 which I appreciate the engagement of this community so much. So welcome to another End the War episode from Code Pink to help bring us all out of the fog of war and into the sanity of peace. I'm your host, Jodi Evans. It's been another devastating few days in the United States of America. Children and people of color murdered in Buffalo, the Orange County and now Texas. The violence of weapons, the deaths of innocent people, the wars come home to our communities. This was all as Biden and Congress voted 40, over $40 billion to Ukraine, almost 20 billion of it to weapons. And over half of US taxpayer money is going to weapons and war and yet we continue to be shocked to buy the violence in our streets and not see any connection to the valuing of weapons and murdering innocent children and people of color around the world and what happens in our streets. Whereas Katelyn Johnston said last night how militarism has created a profoundly sick empire that's held together by trauma and lies and poverty and inequality, mass scale, syops and war propaganda. So a few weeks ago I read, I was shocked to read that Kagan had told Washington the idea that we can win a nuclear war. So I reached out to our guest today, Colonel Larry Wilkerson to help us think about this as we reached out to him at the beginning of the bombing of Ukraine so he could help us see through that fog and you can see that webinar to go back and to keep helping yourself be smarter in this fog. Lolo put it in the chat and I wanna thank Emily, Dorell and Lola for supporting on tech and the chat today. But the question was warmongering has it now gone nuclear but then at Davos this week, we were shocked to see that Biden is now on the rate of war criminal Kissinger and Biden's talking about military engagement in the Taiwan-China conversation as the State Department changes its website and takes down their agreement to a one China policy and creates out of sin air a new policy without China at the table. So there's lots to talk about. My deepest gratitude for our guests, Colonel Wilkerson for joining us today. For those few of you here who might not know who he is, he's a professor at the College of William and Mary and a retired United States Army Colonel and the former chief of staff to United States Secretary of State Colin Powell and a brilliant critical voice against US militarism. Thank you so much for joining us today, Larry. Thanks for having me, Jody and to all your listeners. Thank you. So before we start the question I reached out to you for, what do you think about Biden being to the right of Kissinger? Well, I guess you saw that Henry's backed up a little bit, especially about Ukraine. And well that he should, anyone who is as, who had a MacKinder person, a Heartland person, a geopolitical thinker as Kissinger, even in his dodeach as it were, knows that what we're doing is really dangerous, extremely dangerous. And the fact that we're doing it and the way we're doing it is reprehensible. We don't give a hang about Ukraine. We're using Ukraine and the conflict there to get to Russia. Ukraine is not a democracy. It's as far cry from a democracy as probably any other place on the face of the earth, especially those we've led into NATO like Montenegro, who happens to have the distinction of being the leading country in the world in terms of automobile theft. So we've led some real characters into NATO, but we didn't let Ukraine, thank goodness. It's not a democracy. It does have neo-Nazis in it. That is one thing Putin was right about. I have some Ukrainian friends who've told me about there being beaten to a pulp literally by these Nazis when they were in Ukraine. So we're using that essentially to try and destabilize Russia to regime change in Moscow, to get rid of Putin, destabilize Russia. Why are we doing that? We're doing that to clear that flank so we can take China on. And that brings you to the statements that you were talking about earlier and why are we going from strategic ambiguity with respect to Taiwan to strategic clarity, really strategic clarity. I think there are a group of people inside the government like Victoria Newland, like her husband outside the government, Kagan, and like other people, David Ignatius at the Washington Post. They're shills for the government in London, in Berlin, in Paris, in Moscow. The media are shills for the various governments. They are not acting in the capacity they should be acting, challenging government policy and so forth. They are actually propagandists for the government which is a real dangerous shift. They've been moving this way for some time but ratings and so forth bringing them that sort of attitude. But now they're there. I mean, they are propagandists. I've followed this war in Ukraine and one day the American media is lying through its teeth. Maybe it doesn't know it's lying through its teeth because it's so incompetent, so unprofessional, doesn't know what it's talking about. And then I look at the Russian media such as it is and such as I can look at it and I find the same thing essentially. So you have warring