Editor’s Note: The following is an edited transcript from Amy Goodman’s syndicated radio show Democracy Now!
Amy Goodman:
The son of Caribbean-born immigrants, Harry Belafonte grew up on the
streets of Harlem and Jamaica. After serving in World War II, he
returned to New York and began a successful acting and singing career.
Along with his rise to worldwide stardom, Belafonte became deeply
involved in the Civil Rights Movement and was close friends with the
Rev. Martin Luther King.
In the 1980’s he helped initiate the “We
Are the World” single which helped raise millions of dollars in aid to
Africa. He also hosted former South African President Nelson Mandela on
his triumphant visit to the United States. Belafonte has been a
longtime critic of U.S. foreign policy, calling for an end to the
embargo against Cuba, and opposing policies of war and global
oppression.Belafonte spoke at a rally in Caracas, where he commented on
President Bush:
“No matter what the greatest
tyrant in the world, the greatest terrorist in the world, George W.
Bush, says, we’re here to tell you: Not hundreds, not thousands, but
millions of the American people — millions — support your revolution,
support your ideas, and yes, expressing our solidarity with you.”
Amy Goodman:
Harry Belafonte was standing next to President Chavez when he made
those comments, and he didn’t let up) Harry Belafonte joins us today in
our Firehouse studio for the hour. Welcome to Democracy Now!
Harry Belafonte: It’s nice to be here.
Amy Goodman:
It’s good to have you with us. Well, let’s go back for a moment to
Venezuela and your comments there, for which you got a lot of attention
in the United States. Talk about your views of President Bush.
Harry Belafonte:
When Katrina took place, there was a great sense of tragic loss for
many Americans who saw that terrible tragedy. What we had not
anticipated was that our government would have been so negligent and so
unresponsive to the plight of hundreds of thousands of people in the
region.
And in a dilemma that we all face as to what we could do
as private citizens to help the folks that were caught in that tragedy,
we began to listen to voices that were outside the boundaries of
government, the United States government. We listened to voices that
came from as far away as Denmark, who offered to send goods and
services in emergency, and we also heard the voices of people from
Venezuela through their leader, Hugo Chavez, who said that ‘In this
moment of your great tragedy, we, the Venezuelan people, extend all the
resources we can summon up to help the plight of those people caught in
the Gulf region.
The United States very abruptly and very
arrogantly rejected that offer, while in its stead, we did nothing to
bring immediate relief. And as a matter of fact, I must tell you, we’re
still quite delinquent in what the peoples of that region need, because
we still failed to fully mobilize and meet the needs of the people,
particularly in New Orleans, but other places within that region.
I
and many other private citizens decided that we would listen very
carefully to what people outside of the government were saying, because
there was no immediate sense of relief and response to what we were
experiencing, the people in Katrina. And so, like others, I went with a
delegation of 15 people, at the invitation of the Venezuelan
government, to come and to meet with President Chavez and members of
his cabinet to talk about what we could do to help American people
caught in this tragedy.
While there, we were given the right and
the permission and the opportunity to visit barrios, villages, going
into the schools, going into the prisons of Venezuela. We went into the
academic institutions, in which Cornel West spoke. Tavis Smiley went to
TeleSUR and other television communications development taking place,
to examine, to see what was happening to, quote-unquote, “freedom of
the press.”
As we’ve said, freedom of the press in Venezuela is
vigorously denied. There is no opposition noise. Yet it’s interesting
to note that nothing in Venezuela has been nationalized. There’s still
a very vigorous private sector, albeit that it’s a little disgruntled
that it is not able to sustain the rather one-sided agreement that they
drew with that government a long time ago in contracts that were drawn
for oil and other resources.
Amy Goodman: Did you meet with the opposition as well?
Harry Belafonte:
Yes. We met with the opposition, as a matter of fact, the leader of the
opposition. And for a little over two hours, we had an exchange. I
asked him questions that I thought were appropriate about what he felt
about Chavez and the program, why did he take an opposition position.
And he expressed his thoughts on the way things were going. We found
that there were some contradictions to what he said, but that was not
my purpose.
I didn’t go down to be an investigative reporter. I
went down to ascertain facts and to make sure that if we got responses
from the Venezuelan government that would help the plight of poor
people in America, not just those caught in Katrina, but, as you well
know, already the South Bronx has received aid, oil at very favorable
prices for people who were not given any to be able to face this winter
that we’re experiencing now, and it is expected that will become more
severe. Massachusetts received oil. They just recently negotiated with
Vermont and Maine and other places, about not only oil, but what other
goods and services can the Venezuelan government bring to take up the
slack for what the United States says it has no resources to fill.
It
is quite curious that we can find billions and billions of dollars to
sustain an illegal and immoral war in the Middle East, invading a
country that did not provoke us and moving into this conflict
unconstitutionally, even though it had the approval of the Congress.
Even the Congress violated the statutes of the Constitution.
We
were not invaded. There was no threat of an enemy. We unilaterally
walked into a country that had no threat to this country, and we
invaded it. That’s against the Constitution.
Amy Goodman: You call President Bush a terrorist?
Harry Belafonte:
I call President Bush a terrorist. I call those around him terrorists,
as well: Condoleeza Rice, Rumsfeld, Gonzales in the Justice Department,
and certainly Cheney. I think all of these men sit — and women — sit
in the midst of an enormous conspiracy that has been unraveling America
for the last six years. It is tragic that the dubious way in which this
president acquired power should have begun to unravel the Constitution
and the peoples of this country.
Yes, I say that there are people
in this country who live in terror. Poverty is terror. Having your
Social Security threatened is terror. Having your livelihood as an
elderly person slowly disappearing with no replenishment is terror.
Students who are dropping out of school because there are no resources
to keep us in school is terror.
You find people in the streets,
watching drugs permeate our communities and destroy our young, it’s a
life of terror. And men who sit in charge of that distribution
mechanism, which can help the American people overcome these problems
and refuse to do so, while giving the rich more money than they’ve ever
dreamt of having, while turning around our institutions and redirecting
resources from those who are truly in need to those who are already
generously endowed, if not hedonistically so, it’s a great tragedy.
And
I think most important is that we have words that attempt to give us
moral cleansing, so that somehow we hold those responsible for crashing
into the Twin Towers and killing over 2,000 Americans citizens in cold
blood, which is an act of terrorism — people who have done that should
be sought out and brought to justice; there’s no question of that —
but when we do what we have done, illegal war, going into the Middle
East, bombing at will, and then hundreds of thousands of people get
caught, who are either maimed or over 100,000 have already been killed,
who are innocent men, women and children, and we chalk that off to a
thing called “collateral damage,” as if somehow that murderous thing
that we’re doing so cruelly and so inhumanely has no judgment before
world opinion, that we are somehow righteous and above criticism and
above the law. That is unacceptable. And that’s what I speak out
against.
Amy Goodman: I wanted to ask you about the
comments you made about former Secretary of State Colin Powell. This is
what you said about him during a radio interview in Los Angeles in
October 2002:
There’s an old saying in the days
of slavery, there are those slaves who lived on the plantation, and
there were those slaves who lived in the house. You got the privilege
of living in the house if you served the master to exactly the way the
master intended to have you serve him. That gave you privilege. Colin
Powell is permitted to come into the house of the master, as long as he
will serve the master according to the master’s dictates. Now, when
Colin Powell dares to suggest something other than what the master
wants to hear, he will be turned back out to pasture.
Amy Goodman: Your thoughts today about Colin Powell?
Harry Belafonte:
I think I’m mostly saddened by the fact that now that Colin Powell is
no longer in office and enjoys the privileges of private citizenship,
that even in this aftermath, he is still not repentant. And I’m not
asking him to repent in some supercilious commanding way. What I’m
looking at is his soul, and I’m looking at redemption from past
grievances and transgressions.
