You Cannot Win a Nuclear War

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Though one can debate the reasons, statistics and precedent of nuclear war, what is often left out of the conversation is the reality of it: destruction of the world as a whole. In her new immersive art experience titled, “Any War, Any Enemy,” immersive artist Lena Herzog throws this reality literally right in the faces of viewers. The film can uniquely be experienced via virtual reality as well as a traditional screen and it plainly shows what nuclear war looks like.

Herzog begins the film with a quote stating nuclear war is not war. She tells host Robert Scheer on this episode of Scheer Intelligence that she begins with this because “the word ‘war’ is disorienting, because in war, you can have a battle, you can lose a battle, you can win a war. You cannot win a nuclear exchange. It’s omnicide. It’s not war.”

Part of a trilogy which tries to invoke art in a novel form, the film follows “Last Whispers,” another piece of immersive art that focuses on the destruction of language. For “Any War, Any Enemy,” Herzog wants people to “experience [nuclear war] inside the frame, to feel it in the fiber of your being.”

For Scheer, the film’s power comes from viscerally showing the reality most people have no idea will happen in the event of a nuclear war. “You are forced to be immersed into an environment where your voice means nothing, your brain means nothing, your eyes mean nothing, because this weapon has destroyed any means of sustaining life,” Scheer says. “So you are these figures floating around in the water dead.”

Foreign policy discussions centering around the U.S., Russia, China, Israel and others become moot points as Herzog points out, “This is a question of existence versus nonexistence.”

Scheer and Herzog agree that the time for nuclear disarmament is now. As opposed to the middle of the 20th century with the Cuban Missile Crisis, where leaders had hours and days to talk about any provocations and would actually speak to one another. Nowadays, leaders avoid each other and the response time to any kind of strike, Herzog says, “it’s 90 seconds. It’s four minutes.”

Here is the film in full:

Lena Herzog website

You can watch the virtual reality (VR) version here.

You can view view “Any War Any Enemy” as a video here.

You can also watch a conversation between Lena Herzog and Flavio Gregori here.

“Last Whispers” website

Credits

Host:

Robert Scheer

Producer:

Joshua Scheer

Video Producer:

Max Jones

Introduction:

Diego Ramos

Transcript

This transcript was produced by an automated transcription service. Please refer to the audio interview to ensure accuracy.

Robert Scheer  

Hi, this is Robert Scheer with another edition of Scheer Intelligence, where the intelligence comes from my guests. In this case, no question—Lena Herzog. She’s a great filmmaker in a form called immersive art. And I’ve seen her work before. Yesterday, I watched her latest film. It’s part of a trilogy called “Any War, Any Enemy.” The previous work was called “Last Whispers,” about the extinction of languages, but it was really about the extinction of history and all of the various ways history was lived with people speaking dialects and languages that have disappeared and, with them, a large part of the history of their lives and the sweeping takeover, basically, of English wiping out. But before that, of course, colonialism, Spanish and French had an active hand in it. So I was very impressed with that movie, “Last Whispers,” and then I learned about her new movie, which just came out recently, and “Any War, Any Enemy,” and it’s on a subject that I’ve written a lot about myself and covered: nuclear war. And it is the elephant in the room. No one really takes it seriously anymore. I shouldn’t say no one. There are a lot of people around the world who know about it and care, but in the United States, it’s largely absent. We see it’s a ploy that Putin, who is now the devil of the moment and Russia has been the devil for the whole last 100 years. They might think about it, but no, they’re just bluffing. And so, from my point of view, and having studied this issue and been a fellow in the Stanford Arms Control Institute with Condoleezza Rice and other famous experts on all this, I think it’s the most dangerous moment because we’re oblivious to it. Also, there’s an awful lot of nuclear saber rattling. And the issue of Ukraine comes up front and center, where there’s a real possibility of nuclear war. But also, obviously Israel, which is a nuclear armed nation, and not to mention all the others. I’m going to leave it to Lena. But first of all, let me ask you, what is immersive art? I know I experienced your film wearing a helmet on my head yesterday, and it was, I don’t want to trivialize waterboarding, but there was something about watching the end of the world, which is what the movie is about, with this incredible, immersive experience. I had watched it previously on my iPhone. I found it quite compelling in that form. I know you can see it on video, but tell me what you’re about as a filmmaker and this technology and why this subject now, and also relate it to your previous subject. And I’ve been instructed by my wife, who was a longtime editor of mine at the Los Angeles Times, to shut up and not interrupt so much. So why don’t you take it away and explain what this is all about?

Lena Herzog  

Thanks for having me here, