CINDY SHEEHAN'S SOAPBOX, August 8, 2010
Cindy Sheehan Interviews Ethan McCord and Jud Newborn
Transcript
Cindy Sheehan: Welcome back to Cindy Sheehan's Soapbox. I'm your host, Cindy Sheehan. Today as we tape, it's the five-year anniversary of when I camped out in Crawford, Texas, asking for a meeting with George Bush so I can ask him what noble cause he killed my son, Casey, for, and so many others. So today with the resistance to the wars for empire being so low, I thought I would bring on two models of resistance to talk about it. We'll be speaking with Ethan McCord and Jud Newborn today.
Ethan McCord was in the U.S. Army and he is seen in the WikiLeaks Collateral Murder video of an incident that took place in 2007 that was exposed a few months ago. Ethan is the soldier who was running with the children out of the van.
Ethan, welcome to Cindy Sheehan's Soapbox.
Ethan McCord: Thank you for having me.
Cindy Sheehan: Oh, it's such an honor to have you on. And your bravery on and off the battlefield is just very stunning to me, and I'm just really, really grateful that there are people like you in the world. And we recently became Facebook friends and I found out that you grew up in the same town, in our home town, Vacaville, California.
Ethan McCord: Yes I did.
Cindy Sheehan: Yeah, you went to the high school across town, our cross-town rival. You went to Will C. Wood and my kids and my son Casey graduated from Vaca High.
Ethan McCord: Yeah, we were pretty big rivals back then.
Cindy Sheehan: Yeah, it's mostly a, I think it's mostly a friendly rivalry, but anyway, Vacaville, if people don't like know, it's like in Central California, kind of like northern Central California between Sacramento and San Francisco, so I was really honored that you, you know another person comes from my town. I don't know about you, but I've been vilified in Vacaville. Have you had any feedback from our fellow Vacavillians about what you've been doing?
Ethan McCord: Just a couple of high school and people that I went to school with, but they've all been supportive.
Cindy Sheehan: Oh? That's cool.
Ethan McCord: Yeah, I haven't had anything negative coming from Vacaville, but then again I haven't been to Vacaville in probably 15 years.
Cindy Sheehan: Oh yeah. The Reporter used to regularly rake me over the coals. [laughs]
Ethan McCord: Well that's to be expected sometimes ________ [laughs]
Cindy Sheehan: Yeah. Well, Ethan, tell us about your experience. Like I introduced you and I told my listeners that you're actually in the Collateral Murder WikiLeaks video. I've only been able to watch bits and pieces of it. I haven't been able to watch the whole thing. But can you tell my listeners about your experience and, you know, exactly what you were doing that day, and what happened, and what you were going through? I think people have seen the video and they can see what you're going through physically, but what was your mental state and the emotions that you were feeling when it was happening?
Ethan McCord: Sure. Well, you know, to start it off, basically-- I joined the military, you know, to provide freedom and democracy. I bought into the whole, "Now what we're going to do is we're going to help people. We're going to go help the Iraqis from the so-called insurgents that are there, and the terrorists, and--"
Cindy Sheehan: When did you join the military?
Ethan McCord: Well, I joined the military, which was the Navy, in 2002, and then in 2006 I switched over to the Army infantry.
Cindy Sheehan: Okay. So sorry for interrupting you, but--
Ethan McCord: Oh no, that's okay.
Cindy Sheehan: Go on.
Ethan McCord: We got to Iraq and you know one of the first things I noticed was that we were unwanted there. We were getting rocks thrown at us and people chanting and, you know, protests against us being there, which went against everything that I had thought I was going over there to do. You know, I thought they would be happy that I was there, you know, since I'm going to be providing the so-called freedom for them. And I quickly learned that, you know, we were unwanted. So, you know, that began to shift my personal feelings about the war, being there, within the first couple of months. Now when this incident happened in July 2007, I had just gotten there in April of 2007. So we were actually getting blown up by IEDs pretty much every day. It was a pretty volatile area.
Cindy Sheehan: Wasn't that right after the surge? Wasn't that the surge?
Ethan McCord: Yeah, we were a part of the surge.
Cindy Sheehan: Right. And tell me ________ what division did you belong to, or whatever they call that?
Ethan McCord: Yeah, I was in First Infantry Division and I was a part of Second Battalion 16th Infantry Rangers.
Cindy Sheehan: Okay. And your group was part of George Bush's surge that the Democrats supported and paid for.