medias in terms of the conflict also. This is not the way we're supposed to work, not the way a democracy is supposed to work. It's a very dangerous situation. And as you said, we've got nuclear weapons involved now and we are minus almost any kind of formal arms control with regard to those weapons other than New START which I'm afraid maybe in jeopardy from the way we're treating Putin now in Ukraine. So what arms control do we have left? On top of all of that, Modi in India has mounted a campaign and he's our ally, he's our ally and he's mounted a campaign against the Muslims in India the second largest Muslim population in the world, second only in Indonesia that looks a lot like it might just carry over into Pakistan which of course is Pakistan because Muslims wanted a place to live in peace and that would be nuclear too probably. So when I've been there in 2002, we were as close to nuclear war between Pakistan and India as we've been since both became nuclear powers. It's a very dangerous situation we've set up in the world and this cavalier attitude that some people in the military and elsewhere have toward nuclear weapons is the maximum danger. Well, let's go to that because we know that's been talked about for a long time but it rose to the surface of the media. Like now it's been, I wanna say, infecting the brains of generals and the media and people in government for a while but now the media is like it's raised its ugly head there and in a normalization process, they feel like we're told these stories and they're rolled out in a way to normalize madness. And so here we have Victoria Newland's husband, Robert Kagan arguing we can win a nuclear war. But then I start reading further and he's been doing this for a very long time and I saw it a couple of years ago when I'm like, why is the US thinking of taking on China? That's a nuclear war. Do they really think they can win a nuclear war? Is, could that be, that's an absurd thought, right? But now we're seeing that this is a strategy and I mean, part of me wants to believe it's like part of their strategy positioning but I don't believe that. I think they actually think they can win a nuclear war and that thought pretences the hell out of me and you've been there. So I'd love it if you could take us back to the 50s where you were saying that there was this mad idea and it got quashed and kind of how we've come back here and then just like why that's an insane idea given that, we make mistakes with drones and smart bombs which are done to exist in the first place but mistakes like with those don't have lasting irreparable effects like a nuclear bomb. So. Well, for those who don't remember Hiroshima and Nagasaki and I would put most Americans in that category. I was born in 1945. So I know it principally because I've studied it and I've studied it a lot and I studied the development of the atomic bomb and the Soviet attempt to get theirs and it was a very dangerous period because military leaders who really were powerful after World War II. Just imagine that. Look at Roosevelt at Casablanca. Look at Roosevelt in Tehran. Look at Roosevelt at Yalta. Cordell Hall was never with him. The people around Roosevelt were the military warriors of World War II. They came out of that war awfully powerful, incredibly powerful. One of them became president of course, Dwight Eisner. We're very fortunate it was Dwight Eisner and not one of the others. A lot of these generals thought they had a new weapon, a new weapon on the battlefield. We had Davey Crockett's in the army. That was just a cannon that fired nuclear weapons. We even had an atomic mine. We were gonna plant it in the road and blow up the road and build a big crater so Soviet tanks would fall in it. They thought it had utility. It took a lot of people studying it. A lot of civilians studying what it meant to, especially once Truman made the decision to go to thermonuclear weapons. We're talking about nuclear weapons that would make the ones that we dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima look like child's play. These are hugely powerful weapons. A thousand times more powerful than those. The megatonnage is just incredible. And a submarine carries a missile that goes towards Moscow, for example and has 10 of these in its merged warhead. And each has a circular error of probability of about 10 meters. That means it's gonna hit right where you wanted it to hit and the damage is gonna be incredible. We now know from study after study, from RAND from other reputable places that the nuclear winter that would fall such an exchange would wipe us all out. We wouldn't have to wait for climate change. It'd wipe us all out. Even a nuclear war in India between India and Pakistan would impact our farming ability for five to 10 years because of the nuclear winter that would occur from it. So we were seized finally of the idiocy, the insanity of thinking about fighting a war with these weapons. And we had lots of people in and out of government who understood that in the think tanks, in the government and so forth. We had a occasion, a very