He lied to the American people, as
did his president, before the United Nations. That led us into this
war. We were told about weapons of mass destruction — there aren’t any
— and all the things that you and I’m sure your listeners already
know. And I would imagine that now that he’s been removed from that
responsibility, that he would have taken a position that maybe would
have said to us more clearly and more humanely what his difficulties
and problems were while he was in service and that he now choose to
look at all of this from another perspective, especially in the wake of
all that has been revealed by intelligence reports that have been
released, by the debate that we’ve been having on what happened and how
we did it, and what all the subterfuges were and what has come out from
the intelligence communities in other nations around the world. But no,
there has not been such — he still maintains that what he did was just
and correct.
I find that sad. I mean, I remember John Kennedy,
when he went into Cuba and understood very quickly how ill-advised that
was, that he had the courage and the strength to say, I made a mistake,
and that I’m sorry that I listened to counsel that misled me, and that
I accept all responsibility for this act, and that I will not do that
again. And he apologized not only to the American people, but to the
world at large, and stepped forward. For that, he was greatly admired.
I
don’t think that we are a species or a people that can exist without
making mistakes somewhere along the line. Some make mistakes that are
greater than others. But I do believe that we should have the courage
and the ability to look at something that we did, even if in the first
instance we believed it, when in the wake of the aftermath and the
truth, you find out that that was not the case, to then say, ‘Let me go
back and examine what led me to this conclusion. What gods was I
serving? What masters was I serving? What was it all about?’ and then
try to be more instructive to people who will listen to you.
Amy Goodman:
I wanted to ask you about the surveillance scandal; President Bush
wiretapping Americans without court warrant. This isn’t the first time,
of course, and you were a victim of it. Can you, in talking about that,
also talk about your relationship with Dr. Martin Luther King, how you
met, the conversations you had, and then recently learning about these
wiretaps?
Harry Belafonte: When I was discharged from the
United States Navy, having served almost two years during the Second
World War, I came back, like millions of us did, with an expectation
that those principles for which we fought would be fully revealed and
embraced by the American government and the American people — the war
was about democracy, the war was about ending white supremacy, the war
was about ending colonialism — only to discover that the Allies, the
British, the French, the Dutch and the Americans, all who were the
forefront of the democratic charge, having victoriously won that war,
did not upon the celebration of victory do anything but go back to
business as usual.
Segregation was more vigorously enforced in
this country. Many citizens in this country did not have the right to
vote. Opportunities were not on an equal level playing field. The
peoples of Asia and Africa and the colonial Caribbean were not
experiencing any relief from their colonial degradation. And many of us
were very, very upset and very angry with the fact that here was
democracy, having been fought for so vigorously, not reaching out to
those of us who were the victims of the absence of democracy. And in
that context, rather than submit, we joined and organized and did
everything we could to have the principles of democracy in our
Constitution upheld. That meant we went after voting, we went after
ending the segregation laws. We did everything.
For that act, we
were looked upon as unpatriotic, we were looked upon as people who were
insurgents, that we were doing things to betray our nation and the
tranquility of our citizens, when nothing could have been further from
the truth. That engaged the F.B.I. That engaged the House on American
Activities Committee. Many of our leaders were hounded and denied their
livelihood. Their passports were taken away. So vigorous was that
campaign of oppression that even American citizens committed suicide,
and not by ones or twos, but by large numbers. It was a cruel,
oppressive period. But we stayed the course, many of us. We resisted.
And ultimately, we prevailed.
On the threshold of that experience
came the Civil Rights Movement. As a matter of fact, we were the
forerunners to the movement. We energized the spirit and people to make
America live up to its code, live up to its great promise. In that
context, the Civil Rights Movement began to do the same things that
those before the movement did to vigorously pursue the unjust laws of
this country and to turn them over.