Ethan McCord: Right. Yes. And originally we weren't even supposed to go to Iraq. We were supposed to be a training battalion, and our battalion commander decided that, "No, in order for me to make general I need war." So he talked to the Pentagon and ended up getting us to be part of the surge.
Cindy Sheehan: And, has he become a general?
Ethan McCord: No, he has not. This is also the same battalion commander who was the ExO of Pat Tillman, who got on ESPN and said--
Cindy Sheehan: Oooooh.
Ethan McCord:--said that he was worm dirt because his family didn't believe in God.
Cindy Sheehan: Right. Wow.
Ethan McCord: Yeah. Same guy. Yeah, he had a lot of--
Cindy Sheehan: That's been happening--
Ethan McCord: What's that?
Cindy Sheehan: That happens a lot. That's been happening from the beginning of time, where officers, you know, willingly put the people who are under them in harm's way to advance their own careers.
Ethan McCord: Oh, definitely.
Cindy Sheehan: Yeah.
Ethan McCord: You see it all the time. There were certain things that we did in Iraq where you were just like, you know, this is uncalled for, this is unnecessary, and why are we doing this? You know, our battalion commander came out to the COP after a few of our soldiers had been killed by an IED, and he said that he wanted a new SOP, which is a standard operating procedure, that, you know, 360-degree rotational fire every time you get hit by an IED, kill every person on the street.
Cindy Sheehan: Yeah, I've heard about that too. And so, let's get back to what happened on that day. And you are yourself, you're a father, right?
Ethan McCord: Right, yes. I--
Cindy Sheehan: You have children.
Ethan McCord: I'm sorry?
Cindy Sheehan: You have children.
Ethan McCord: Yes I do. My son was born May 31, 2007, so just before this incident in July. I hadn't gotten to see him yet because I was over in Iraq. I saw pictures of him. And then I had a daughter who was 5 years old.
Cindy Sheehan: Right.
Ethan McCord: Now, that day, we were supposed to go out on what was called a Ranger dominance, which is a mission of walking from one end of town to the other and doing what's called knocking searches, where you knock on the door and ask to search the home. We weren't finding anything that day. It was pretty, pretty boring I would say. We were kind of joking around and stuff because nothing was going on. Towards the end of the day, we started to kind of funnel into an alleyway to start our march back to the FOB when a couple of guys on rooftops started firing AK-47s at us.
Cindy Sheehan: Right.
Ethan McCord: So we were involved in our own little incident there when we could hear that another platoon was being engaged as well. And then we heard the 30-mm cannons from the Apache just a couple of blocks away from us. And, you know, it--
Cindy Sheehan: A massive? That's the Apache that was firing on the journalists?
Ethan McCord: Right. Yeah. The 30-mm round from an Apache is very distinctive. It's very loud, almost like just cuts the sky open when you hear it going. It's almost like thunder. And we were told to move to that position where the fire was coming from, which was about four blocks from where we were. I was dismount that day, and I was one of the first six soldiers to actually walk up onto the scene in that courtyard. And when I got there, it was pretty grotesque and gruesome. I had never seen anybody destroyed in that manner before. One of the guys, the top of his head was completely off. Their entrails were everywhere. Coagulated blood everywhere. It was just--it was a mess. And, you know, to me at the time, it almost didn't seem real. Kind of like, I may have been trying to separate myself from looking at it.
Cindy Sheehan: Yeah. I know how--I know what you're talking about.
Ethan McCord: Yeah, the first thing I thought of was, like, oh this doesn't even look real. It looks like something out of a bad horror movie, you know? But the smells were very real. But, within a couple of minutes of me getting onto the scene, I could hear a small child crying. And I remember the cries very distinctly because they were cries of, like, just horror, terror, coming from a small child. And I could tell that they were coming from the minivan that was backed up against the wall there.
So, me and another soldier, who was a 20-year-old private who was pretty good friends with me, went over to the van and looked in the passenger door, and the private that I was with couldn't handle it and he turned around and started puking and ran away.
So what I saw was, there was a 4-year-old girl sitting on the bench seat on the passenger side of the van with a severe belly wound and glass in her hair and in her eyes. And next to her was a boy who was about 7 years old who had a severe wound to the right side of his head. He was laying kind of half on the floorboard with his head resting on the bench seat. I immediately thought he was dead because of the wound to his head. And next to him in the driver's seat was who I pretty much assumed was the father by the way he was kind of hunched over protectively over the children. He had taken a couple of those 30-mm rounds to the chest and was just annihilated.