dangerous occasion in the early 50s when the generals were talking about using them when Mao Zedong was moving towards Kuomint Maitzu, the two islands that he was challenging Junkai-Shek's presence on that front Taiwan as it were. And Eisenhower was in the deliberations and then in general, same one, we just nuke China. They didn't have that term at that time. They wanted to use the atomic weapon on China. No, we're not going to do that. Thank God, Kula has prevailed. But look at Curtis LeMay. We go on to the Cuban Missile Crisis and John Kennedy. Here's Kennedy getting advice that thank God Kennedy had learned from the Bay of Pigs to distrust the Pentagon. He did not trust the Pentagon, nor did Bobby, his brother, the Attorney General. And so the two of them discounted a lot of what was coming from the Pentagon, even when it came through McNamara, even when McNamara sort of adulterated a little bit. But Curtis LeMay wanted an invasion on Cuba. We now know from the archives available to us after the Soviet Union collapsed, there were 10 frog missiles with nuclear warheads on them just outside Guantanamo Bay and the operational control of those missiles had been chopped to the Russian regimental commander. And the purpose of those missiles was to shoot a US invasion fleet with those atomic weapons. Guess what would have happened to that invasion fleet? And we probably would have gone into a general nuclear exchange too because you got probably 30,000 American dead right there. You're not gonna not go back at them. That's these weapons, that's the mental state that goes with these weapons. We tried to tell this to both Islamabad and Delhi, India in 2002 when they were about to have an exchange. Powell went to Islamabad, Rich went to Delhi, we got the president to call them. They were gonna exchange. They had no concept of escalation. What will you do General Musharraf if they shoot 20? Well, I'll shoot 20 back. No, you'll probably shoot 40 back and then they'll shoot a hundred. And then it'll be Katie Bar the door. It'll be over then and it'll be over for a lot of the world then because you will have had a general nuclear exchange. That's the danger we're in right now especially with no arms control. And we've destroyed everything. Open Skies Treaty, INF Treaty, ABM Treaty. Only thing we have left is a new start. And I'm afraid that's in jeopardy with this Ukraine crisis because the other member of course is Putin. He has about 6,000 more heads and we have about 6,000 more heads. That's enough to annihilate the world 40 times over. And we don't need to be playing with these things. And when people say like Kagan, oh, you're just not brave enough. You need to be able to stand up to the tower. Okay, let's be smart in what we do in standing up to him and let's don't go nuclear. And to your point about China, I never played a war game and I played 30 or 40 of them big war games with for example, Bill Perry sitting in as the president in one with Taiwan that we didn't go nuclear at the end because we attract the Air Force and Navy of China. They do the same thing to us in the South China Sea and elsewhere and we're sitting there looking at each other. And some Admiral or General says on both sides and when we play these games, we play with the red side, the Chinese side played by people who know China well. Both sides are saying, well, we've got to get it. We've lost all this Navy and Air Force asset. We've lost all these people. We've got to do something. So the US side says, well, let's drop a couple of small yield nuclear weapons on Chinese cities like Shanghai and the Chinese are saying things like, well, why don't we just pop a nuke and we'll do it on the US fleet that's in the South China Sea now. You don't do that without going further. Now, all the civilian leaders in every war game I participated in, J-Las, the big game we played at Newport Global, all of them say, whoa, stop. We're not going there. They stopped the game there because they realized they're beyond their comprehension of control. That once you go nuclear, you've let the genie out of the bottle. And so they usually stop, they always stopped the game when I was there and you just go to a hot wash up, a review of what happened during the game. That's what happens when two behemoths, nuclear armed behemoths, go at one another conventionally and one of them starts losing. That's what happens. It's a very dangerous place to go. So you don't need to go there. What we need in Ukraine right now is for the US to eat a little crow and to have diplomacy and to push Ukrainians aside if necessary. We're doing it with everything else and have diplomacy and sit down and talk and try to work out a solution that will stop the killing, satisfy as much as possible both sides, both sides, there's five or six sides here, but you've got to have diplomacy and you've got to talk and you've got to get the killing stop, but we don't want to do that. We want to use Ukraine to bring Putin down, clear that flank and then go on to China. That's what we're doing this for. That's the geopolitical strategy. Go