Christian Nationalism Is Un-American and American Crusade: How the Supreme Court is Weaponizing Religious Freedom. He’s also co-editor of an academic text, Law and Religion: Cases and Materials 5th Edition, with Prof. Leslie Griffin of UNLV law school.
He has been fighting to keep state and church separate for more than a decade. Currently, Andrew is the Vice President of Strategic Communications at Americans United for Separation of Church and State, the largest organization fighting for that founding principle. Previously, he served as a constitutional attorney at the Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF) beginning in 2011 and later as the Director of Strategic Response, running a nimble unit known as the Strategic Response Team.
Andrew Seidel is a Senior Correspondent at Religion Dispatches, a prolific author of op-eds and scholarly articles. He organized and contributed to the groundbreaking report “Christian Nationalism at the January 6, 2021, Insurrection,” which was published by the Baptist Joint Committee and FFRF and which aroused considerable congressional interest. He has appeared on Fox News to debate Bill O’Reilly, MSNBC, and hundreds of other media outlets.
Andrew graduated cum laude from Tulane University (’04) with a B.S. in neuroscience and environmental science and magna cum laude from Tulane University Law School (’09, part of the first post-Katrina class), where he was awarded the Haber J. McCarthy Award for excellence in environmental law. He studied human rights and international law at the University of Amsterdam and traveled the world on Semester at Sea. Andrew completed his Master of Laws at Denver University Sturm College of Law (’11) with a perfect GPA and was awarded the Outstanding L.L.M. Award for his work as the Erik Bluemel International Environmental Law Fellow.
Before dedicating his life and law degree to keeping state and church separate, Andrew was a Grand Canyon tour guide and an accomplished nature photographer.
Tennessee Pastor burning THE FOUNDING MYTH: Why Christian Nationalism Is Un-American
Forthright Radio 