J. Edgar Hoover and others in
government began to put surveillance on the citizens. I have no idea
how many court permissions were given to have our wires tapped, but
nevertheless, we were. Everything we talked about were tapped. As a
matter of fact, as an artist, while I was away, the innocence of my
family and my children were invaded one evening by the F.B.I. agents
who came while I was away, knocked at the door. My wife was very
startled at the experience, and when she queried them as to why they
were there, they said they had come to investigate me, because they
felt that I was doing acts of treason towards our country.
Amy Goodman: When was this?
Harry Belafonte:
This was 1950, ’51, ’52, around that period. Although we suspected that
we were being surveilled, we didn’t know the extent of it until reports
began to be revealed and came out in a number of books that were
written.
Perhaps the most detailed and one of the best-researched was a writer by the name of Taylor Branch, who did a trilogy called Parting the Waters and then Pillar of Fire, and the most recent, Canaan’s Edge. In Canaan’s Edge,
much of his research was drawn from wiretaps, from surveillances, from
conversations taped in the White House and the Justice Department and
through the F.B.I.
These revelations should say to the American
people: such a mechanism has been in place for a very, very long time.
The essential difference between then and now, in the face of the same
horror, is that no previous regime tried to subvert the Constitution.
They may have done illegal acts. They may have gone outside the law to
do these, but they did them clandestinely. No one stepped to the table
as arrogantly as George W. Bush and his friends have done and said, ‘We
legally want to suspend the rights of citizens, the right to surveil,
the right to read your mail, the right to arrest you without charge.
You do not have the right to counsel if we so decide, and you can stay
in prison as long as we want you to, until we’re satisfied that we have
reached the objectives that we want, despite the Constitution.’
I
think that every person in the United States of America should be up in
arms, should be up in rebellion against the reality that we face, that
it is that fact that made me say that I think and I feel that we are at
the dawnings of a new Gestapo state here in the United States, through
the security — Securities Commission and through the Homeland
Security, as well — National Security Agency.
All of these
different agencies, all of these different bureaucracies have their own
special assignments, and then they come — and when you look at the
collective, America is playing out a horror theme. The fact that we’re
a joyous nation, when you see sports and you see so much light, frothy,
mindless entertainment bombarding you every day and so much
disinformation coming your way, is enough to make any citizen mentally,
as well as socially, blurred to truth.
But the fact is that it
exists, and it exists very intensely in our midst. There are citizens
at this moment who are being arrested, who are not being told why
they’re arrested. Some have been spirited out of this country to
faraway places to be imprisoned and tortured. These are realities, and
the American people had best wake up, because as one priest once said,
or I think it was a protestant minister in Germany, said, ‘When they
came for the communists, I didn’t know any. When they came for the
Jews, I didn’t know any. When they came for the labor movements, I
didn’t know any. And then when they came for me, no one was left.’ I
don’t think we can distance ourselves from what’s going on in America.
And
as Roosevelt said, that ‘When our government is being subverted, our
Constitution is being undermined by those who sit in the seat of
government and power, it is the right of citizens and the
responsibility of citizens to raise their voice against this intrusion
and this collapse and should speak out against it and, in fact, change
the government; and those who do not do that, should be charged with
patriotic treason.’
Amy Goodman: How do you think people should do that?
Harry Belafonte:
By organizing, by coming together, by meeting, and if those sources of
information that come your way blur, and all have the same voice, it’s
very easy to find Democracy Now! It’s very easy to go to the internet.
It’s very easy to go to local meetings that are being held all over
this country, on university campuses, in communities. I work very
vigorously with groups in California, in South Central, up in Northern
California. I go into the prisons of America. This nation is humming
with people who are in discussion about what’s happening to us.
Amy Goodman:
Can you talk to people who are afraid of being blacklisted or
whitelisted, if you will, from your own experience? I mean, here you
were. the Calypso King. You were the first one to sell a million
albums, way ahead of Frank Sinatra, all of them, but you were willing
to risk it all. What did it mean to be blacklisted in this country?