back and read Brzezinski. That's his geopolitical strategy. That's what we're doing. We're carrying out that strategy and the people who brought you Iraq in 2003 are the people who are going to bring you that. Well, I guess that's like going back to that 1992 defense planning guidance memo of Wolfowitz that when it came out, saying that we need to have dominate in a pearl or world in perpetuity and people laughed at it and thought it was absurd. And now it's the blueprint for Washington. So how does the absurd get normalized? And I ask you that also with the whole, we can win a nuclear idea. If you tell yourself a lie long enough, do you believe it? And have the more balanced thinking members of the Pentagon and the State Department been weeded out and have the Kagan's been able to tell this lie long enough that people are actually believing it and acting from it? I think it's a little bit of both. I've been there and I've seen it. I've seen the poison spread. I was asked a question this morning. What did I think about the, I guess it's 19 children and a teacher now, two teachers, whatever in Texas. And I said that I was looking at the Texas newsfeed at the time and I was looking at comments just rolling underneath. They were blaming everyone from Biden to Trump to QAnon. You name it, everything in there was blamed except the right blame more to the person, the American people. It's us, it's me, it's you. It's all of us who have let this happen to us who have let this happen. Malcolm Byrne and John Tierman and Hussein Benai have a book out called The Republic of Myth. They nail our myth in the beginning of that book. It's about Iran and the United States and how our myths collide and why we can't negotiate. But they nail our myth. And our myth is now exactly what you were saying. It's contaminating our domestic scene because it's so bad. When you're at war on your periphery as an empire, you bring that home. You bring that war home. You bring that violence home. And we shouldn't be surprised that this is happening to us. We have militarized our law enforcement in this country. We spent $5 billion sending military equipment down to law enforcement, armored cars, heavy weapons, automatic weapons. A SWAT team doing a no-knock drug bus in Houston looks just like a SWAT team in Afghanistan of special operating forces, Navy SEALs for example. That's what we've done to our society. It's not a Guardia Civil or a Calabiniere like Italy and Spain have, a heavy police force. It's a militarized law enforcement arm. That's what we're doing to ourselves. And so people ask, what's the problem? Why has this happened? It's happened because you've been asleep Americans. You've been absolutely asleep. Now, if you buy this, if you're for this, if you're for this empire, if you're for this predatory capitalism, if you're for this, even when we do humanitarian actions, we're immoral like in Libya. If you're for this, I won't out of here, you know? I'm not with you anymore. But I don't think this republic was founded for this purpose. And I don't think if you've been paying attention and you were really concerned we'd be doing some of this stuff. It's people who've taken over the government and taken over the range of power that are truly poisonous insidious people. As I said to you earlier, I think right now the person who's standing between, despite his impolitic remarks, these people inside and outside government who wanna bring Putin down, use Ukraine, get to China, have a eternal war is Joe Biden. I don't think he wants that. I've known him through Powell and through my own interaction for a long time. I don't think he wants that. I do not think he wants that. So he's a lonely man right now, I imagine. Despite the appearances maybe of his being a little bit, you know, old, too old, whatever is the presses want to say from time to time, especially my party, the Republicans. I think he understands exactly what's going on. He's been around too long, not too. He's standing in between these people who wanna do this sort of thing and the rest of the government. And it's a godsend that he's there. I'm just afraid he's not gonna be able to hold out. I watched my boss, who I thought was one of the most capable men in the world, Colin Powell. I watched him get overridden by Cheney and ultimately George W. Bush and Condi Rice who ganged up on him time and time again. And that's what happens. Even if you're the president, that's what happens. You have to depend on your subordinates and when you can't depend on them, when they're trying to take you down the primrose path, as it were, it's very difficult to stop them. And to your point about nuclear weapons, it's not just Kagan. Go back and look at the hearing in the Congress where the now chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee from Idaho, Senator Rich makes a statement that the president of the United States should have first use authority with nuclear weapons and should not necessarily have to consult with anyone, including the Congress. This isn't just nuts like Kagan. It's people actually sitting in