So I grabbed the girl and I yelled for a medic. We went into a building behind where the van had crashed. There was a guy hiding, a local Iraqi hiding in his kitchen there when I asked him to help me. And me the medic cleaned the girl off and did as much as we could. I was sitting there pulling glass out of her eyes so that she could blink. The whole time I'm thinking, you know, thinking of my own children back at home. Again, my daughter was just barely older than this little girl. You know, it was heartbreaking. So the medic called in that there was nothing else that he could do there. She needed to be evacuated immediately because we didn't know exactly how severe the belly wound was.
So I went back outside while the medic ran the girl to the waiting Bradley vehicle, and I walked back up to the van again, and I don't even know why I walked back up to the van, but I did, and that's when I saw the boy kind of take like a labored breath movement. And I started screaming out that the boy's alive. "He's alive!" That's when I grabbed him and cradled him in my arms and was telling him, "Don't die, don't die, I got you," and started running him toward the Bradley, and I'm hoping that the Bradley wasn't leaving yet. And that's when the boy opened his eyes and looked at me, just for pretty much a split second, and his eyes rolled back into his head, and I squeezed him a little bit tighter, just kept telling him I have him, he's going to be okay, and don't die, and then I placed him in the Bradley vehicle, where I got yelled at by my platoon leader, who's a lieutenant, for not pulling security but rather wasting my time on these MFing kids.
Cindy Sheehan: Wow.
Ethan McCord: Yeah. You know and at the time you know there's so much going on, you're just like, "Roger, sir, I'm going to pull security." So I went up to a rooftop and was pulling security. And you know there was still a lot going on. I mean, there were three Hellfire missiles that were fired into a building shortly after that.
Cindy Sheehan: Wow.
Ethan McCord: And that building was really close to us and--
Cindy Sheehan: Were the missiles fired from drones? The Hellfires--
Ethan McCord: No, they were fired from--the Hellfires were on the Apache, the same Apache that fired on-- Now, one thing I do need to make clear is that when I came onto the scene, I did see an RPG and an AK-47 there. However, when there's peo-- My experience in Iraq is that when the locals see someone with a camera who may be a photographer or with a news agency, they always come out with their weapons, and it's kind of like showing off. Like, "Hey, look what I have. You know, make me famous" type of thing. "Put me in the magazines." And it's just to be noticed. My personal belief, I do not believe that these guys had anything to do with the attacks that we were facing earlier from a few blocks away.
Cindy Sheehan: Right.
Ethan McCord: These guys were walking around nonchalantly. They weren't even really gathering into any kind of formation to do anything to us. So--
Cindy Sheehan: The one thing that got me about that, what did you think when the video came out? Did you know it was coming out? Did you know that it was going to become such a big, you know, controversy at all before it happened?
Ethan McCord: No. What's crazy about--the way that I found out that the video had been released is I, back in April, I went and dropped my daughter off at school and I came home, you know, sat on my couch with a cup of coffee and turned on the TV to the news and the part that I caught immediately was me running across the screen with the little boy in my arms. And it was just like a huge slap to my face. You know, this was something that I had been trying to put behind me. You know, it's something that I remember vividly every night when I sleep. You know? And here it is on TV and, you know, people analyzing it who had no idea of anything, you know, what happened that day. You know, you have all these news supposed war analysts, you know, who are going over this video who know nothing of what happened that day. All they can go off of is basically the military reports that were put out on the incident, which the military reports are 99 point, you know, 9% of the time falsified to begin with.
Cindy Sheehan: Exactly. Well, what--? The thing that got me, like I was telling you, ________ that just a few days ago I got an e-mail from one of my son's buddies who was with him when he was killed, and he said, "You know, Miss Sheehan, I'm sorry, I don't want to cause you any more pain, but I just want to tell you that I think about it every day. I can't stop thinking about it. And I just want to let you know that I'm in pain also." So, you know, people might come back alive, but there certainly is a lot of issues that have to be dealt with to be able to heal and move on. And I know Vietnam vets who still have nightmares and have issues about what happened, so, you know, that's something that's just going to have to become part of you.
Ethan McCord: Right. You know I am getting--
Cindy Sheehan: You know, unfortunately.
Ethan McCord: I'm getting a little bit better. Actually what's been most healing for me, you know, other than the Army psychologist and whatnot who told me to rub a woobie and have a scented candle next to my bed so I know where I am when I wake up. You know, that's--
Cindy Sheehan: Right.
