Mark Siljander
speaker
279 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Mark Siljander’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And it was historic because it was a little vibration in the ocean of apartheid in white rural South Africa. and it built into a tsunami essentially within the next few years.
So let me get that story exactly straight. So you were spearheading a weak-kneed bill to begin with, and you were doing that to some degree unbeknownst to yourself as a puppet of forces that you didn't fully understand. But then I didn't quite follow that. What was the transformation of the bill that had the cascading effect?
Well, there was a substitute bill by Ron Dellums, a very liberal Democrat from California, that had real teeth in it. Oh, I mean, it was seriously condemning, justifiably, the apartheid regime. And he, of course, presented it as a substitute for the original bill. And all I had to do was call for record roll call vote and be voted down.
We go back to the other bill, debate that for another day or so. And the weak bill would float through the Senate and go through the Senate and everything would be copacetic with the racists. Well, I refused to allow a voice vote, and no one else was there to call for it except for me, because Republicans didn't want to be seen defending racism.
Okay, and so what's the significance of you refusing to call for a voice vote?
Because the Ron Dellums bill, this extreme bill, passed the U.S. House of Representatives as a substitute for the weak bill. And I was blamed for it. And by the time I got back to my office, I can't tell you how many messages of disdain and anger I received from that. And that was just the beginning of this whole epiphany.
And then when I went to the Middle East, usually we go to Israel because I was on the Middle East committee too. And we were told not to see the Palestinians. And I thought, now, wait a minute, how can one ever work as a mediator, especially one of the most powerful countries in the world and most powerful parliaments in the world, the U.S. Congress, if we don't talk to both sides? We have to.
I'm very pro-Israel, but I felt we still have to talk to our enemies, what are perceived to be enemies anyway at the time. And I was threatened at that time not to pursue this type of, I would call it balance, of engaging people that our party was told not to engage.
Okay, so let me expand on this a little bit. So you talked about the anti-communism and the role of the military, the role of force in combating communism. And you talked about apartheid. And then we also started to talk about the conflicts that involve the Islamic world. So let me walk through those with an eye to fleshing out the neocon position.
I mean, obviously, during the 60s, there was a huge rebellion in the United States, especially by young people, against the use of the military in fighting the communists in Vietnam, an extension, let's say, of the Korean conflict. Now, when I was young, I was temperamentally, I suppose, predisposed and also by my youth to thinking that the anti-war protests were fully justified.
But as I matured and learned more about the absolute horrors of communism, both Soviet and Chinese, I could certainly see the rationale for war. the U.S. in particular, do everything it could from stopping any population like that of Cambodia, let's say, from falling into the hands of the communists. I mean, how many people in Cambodia died when the communists took over?
Four million in the killing fields? At least. Something like that. Some absolute cataclysmic catastrophe. And of course, North Korea has never been able, the Koreans have never been able to free themselves from the grip of the Chinese communists. And so it's an open question. with regards to communism, how much diplomacy is possible and how much force is necessary.
And the certainly weakness in the face of communism and military weakness was not advisable. And then, so let's just park that for a second. And then on the South African side, I mean, I've been concerned ever since the 1980s when the anti-apartheid movement emerged that...
South Africa would turn into what Zimbabwe turned into, or Rhodesia, and that the radical leftists would take over in the aftermath of the disintegration of the Apartheid Empire, and all hell would break loose. And it still seems to me that that's a real possibility, still, for South Africa. Right, so these are the sorts of things that you were caught up in, in that nexus.
And so the neocons from... from what you've said, from what I understand, they're more likely to stand on the side of resolute and even invasive military force to implement regime changes. Now, I want to add one more thing to that, and then we'll go back to your epiphany. The theoretical...
The problem with the neocon theory, in my estimation, is that it seems to be predicated on the belief that a totalitarian state is basically composed of like a hyper thug and his minions oppressing a vast number of essentially freedom-loving people. And I don't think that's a reasonable argument. account of a totalitarian or authoritarian state at all.
Like, an authoritarian state emerges when everyone is lying about everything all the time. There might be the worst thug at the top, but the pathology is radically distributed through the system. So the idea that if you do a regime change, that you're going to evoke something like democracy in its aftermath strikes me as... wishful thinking in the extreme.
So it doesn't seem to me that the neocon fault is necessarily their proclivity to rely on military might. It seems to me that their fault is that they have a naive view of how complex it is to generate the preconditions for a democracy. Exactly. Okay, so I'd be more than happy to hear your reaction to any or all of that, and then we'll go back to the epiphany. Certainly.
Well... This is extraordinary naivete to think one could go to Iraq, or even Syria for that matter, and force... an American-U.S. style democracy on a people group that is broken into different faith groups.
Right. Languages.
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