the Senate of the United States of America. They're imbued with what you just described, this philosophy of us first, us first, us first, if it looks like we're gonna be second, we're ready to kill the world. Well, so I mean, you say that about Biden, but like we watched Congress, the entire Congress, not a single dissenting voice, vote this $40 billion and- Well, there were a few, there were a few voices. Well, not votes, I mean- No, I agree. Well, it's fine, but they tried to like minimize the fact that they voted, but so yeah, I wanna get to that. So two ways, one is the, what are the restraints to the war in the past? And Chris Hedges spoke to this week, where there used to be the old liberal wing of the Democratic Party politicians that would go against the war. We used to have that. And then we used to have an independent media and some of academia and even some mainstream journalists that would speak out against war. And by the way, Lola, if you could post the action this week to take on the media about driving us to war. And then the third was an organized anti-war movement that included religious leaders. And if you look, that has been effectively annihilated, like concentrated effort from the Pentagon and the State Department to minimize, undermine, you know, vote out, you know, there's peace organizations. There's not even a foundation of funds-based activism. So that restraint is missing. And then right now, you know, we saw that the peace and NBC and Meet the Press where they were like showing a war game about how we could beat China that was put on by the CNAS. And then we've got the Council on Foreign Relations. And it's feeling very much like, there's the military industrial con, and then there's the Council on Foreign Relations and the CNS, and they're operating outside. It's kind of like they're the puppeteers and Congress and the White House are the puppets. And I look at that because I'm trying to find a lever to hold on and pull that can scratch it all at the momentum of this war machine that's moving forward. I think you're on to the point that Malcolm and John and Hussein built in that book in a narrower context, but it's remarkable how they get our myth. And our myth has become contaminated. I mean, it's been contaminated before. And they point that out when we went to war with Mexico, for example, the most egregious war in our history. Even Ulysses S. Grant said that and he fought in it. Why am I here? This is crazy. And it wasn't an easy war. Grant points out in his memoirs that it was the highest casualty war in our history per capita. We lost more soldiers in Mexico. The Mexicans were not the pushover that people think they were. They fought us tenaciously and they took a lot of casualties. We've always had these problems. We massacred people in the Philippines and so forth. But now we've institutionalized it. And that's because of this myth. And when we kill people in Texas who are grammar school kids, that's part of the myth. We can't get along anymore without violence. We can't govern ourselves so we transport that violence overseas. And we try to govern others. What are we trying to do with the NATO European powers right now? We're trying to govern them. We're trying to get Finland in. We're trying, Finland, Sweden, leaving a historic history of neutrality. Big mistake both countries. They should never have done it. But we managed to get them to do it. And I can just imagine Kagan crowing over it. Just crowing over it. Because this is what they want. Can't govern yourself so you go abroad with violence and sanctions. And then you expect the violence and sanctions produced violence, not to come to your home. And it comes to your home. So you go abroad further and further. This is what happens to empires. This is how they murder themselves. This is how Lincoln and Adams and Jefferson all predicted we would wind up. Washington even made an explicit statement that nobody quotes today. In his farewell address, they talk about entangling alliances. Washington said, if you let these political parties, he called them factions, get out of control, they will soon run the country. And they will run it in accordance with their ambitious, greedy selfish interests and not the interests of the country. And it will no longer be a democracy. I mean, what are we doing today? That's exactly what we're doing. And people look at me and say, well, Larry, why do you still live here? I say, because the same thing black soldiers used to tell me when I would ask them, why did you fight? We treat you like crap. Why did you fight for us? It's my country too. Okay, it's my country too. And I like to see it return to at least a vestige of its former self and stop this worldwide onslaught that it is engineered because it has the money and the power and apparently the people to do it. Although, you know what my army is doing now? It's sending recruiters to Mexico. Yes, to recruit people in Mexico because they can't find people enough for the volunteer force. Well, that's what Rome did. That's what Rome did. It couldn't find any citizens to pick