Ethan McCord: It's either that--you know you get either that advice or you get just pumped full of medication. And I didn't want to go with either of those. But my healing and my feeling better about what happened and my guilt for being a part of what happened to that family--I've been healing myself through speaking out, through telling my story and telling, you know, other people about all the atrocities that happen in war. You know, so that people can open their eyes and see exactly--You know, I'm not mad that this video was released, because this video is a daily depiction of war. This isn't just--
Cindy Sheehan: It's not--yeah, it's not unusual, is it?
Ethan McCord: No, it happens almost every day. The only thing that's unusual about this is that America got to see what happened.
Cindy Sheehan: Exactly. So, what I was telling you, the part that really got me in that video is when somebody in the helicopter says, "Well,"--something like there were kids in the van--"Well I guess that's what happens when you bring your kids to a war zone." Actually the U.S. brought the war zone to the kids.
Ethan McCord: Right. And we state that in our letter to Iraq. Now, a part of the so-called gallows humor that you hear on the Apache, that's something that's--it's a way of self-justifying what you just did. Now if you notice when the soldiers find out that there were children, the first thing they say is, "Oh, damn." You know? But then immediately the other guy in the helicopter is, you know, "Well, you know, it's their fault for bringing kids to a battlefield." You know, it's a way of self-justifying. It's something that's taught by the Army very well, you know? It's your job.
Cindy Sheehan: Well, demonization of other people is one of the reasons that things like this can happen, and you know unfortunately I'm, you know, really sorry that you've had to experience this and that, you know, people like my son are dead, and people are wounded physically and mentally, but you know it's the reason that our empire gets to thrive, because we don't think that people like the Iraqis or Afghans or Vietnamese are fully--or really, for that matter, Americans, you know, Native Americans--are fully human beings.
Ethan McCord: Right. Yeah, it's a--you know, racism is rampant in the military and in the government. You know? Everything is--you're taught from day one in the military is racism against, you know, other countries. We were marching to cadences in basic training that went like, "We went to the market where all the Hajis shop," you know, "Pulled out our machete and begin to chop."
Cindy Sheehan: Oh, wow.
Ethan McCord: Or, "We went to the playground where the--" Yeah. "We went to the playground where all the Haji babies played," you know, "Pulled out our machine gun and we begin to spray." You know, it's rampant in the military. Everything that's taught to you has to do with racism, hatred, dehumanization of anybody who's not--actually, you know, with, in the infantry especially, anybody who's not infantry is dehumanized, because infantry is the best. You know, we're taught to dehumanize anybody who's not a soldier. That included civilians, you know?
[phone announcement]: Dr. Jud Newborn has arrived.
Cindy Sheehan: Sorry, Ethan. Um, Jud?
Jud Newborn: Yes, hi, it's Jud here.
Cindy Sheehan: Hi, this is Cindy, I'm going to finish up with Ethan really quick and then we'll start with your interview, okay? This'll probably be like two more minutes, if you can just hang on for two sec-- two minutes, okay?
Jud Newborn: No problem.
Cindy Sheehan: Okay, thank you. Sorry about that, Ethan. So--yeah, we're going to have to wrap this up, so I'm going to give people--I'm going to give you an opportunity to tell people where they can find the letter that you and Josh wrote, and more information, okay?
Oh, Ethan, I'm sorry, we're running out of time, but can you tell--I wanted to talk more about the letter that you and your fellow soldier, Josh Stieber, wrote to the Iraqi people looking for reconciliation. But can you tell my listeners where they can find that? Because I believe that they can also sign it, right?
Ethan McCord: Yes they can. You can go to www.lettertoiraq.com and get on there and sign it, and I believe we have over 3500 signatures right now.
Cindy Sheehan: I'm on it right now. You have 3,767 signatures. And Ethan, I just want to thank you for your important work, and I'm sorry I didn't get to meet you in Albany, New York, but I'm sure our paths will cross soon. And I hope so, because I've just been really honored to have you on Cindy Sheehan's Soapbox today.
Ethan McCord: I'm honored to be on, thank you.
Cindy Sheehan: And I hope you feel better. I know you have a cold, so thank you for taking the time.
That was Ethan McCord from the WikiLeaks Collateral Murder video. I'm Cindy Sheehan, and when we come back we'll be with my next guest, Dr. Jud Newborn.