Harry Belafonte:
Actually, upon hindsight, it meant that I was doing something right,
and regardless of any doubts that I may have had in the beginning, in
wondering where this was all going, I’ve come to find that men like
Paul Robeson and women like Eleanor Roosevelt and Fannie Lou Hamer and
Ella Baker and so many noble warriors that were in the Civil Rights
Movement, also those noble people in Africa, many who waged a vigorous
resistance to colonialism, foremost would be Nelson Mandela, when our
correspondence started while he was in prison and then ultimately to
see the A.N.C. come about and bring a transition to a rather oppressive
experience, one of the most in that century, and to do so nonviolently,
to transform this government without firing one shot, all of these
people stand as torches to my — to the validation of what it was that
we did, as the principle, as the clear voice of what people have to do.
And I would say to my colleagues, ‘If it is the economics of your life,
when will you have enough? And at what price do you sell your soul when
you know what the truth is and refuse to embrace it at the price of
losing our democracy?’
Amy Goodman: When you say you
started writing to Nelson Mandela when he was imprisoned — for almost
three decades — where was this country? And how dangerous was this to
do it?
Harry Belafonte: Writing to Nelson Mandela, as
such, was not an act that endangered me, I don’t think. It was
certainly an act that was very much in tandem with the way I was
behaving with a lot of people in the world who were having their human
rights violated. I had done quite a lot of work in Africa. I was a
cultural advisor to the Peace Corps, appointed by John Kennedy. I
helped shape some of the early policies and how the Corps did its
business in faraway countries. And long before most of the African
countries had come to independence, I was there, talking to potential
heads of state. I went to Kenya with Thurgood Marshall at the
celebration of their independence, the only American artist or global
artist to be so invited. And I worked with Tom Mboya before Kenya got
its independence to bring African students to this country by the
hundreds, along with Jackie Robinson and others who foot the bill.
We
did a lot of work in Africa. I knew Julius Nyerere and Kenneth Kaunda,
and then eventually Seku Ture, and had a long relationship to the
continent. And so, therefore, writing Nelson Mandela would not have
been an unusual thing for me to do, except that we knew he was
incarcerated, charged with being a terrorist and all those things that
we charged him with. And then I thought that in prison he should be at
least — we should make an attempt to reach him and to help with his
spirits. My letters were delivered through his attorney, because all of
his mail was read, and some of the letters got to him in a clandestine
way.
I don’t think any of us expected to see him alive. And at
the end of 27 and a half years, because I continued to work with the
A.N.C., I had continued to work with the issues of apartheid and the
sanctions, I had brought to this country great African artists, Miriam
Makeba, Hugh Masekela, who were hugely successful, and they delighted
American audiences. And those artists spoke to the plight of the South
Africans. And behind their calling, behind their power, and in the
midst of my own, we did a lot to put the light on the darkness of what
was going on in South Africa. And when Nelson Mandela was finally
released from prison, the A.N.C. asked me to come to London to meet
with Oliver Tambo, because they wanted me to personally handle all of
his events when he came to the country, to help pick his agenda, what
were the best targets, who were the people that he should most reach
out to.
Amy Goodman: And this was Nelson Mandela?
Harry Belafonte:
This was Nelson Mandela. And all the events were looked at. We
negotiated — we discussed clearly where we thought he should be.
George Bush’s father, the original President Bush, was in office then.
I had to meet with his special services, securities, to talk about
Nelson Mandela’s safety in the country. David Dinkins was the mayor. I
had to negotiate with him in the city — a host of things that were
done, in order to be able to secure his presence in this country and to
let his voice be heard. So that was not unusual for me.
I had
talked with other heads of state, Michael Manley from Jamaica, a place
in which I grew up, where my roots stood. I worked very hard with
Michael Manley for the Caribbean nations in the region, and I spent a
great deal of time there, working socially and politically. So that’s
an open page. There was nothing clandestine about it. It’s hard to be a
superstar and hidden.
Amy Goodman: But early on, you were taking on corporate America and the U.S. government by supporting the A.N.C.