up the sword. So it went elsewhere to find its soldiers. That's the sign of an empire in decline, perhaps even precipitous decline. Well, so, yeah, we used to have 25% of global GDP. We're down to 16 and- We used to have 50. In 1945, we had 51% of the world's GDP. Most of our competitors were prostrate at our feet. Soviet Union, France, England, Germany. They couldn't compete. They were broken in enlightened self-interest. You can call it, but we brought them back. And you're right, about 10 years ago, we had 23, 24%, and we just keep on going. I guess what the predominant part of that GDP is, banking and finance. We are the world's creator of money, taker of money, payer of interest, investment of last resort, and so forth. If we pinpricked ourselves, we'd collapse. Our aggregate debt is gonna be 30 trillion within the next decade. Our overall debt against GDP is gonna be worse than World War II. And it's staggering what we're doing. Well, so, besides the insanity of therefore, given what you've said, throwing more money in the incinerator of war, in Ukraine, in your conversation with Medea in January, you talked about how the United States was breaking its agreements, its longtime agreements with Russia and how that was contributing to what was happening with Russia and Ukraine. And so now, this last month, we saw the State Department amend the website to wipe out the One China Agreement and preparation to repeat Ukraine on Taiwan. And it's not just further decimating us, first of all, just the respect of the world because we just continue to warmonger and sanction countries, but also the planet that we need to live on for the future. So, how do we get ahead of this? So maybe Biden made a slip so we could help warn us what was coming. How do we get ahead of this when we just watched the tidal wave that engulfed everyone's hearts and minds with Ukraine? There wasn't, you couldn't see through the fog of war and we can feel it like, you know, the waves have moved out and they're ready to come crashing back. What, how do we as peace activists get ahead of this or where is the sliver of, where can the sliver of our attention go to help derail it? Well, that's the question I get asked more than any other single question. I'm gonna speak in a synagogue in New York in early June and I know I've been there, been going there every year for about 10 years or doing it by Zoom the last two years. And I know that some of the most intelligent people in New York City are members of this congregation. They ask great questions. I know I'm gonna get that question again. Well, what do we do? What do we do? And I've told them everything from unelect your representatives and your senators, get new people in there, do everything you possibly can yourself locally and statewide and so forth. It's not a satisfying answer anymore. But what I tell people is, you know, the crisis is coming that is either gonna get everyone's attention and collaboration, cooperation and comedy or gonna have to be the order of the day or we're all gonna die. We're all gonna die. And that's the climate crisis. You know, nuclear weapons could preempt that of course, but that's the climate crisis. And it is with us right now in the global South they're having temperatures for weeks on the end in excess of 125 degrees. You can't live in that kind of climate. We're going to have really dire circumstances in this country eventually but we're gonna be fortunate North America is gonna be one of the latter places to get the full blown effects of it. We are getting incredible effects. Army National Guards, for example, now spent seven states worth of Army National Guards now spend more time fighting floods and fires than they do anything else. And they're having real problems manning their ranks because of this. Texas has got its guard down on the Southern border. When this hits, when the climate change in the global South really impacts which is not gonna be that far away. It'll be mid-century maybe, maybe a little earlier. We're gonna have the guns sit on, so we'll have machine guns on the border to keep people out of this country because they're gonna have no food, no water, no prospect at all. The young men are gonna have Kalashnikovs or M16s, AR-15s, whatever. In the simulations we did at CNA, by 2065 we were putting armed men at the border all manner of people, anybody we could draft into service and we were shooting people. This is in a simulation we did in 2065 when it really got bad and you had a billion refugees in the world. Think about that. We got about 178 million refugees in the world today. Many of them produced by our wars in Syria and Afghanistan and Iraq, Somalia, Yemen, where we're supporting the Saudis. Think about a billion, a half a billion to a billion refugees in the world. We can't handle that. You can't set up that many refugee camps. That's coming. That is gonna be a moment of such profound crisis that if we don't get our act together, if the world indeed doesn't get its act together, China, Russia, the US, Germany, Brazil, India in particular, we're toast. We can put up