BARACK OBAMA, October 27, 2007: I will promise you this, that if we have not gotten our troops out by the time I am President, it is the first thing I will do. I will get our troops home. We will bring an end to this war. You can take that to the bank.
[The Price of Oil - Billy Bragg]
Voices on the radio
Tell us that we're going to war
Brave men and women in uniform
They want to know what they're fighting for
The generals want to hear the end game
The allies won't approve the plan
The oil men in the White House
They just don't give a damn
It's all about the price of oil
It's all about the price of oil
Don't give me no shit about blood, sweat, tears and toil
It's all about the price of oil, yeah
Now I'm no fan of Saddam Hussein
So please don't you get me wrong
But if it's freeing the Iraqi people you're after
Then why have we waited this long?
Why didn't we sort this out last time?
Was he less evil than when he is now?
The stock market holds the answer
To why him, why here, why now?
It's all about the price of oil
It's all about the price of oil
Don't give me no shit about blood, sweat, tears and toil
It's all about the price of oil, yeah
Saddam killed his own people
Just like General Pinochet
And once upon a time both those evil men
Were supported by the CIA
And whisper it, even bin Laden
Once drank from the Pentagon's cup
And just like that election down in Florida
This shit doesn't all add up
It's all about the price of oil
It's all about the price of oil
Don’t give me no shit about blood, sweat, tears and toil
It's all about the price of oil, yeah
Cindy Sheehan: Our next guest on Cindy Sheehan's Soapbox is Dr. Jud Newborn. He's a New York-based author, lecture artist, curator, filmmaker, and songwriter-lyricist. He's an expert on bigotry, extremism, and an activist in the fight for human rights worldwide. Dr. Newborn is a pioneer in the creation of Holocaust museums, serving as a founding historian and curator for New York's Museum of Jewish Heritage from 1986 to 2000. He is the coauthor of the new, critically acclaimed book, Sophie Scholl and the White Rose, anti-Nazi resistance.
Dr. Jud Newborn, welcome to Cindy Sheehan's Soapbox.
Jud Newborn: Thank you, Cindy. I'm glad to be on the Soapbox.
Cindy Sheehan: Oh, cool. The theme of our show today is resistance. And I just had Ethan McCord from the WikiLeaks Collateral Murder tape on, and he, since the tape has been exposed, he's been speaking out about the true horrors of war and trying to get people to understand about the, you know, the racism that's inherent in war and the dehumanization of not only the people that we are bombing, but the soldiers are dehumanized to be able to commit those kind of atrocities. So, here your book that you just wrote is about one of the, I think, greatest war resisters of all time, and that's Sophie Scholl of the White Rose Society. So, would you like to tell my listeners about Sophie and her resistance during World War II?
Jud Newborn: Yes, I'd love to. The book is called, my new book is called Sophie Scholl and the White Rose. It's the companion to an Oscar-nominated German film from 2006, but that wonderful film left people full of questions, and my book tells the whole and complete story of who the White Rose were, how they got to become who they were, in a nutshell. And it's not just Sophie Scholl.
The White Rose were a handful of students, German students at the University of Munich. Two of them, the leaders, were Hans Scholl and his younger sister Sophie. They were former Hitler Youth fanatics, and they made this remarkable and unique transformation to become the greatest heroes of the German anti-Nazi resistance. So that in alone is extraordinary.
And when they made that transformation, which has been a mystery up till now. I finally found out why it happened. They joined with a group of other students and they began--they launched a daring resistance over the period of nine months from June 1942 to February 1943. They issued a staccato burst of six anti-Nazi leaflets calling out upon all Germans to stand up. Essentially what they were doing was speaking truth to power. They wanted Germans to awaken themselves, hear their own conscience, and if they couldn't hear their own conscience the White Rose was trying to instill a sense of conscience in them and to rise in passive resistance, leading to whatever kind of revolt there could be to shake off the system.
Their leaflets were--they distributed them daringly all over Germany. Now, this is the age, Cindy, before the internet where you can do an instant leaflet to a million trillion people. In those days, you know, they had to secure suspiciously large amounts of paper. They had to get illegally a mimeograph machine, or a printing press. Then they had to print these things up, these very eloquent leaflets. They were not like rigid ideological tracts. They were beautiful, philosophical and poetic and human and passionate leaflets, and they would like get-- Sophie Scholl, for example, would take these leaflets, put them in a knapsack. Then she'd go into a train, put the knapsacks in a different car than hers, so if they were caught, they would not be associated with her. Then she would travel illegally--because you needed certain papers to travel at certain points in Germany in the war, and she'd travel let's say from Munich, where they were based, to Stuttgart. At Stuttgart she would get out and she would mail these leaflets back to Munich, and off to Hamburg, and over to Vienna, so that no one should be able to trace where the White Rose really was based.