Harry Belafonte: Yes. I still take on corporate America and the U.S. government.
Amy Goodman:
What about in Haiti? President Aristide is now in South Africa, ousted
from Haiti. In February 29, 2004, he was taken out of the country in a
U.S. plane, out of his own country, sent to the Central African
Republic. And he said, he was the victim of a kidnapping in the service
of a coup d’etat backed by the United States. Your response?
Harry Belafonte:
My response is that I believe his story to be so. I believe that is
exactly what happened. I’ve talked to many people who have far more
information than I do, because I don’t live within the womb of
government, but those who do have attested to the fact that what took
place historically, that we described as an undermining of a legitimate
democracy, was the case. And as a matter of fact, I think the story
that you alluded to at the beginning of this broadcast in the New York Times
does not say that fully. But it certainly has taken a big slice of that
period to show America’s complicity in helping to undermine that
government and destabilize that beleaguered country.
That’s not
unusual for us. We’ve done that with many places. While we talk about
having democracy for the world, we undermine the democracy of Chile,
where we murdered and participated fully in the murder of Allende. We
have now talked about another legally existing president in Venezuela,
Hugo Chavez. We sought to do everything to diminish and demonize that
president. We’re speaking about other democracies in the region. It is
not unusual for us to be duplicitous when it comes to talk.
We
admit and accept democracies according to how we think they serve our
most selfish and our most arrogant and our most oppressive needs.
That’s what we do, especially in the developing world. We stepped in
while Vietnam was trying to iron out its own internal policies and were
very close to having a victory there, when the United States intervened
and lied once again to the American people, led us to a war that cost
millions of lives, and all the things that we know about Vietnam.
It’s
not an unusual thing for us to do. And I think that citizens just have
to understand that the first order of business for a democracy is
vigilance among the citizens. It is a delicate instrument. It continues
to need nourishment and attention. And the minute we turn away from
that nourishment and that attention, it will be taken away from us, as
it is now appearing to be the case.
Amy Goodman: You knew Paul Robeson?
Harry Belafonte: Yes, very well.
Amy Goodman:
Paul Robeson, who the government pulled his passport. The government
went after him. White-listed from almost every public space in this
country. Have you been concerned in the past, and especially if young
people are listening, as you were deeply concerned also about your
career, that they could go after you in the same way? And what did Paul
Robeson say about this?
Harry Belafonte: Paul Robeson was very clear. He felt he did
what
he had to do, in conscience and in the spirit of this nation. And he
made a choice. He has never imposed that choice on others. He knows
that it is a very, very difficult thing to do, especially if you’re
from the poor. Especially if you’re in the black community, coming from
a line of never having to a moment where you have access, and all of a
sudden to put that access in jeopardy. And I think that I would not put
upon people some harsh judgment if they found that they were living in
a zone of fear and had to move cautiously, as to what they would do to
try to speak out against that oppression. But I suspect that if it is
not attended to in the earliest, it may have to be attended to in the
latest. And in the latest, you may find that it’s too late.
Amy Goodman: You also knew Rosa Parks.
Harry Belafonte: Yes, I knew her.
Amy Goodman:
What about her legacy? One of the things the corporate media said when
she died, though they did pay a lot of attention, they made the point
that she was no troublemaker. But it looks like her history shows the
very opposite. She was a troublemaker from way back, committing her
life to equality, against segregation.
Harry Belafonte:
She never stopped being a troublemaker. But it is now to this country’s
best interest, in order to further hide its villainy, to reach out and
to somehow blur those who were very revolutionary and those who, in the
end, turned out to be huge moral, as well as social, forces in our
time, to lay claim to them, because it helps hide who they are and what
they do. Cheney, I mean, he didn’t want Dr. King to be a holiday. He
worked vigorously against the levels of acceptability that he has
reached in the United States government. I mean, our government is
replete with people who now lay claim to Dr. King and honor him.