the sign and say, hello dinosaurs, we're gonna join you. So I think that crisis is gonna be so profound. Indeed, it's shaping up to be that already that we're gonna have to cooperate. That's why this, did you hear what the head of the delegation for the recent IPC panel meeting and releasing its report on 28th February on climate change? The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The head of the Russian delegation condemned his country for the invasion of Ukraine and said, it's distracting. It's distracting. That's a piece of territory. We're talking about the planet. You get that Putin, we're talking about the planet. And the head of the Ukrainian delegation said similar remarks about, this is crazy. We're fighting over fossil fuels and fossil fuels are killing us. They're killing us. These people are telling the truth. They're not making this up. And you got people like Kagan and others who were, oh man, don't talk to me about climate change. They're worse than Donald Trump. It is real and it is powerful. Now, here's a really sad thought. There are people in my political party. I could quote Charles Dickens. Remember in that scene in his Ebenezer Scrooge story, Christmas story? Remember when the people are trying to get some money out of Scrooge? And he says, are there no prisons? Are there no poor houses? And they say, well, yes, yes, but they're terrible. And people die there. And he says, well, let them die and decrease the surplus population. There are people in my political party and there are people, I think, sitting on the Supreme Court of the United States who subscribe to that philosophy. Let them die and decrease the surplus population. That's frightening. Well, what do you do when the leadership of your country and too many members of your country have literally gone mad? I mean, we earlier this week talked to Janine Jackson at fair about the propaganda we live in and how distorting it is to our hearts and minds. But you're talking about people that have basically that have become inhuman. And so as peace activists, as people who have worked, there are whole lives for the interconnection, for cooperation, for diplomacy, for the health of the planet and the people. You're describing this thing that we're up against. It's hard to find as an activist where that lever is, where even to be able to scratch somebody awake. And so... It's there, it's there. I was stunned when I was in London. I happened to be in London when the war protests against the 2003 invasion of Iraq broke out and it was unbelievable. It was absolutely unbelievable. The only other time I've ever seen that many people on the street where the Bobbys couldn't even, the Bobbys were riding horses and they couldn't even move. The horses couldn't even move because the people were so thick and pressing in on. The only other place I've ever seen that is New Year's Eve on the Thames during the fireworks. When there's four million people down there on the Thames, that was colossal. We have to get that kind of spirit going again. We have to take back our democracy. We have to take it back from both sides because both sides are just corrupt. Well, thank you so much for that because that's really our message you could think right now that Congress and the White House, they're only, they're being distorted by the fog of war and they need to hear us. And so now is the time you can join us in the streets in LA for the People's Summit to expose that militarism and violence that's come from the United States towards Latin America. That's June 8th through 10th and Lolo put that in the chat. And then in DC for the gathering of the Poor People's Campaign on June 18th. And yes, Larry, it's nothing better than standing up, being visible in the middle of madness, showing that there are no lights in the dark tunnel that is militarism and that we need to protect people and planet. And it takes us standing up and speaking out. And being as bold and audacious as those who you talk about and you think that there's, that you can win a nuclear war or that we can kill people. So there's less people on the planet, a very disheartening thought. So thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for your wisdom. Thank you for speaking out for peace. If you have anything, finally you want to say to this amazing community that is so engaged and so passionate, I leave the last words to you. I was on a simulation on Sunday that I've been on for almost 18 months now that posits a different government in Israel. It's a long story, complex story, but we're working with how you would form this third government. There would be the Israeli government, the Palestinian authority, Hamas, and then this government. We had a man by the name of Rami Elhanan on there. He belongs to a group that he said in his opening statement, no one, no one wants to get in. It's called the family circle. And it's people who have lost a child to the terrorism, to the IDF, to the Israeli law enforcement, whatever. One was a Palestinian who lost, I think the 14 year old daughter. The other was Rami who lost his