The truth is, they were just a handful of students based in Munich. And they outraged the Gestapo and Hitler himself. They couldn't find them. The White Rose, the name, resonated and it seemed like, could it be--so how many could it be? You couldn't tell. But they were cropping up all over the place.
Just to close the core story, on February 18, 1943, after the fall of Stalingrad, which was a turning point that they hoped that they hoped that German morale was low enough to want to finally, you know, respond with conscience to the horrors of Hitler and the war, Sophie and Hans together went into the University of Munich's vast inner atrium. They carried a suitcase with 2,000 leaflets in them, and they went to the highest gallery, and after placing leaflets at different places, they, as students were about to come into the lower courtyard, they shoved leaflets down from the highest gallery so that they came flowing down like snowflakes over the heads of the students who were milling about now in the change of class.
It was the only public protest against Nazism as a whole, Nazism ideologically, ever to be staged in the entire history of the Third Reich.
They tried to merge with the crowd, but they were spotted by a custodian taking the role--you know the SS and the Gestapo had tried to recruit all German citizens to be a kind of auxiliary Gestapo force. So this custodian said, "I've-- You're arrested! I arrest you in the name of the Folken Fuhrer!" And they just went limp. They'd been under such incredible pressure. They knew that the Gestapo was on their trail.
So they were taken off and then subjected to, over a weekend, grilling by the Gestapo. They kept on protesting their innocence, and the noose of the Gestapo kept on pulling tighter and tighter around them, tripping them up with what they said, until they finally had to confess, "Yes, I did it, and if I had another chance I would do it again," call out against Nazism in all its ways, both mass murder of Jews, the murder of Slavic intellectuals, especially the stifling of dissent and voices of freedom among Germans themselves, indoctrinating Germans into becoming immor--people with no sense of conscience, moral turpitude, sheeps just following along, when in fact they knew that they could do something. So that's it in a nutshell.
Cindy Sheehan: And they were executed.
Jud Newborn: Oh, I forgot to say that. Yes.
Cindy Sheehan: And, you know that's a very--I've read about it. I've read about their last moments with their parents. I've read how brave they faced their punishment. And what gets me, and what intrigues me so much about the White Rose Society and the resistance and the Scholls is that people here in the United States--you said sheeple. You know, people here--
Jud Newborn: Did I?
Cindy Sheehan: --in the United States, they--I--did you?
Jud Newborn: I don't know.
Cindy Sheehan: I thought I heard you maybe. [laughs}
Jud Newborn: You mean like sheep and people? [laughs]
Cindy Sheehan: That's what--well, maybe you didn't, but that's what I heard. Because I think that's what people are here in the US. They don't even really know the extent of the crimes of our government, and if they do, very few people are afraid to speak out, but we don't stage, even though there's all kinds of ways to keep us quiet and there's a lot of oppression, we don't stage executions for speaking out like Sophie and Hans did, and that's why I think their story is so important to tell. That they cared more about other people than they cared about themselves.
Jud Newborn: Yes. I agree with you wholeheartedly. They are unique in that way, and today what I do in--I do a dramatic multimedia lecture program. I'm a lecture artist, and although I'm a scholar, I also come from a showbiz family, and what I want is for people to hear the story and be moved by it but also relate it to current events today.
So, after telling the story of the White Rose as I just told you, with music, photographs and suspenseful storytelling, Part Two is about, are there any White Roses around, as I call them, in the world today? Are there any people who are not bystanders but upstanders in this world filled with oppression and abuse, who dare to risk themselves the way the White Rose did for freedom and our shared humanity? And then I give an array of, from all cultures and places abroad but also here in the United States, where people are standing up and risking themselves, whether it's from being executed or maybe risking being absolutely shunned by all of your neighbors in the United States because you're taking a very unpopular position. Or being a student! Kids in high school who speak out against the--you know, high schools are dens of conformity, and they're really horrible. So anyone who speaks out becomes ostracized or bullied, and bullying is a terrible thing now.
