Peter Kuznick
speaker
151 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Jan 2025
Peter Kuznick’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Ava and I are invited to Okinawa in February by the prefectural government to support the anti-base movement in Okinawa. Another story we could get into. But the Okinawa War Memorial has the names of all the Okinawans, the Japanese, the Americans, the Brits, the Aussies, everybody who died there. And that would be an anti-war memorial. But the Vietnam Memorial, sadly, as powerful as it is,
is giving the wrong message. And America is always giving the wrong message when it comes to war.
Well, the United States, foreign policy has been bipartisan throughout the Cold War, really. And so both parties have been war parties. Correct. But there was a strong element within the Democratic Party of progressive Democrats who were much more anti-war, anti-defense spending, and wanted to use that money instead for health care and education and education.
infrastructure and the things that people need that actually help people's lives. But it's become this group think now. And even progressive Democrats who are my friends sound so hawkish these days that I don't recognize them. And the odd thing, so we've had this reversal. Trump ran as the anti-war candidate. Trump ran as the pro-labor candidate.
You know, it makes no sense to those of us who grew up, I was never a Democrat, but I usually voted for the Democrats because they were more progressive than the Republicans. But at this point, you've got two war parties, although there's a stronger faction in the Republican Party at this moment. who are at least making sense about the nuclear threat and about Ukraine.
And it backfired and it was stupid. And you know, what really hurt Kamala with the young people was the unquestioning support for Israel. I saw with my students, They despise the Democrats. Gaza is the big issue for this generation. And they see it every day, or they were seeing it at least for a while on television.
And the stories, you know, every day they were digging out babies from under the rubble. It was horrible to watch. And it was worse if you traveled in other parts of the world. They were even more graphic and explicit than they were in the United States.
This is what my kids were watching, my students were watching, and they were so disgusted with the Democrats for keep on feeding this Israeli war. I mean, I would say that most of my students were pretty horrified by the October 7th attack that Hamas made. And I know I felt very strongly too. Me too.
I mean, I know that they've been badly treated for a long time, the Palestinians, but what happened on October 7th is unacceptable, unforgivable. Fair. And I can understand why there was a strong reaction, but the Israeli response, we're talking like for 9-11, people being ready to do something. They had already been brutalizing the people in the West Bank
Gaza had been an open air prison for years already. And so the Israeli response is so disproportionate, it's so horrific. For those of us who have different history and experience with Israel to see what Israel has turned into now, without any, almost no protest against this brutalization of an entire people, whether you consider it genocide or just a slaughter, it sickens one.
And that's what I found in my students. And the young people did not vote. I mean, for the first time, Trump got a majority of young voters. And it wasn't just young men, young women also.
But change is good. Change is good. And, you know, I see with my students, you know what they lack now? They're very critical. They're very smart and analytical. There's no utopianism. So many of the young people think that the world that they've inherited is all there is gonna be.
And they don't have any, the 60s generation, Oliver and I were part of the 60s generation when you were too young, or not even born. But the 60s generation had a vision of making a better world.
And that informed everything we did. And we would jokingly refer to what we're gonna do after the revolution. You know, but we did have a utopian vision for how human beings could live differently. Young people now are even much more ready to critique the system at its roots than we were back then.
We were just learning about what it meant to critique the system, but we had a hope and a belief that the future could be that much better. And I don't, you know, I think kids now see it, maybe it could be different, but they don't have this kind of vision burning vision that we can make a better world.
50 years from now, well, they should start with Oliver, my book. This is the earlier edition, The Untold History of the United States. You know, this one, the 2012 edition, was about 750 pages. We put out an updated edition in 2019, and now it's over 900 pages. People really should read it and watch it because it's got so much history that people don't know.
I was talking about the ignorance about World War II Well, I did an anonymous survey with college students, all of whom were A students in high school. And I asked them, how many Americans died in World War II? And the median answer I got was 90,000. 90,000? by 300,000. So they were in the ballpark. I asked them how many Soviets died in World War II. The median answer I got was 100,000.
So they were only 27 million off, right? These are smart kids and they know nothing. They couldn't understand World War II. They couldn't understand the Cold War. They couldn't understand what's going on in Ukraine unless they know the history. And so that's why Oliver and I did the Untold History of the United States to begin filling in those blanks.
Tulsi Gabbard was interviewed by the New York Times in 2019. And they asked her, what is the big article? What podcast do you watch? She says, I don't want to talk about podcasts, but I just finished watching the Untold History of the United States. And everybody should watch it because it fills in those blanks in the history that nobody knows, that we never learn about in this country.
And so 50 years from now, it depends really, because it's going on in Japan. Oliver and I wrote an article after one of our trips in Japan called Partners in Historical Falsification, the United States and Japan. It's going on in Russia. I mean, everywhere people try to sanitize, whitewash their history,
Showing 121–140 of 151 · page 7 of 8
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