daughter in a terrorist attack in Jerusalem, in front of his face. Instead of turning hateful, instead of saying, I want to go kill everybody, they joined this group, a group that, as Rami said, no one wants to join and the criteria for joining is really cruel. The statement he made, the five minutes of statement he made was so right, so perfect for what we need to do. What we need to make our lives based upon, rather than violence and killing and murder and a tooth for a tooth, that I almost started weeping as he was talking. It was just so powerful and he's right. He's Mahatma Gandhi, he's Nelson Mandela, he's Desmond Tutu, he's Pope Francis, all wrapped up in one little Israeli lamenting his daughter's death. And he tells it like it is, we need to stop this. Yes. All our voices need to hold that, thank you. We need to stop this. Thank you so much. Thank you for having me. And one of the questions was about where is the synagogue? So other religious leaders might hear you, there's a religious leader on the program. Oh, Temple Emmanuel and Great Nat, Rabbi Bob Woodham, Robert Woodham. Great, so we've covered a lot and I promise there would be 40 minutes, so we're beyond just deepest gratitude and to all of you, onward to peace. And yes, when we ask why does there to do it, it must stop and that's the thing that must continue to come out of our mouths and out of our lives. So thank you, Larry. Onward to peace. Good luck. Thank you. Viva la Pax. Yes. It's like we're living in Louis the 16th time, the way you describe it. Well, you know, I think it was better than frankly. I just watched Ken Burns, Benjamin Franklin. And it was stunning when the French Foreign Minister, Franklin thinks he's going to be unsuccessful. He's talking to again, the French Foreign Minister and again, it looks at him and says, how much do you need essentially? And he drains the coffers of France virtually in order to support the American Revolution. Now, of course, the French had their own motivations. They didn't like Britain. They wanted, you know, but still, I mean, that moment is just so powerful. Franklin's even stunned that his request is going to be met. Huge sums too then. I mean, just huge sums of money. All that work does not need to go in vain. Well, how do we also, you know, you described and we have to get out, you know, we have to kill the madmen, but why are we not seen as madmen and the destruction that we, you know, wreck like every day? We are increasingly being seen that way in the world. The world polls are showing even our allies have especially under 40. And if you go under 35 or under 30, it's even worse. Even in South Korea, it's better than 50%. Think we're the greatest threat to their future. That's not something we should be fond of, but people like Kagan are. They are? Dick Cheney. They think fear, fear is what keeps the world in check. Not respect, not love, not decency, fear. That's the reason they like nuclear weapons. That's the ultimate fear. Two very crazy nonhumans, unfortunately, that have a lot of power. Or they're too human in the sense of the lower species. They're selfish, they're war-mongering. But I hate to say it, they are typical of man's history over the last 5,000 years. Well, power corrupts and absolute power corrupts, absolutely. Yeah, I was in a taxi the other day and I was describing to the taxi driver like what was happening and that Biden really wanted, you know, to have global hegemony. And he looked at me and he goes, doesn't he watch Star Wars? Doesn't he know empires are stupid? Good for him. I wish there were more of him out there. The rebels will get you eventually. Unfortunately, Star Wars has gotten faded away. I mean, all the lessons are fading and being taken over by a story that gets repeated into people's brains and becomes reality. That is so false to the needs of the people in the future and people believe it. You know, George R. R. Martin's Game of Thrones as put on by HBO kind of became the stereotypical thing for the generations now. I couldn't use Shakespeare in my seminars because my kids did not read Shakespeare. And I would quote from King Lear or Hamlet or something like that. It was like speaking to deaf and dumb people. So I started quoting from Game of Thrones. Wow, got their attention. But that's a different model. It really is, if you think about it, it's a different model. That's all about power. It's all about murder to keep power. Yes, it has its bright spots from time to time. But some of those, and the most pronounced one, is manufactured. Manufactured out of whole cloth. Dragons, a princess. You know nothing, Jon Snow. Those are the most powerful words in that whole series. You know nothing, Jon Snow. And they come from a wilding from the north, you know? Those are powerful words. You know nothing, you human being. Oh, that's a good one. We have to give that to Emily to make a meme out of that. That's very good. You know nothing, Robert Keaton. We all know nothing. All right, well, thank you so much. Surely. Thank you for your gratitude. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.