So, yeah, I relate them to today, and then after I do that I end up with Pete Seeger's wonderful song, "Your Thoughts Are Free," "Die Gedanken Sind Frei," which was actually a German freedom song that the White Rose were deeply inspired by, and Pete Seeger recorded that song in English translation in 1962 on an album called Dangerous Songs that he was able to make only after the McCarthy era blacklist was lifted for him.
So that sort of pulls together Nazi Germany, oppressive regimes, the past, the present, whether you're under the Taliban or whether you're living in the United States and have to open your eyes to things that the mainstream media doesn't want us to know, that our political leaders don't want us to see and hear. Yeah. So that's how I try to pull it together.
But yes, the White Rose were facing the biggest punishment, which was execution by beheading.
Cindy Sheehan: Right. Well--
Jud Newborn: Yes, please go on.
Cindy Sheehan: I'm sorry, Jud, unfortunately we're out of time, and you've given a lot of information in the short time that we were able to have you on, but tell my listeners how they can get more information about your book and about your performance.
Jud Newborn: Well, if people want to find out everything about both the book and the lecture performances, they can google me by googling Golden Land Jud Newborn--that's my lecture agent, Golden Land Jud Newborn. You can also google me, www.JudNewborn.com--that's one D, like the Judds but one D, and Newborn like a newborn baby. Or e-mail me at jnewbo@optonline.net. So that's how they can get to me. And you can find out about the book, you can go to Amazon.com. And I have a new animated film project which I can't tell you about, but it's also about linking the Holocaust and the oppression of children then to depression of children everywhere around the world of all backgrounds in the 21st Century.
Cindy Sheehan: Well, we'll also--we'll also put your information linkup to CindySheehansSoapbox too when we, you know, what do you call that, promote the show.
Jud Newborn: That's true.
Cindy Sheehan: So, anyway, you gave us a lot of great information in the short time we have, so you know maybe we can have you on again in the future and we can get more deeply into the subject. But thank you so much, Jud, for being on Cindy Sheehan's Soapbox today.
Jud Newborn: Oh, you're welcome, Cindy, and I'm looking forward to your new documentary as soon as it comes out.
Cindy Sheehan: Awesome. We'll talk to you soon, I'm sure. Thank you.
Jud Newborn: You're welcome.
Cindy Sheehan: That was Dr. Jud Newborn talking about the White Rose Society in Nazi Germany.
Well, that's the show for today. I'd like to thank you for listening to Cindy Sheehan's Soapbox. I'd like to not only thank you but encourage you to get off your keister and do more for peace, to do more for justice. There's so much peace and justice that are needed in the world today. As always, I'd like to thank my engineer, Scott Petty, my webmaster Rich Bowser, my producer Mikey, you for listening, and my guests for being on the show. Don't forget to go to their websites and to check out more information about what they shared with us today. We'll talk to you next week when my guest will be none other than Tommy Chong from Cheech and Chong. This is Cindy Sheehan. You've been listening to Cindy Sheehan's Soapbox.
HOWARD BEALE: I don't have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It's a depression. Everybody's out of work or scared of losing their job. A dollar buys a nickel's worth. Banks are going bust. Shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter. Punks are running wild in the street and there's nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do, and there's no end to it. We know the air is unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat. We sit watching our TVs while some local newscaster tells us that today we had 15 homicides and 63 violent crimes. But if that's the way it's supposed to be. WE know things are bad, worse than bad. They're crazy. It's like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don't go out anymore. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we're living in is getting smaller, and all we say is, "Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms, let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials and I won't say anything. Just leave us alone. Just leave us alone. Well I'm not going to leave you alone. I want you to get mad. I don't want you to protest. I don't want you to riot. I don't want you to write to your congressman because I wouldn't know what to tell you to write. I don't know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crime in the street. All I know is that first you've got to get mad! You've got to say, "I'm a human being, God damn it! My life has value!" I want you to get up now. I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window, open it, and stick your head out and yell, "I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore!" Just get up from your chairs, right now. Go stick your head out and yell and keep yelling, "I'm as mad as hell! I'm not going to take this anymore!" Just get up from your chairs.
[voices]
There's yelling in that room.
[shouting]
I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore!
I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore!
I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore!
I'm mad as hell! I'm not going to take it anymore!
I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore!
I'm not going to take it anymore!
I'm mad as hell!
I'm mad as hell"
I'm not going to take this anymore!
I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore!
I'm - as - mad - as - hell
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