Well,
let me say this, as one who was instructed by Dr. King to seek and to
encourage redemption, I’m glad that at this late date in life they
somehow celebrate it. But I don’t think they celebrate it in honor.
They celebrate it to subvert what it is that they do, by having people
believe that they embrace the principles of a woman like Rosa Parks and
people like Fannie Lou Hamer, one of the most courageous of all.
Amy Goodman: Kanye West, after Hurricane Katrina, said President Bush doesn’t like black people. Do you agree?
Harry Belafonte:
I do not know that I could look upon President Bush as someone who
actively works every day of his life to oppress and to kill black
people as a direct act of race. I think his insensitivity, in the class
frame, being who he is, coming from the privileges that he does, being
one who pursues the edge of imperial ambition — not so much the edge,
he’s right smack in the center of it — he can be expected to do those
things, which will cruelly administer no relief at all to those who are
oppressed, who are poor. And in that act, because of the way in which
our society is structured, a large group of brown people, a large group
of yellow people, a large group of black people, are on the forefront
of this nation’s poverty. And therefore, we feel the brunt of it.
One
cannot help but wonder that if what happened in Katrina in that region
of America had happened somewhere in Maine or had happened somewhere
else in America where white sensibilities and white life would have
been in great jeopardy, that our nation would have been that blurred,
and certainly our government, to what was happening to the citizens who
are not white.
I think somewhere in the American psyche, black
people are expendable when we try to sustain our positions of privilege
and our positions of power, just as I think people in the Middle East
are expendable.
I don’t think America really knows who we are. We
don’t know our fellow citizens. We don’t know the nations we invade. We
don’t have a real deep and honest sense of who we are as a people, both
on the good side of the ledger, to who we are as a people that comes
from the dark side of the ledger. We are the most uninformed people on
the face of the earth. And I don’t say that as hyperbole.
Amy Goodman: Do you think Americans should join the military, and do you think soldiers should go to Iraq?
Harry Belafonte:
I don’t think soldiers should be anywhere in the world. I mean, that is
a moral and a basic philosophy. I think that the only way to end wars
is to have no military and to find other ways in which — I think we
should suspend all nuclear weapons. Do I think we can do that as an act
that is instantaneous? No. I think too much of the world is locked in
to what the military stabilizes in civilized society. So I think there
is a process. But if that is the goal and the aim, and it is so
declared, then I think citizens should participate in the prospect of
disengagement.
Let me just say this. If you have a patient who is
hit by a disease, and doctors look and say, ‘To go in, it will be a
shock to the body to move that, without looking at what it does to
other parts of the body; let us move to prepare the body for the moment
of great relief,’ then that’s what we pursue. I think the same thing
exists in a civil society and in the political process. We have to be
careful. But I think that we should have as our goal to end military
intrusion as a way to settle grievances.
Amy Goodman: Would you counsel soldiers not to serve in Iraq?
Harry Belafonte:
If I were a soldier today or going into the military today, as an act
of conscience, I would not serve. I volunteered to be in the United
States Navy during the Second World War as an act of conscience, not
just because it gave me relief from poverty and I had a place to go to
maybe learn a skill, because I wasn’t learning anywhere I lived and had
opportunity where I was living, but because I really believed in the
principles of what we fought for and what we said we were doing in
making the world safe.
So I think it’s an act of conscience and
an act of social responsibility to say yes, as tens of thousands of
young people do. We just don’t hear about them. I think we’re having
trouble recruiting young people, because they’re not readily
volunteering because they have conflict about what this war means and
what our government is asking them to do.
Amy Goodman: What gives you hope?
Harry Belafonte:
People. I cannot believe that which we have achieved in this country,
nothing could have been darker than the time of slavery. We extricated
ourselves from that. Nothing could be darker than a century of
apartheid and oppression. We extricated ourselves from that. The Second
World War was not winnable by the onslaught of the German forces. We
won that. I think in the final analysis, the people are the true
frontier, and I think people will save this nation. But it is only
people who can do it.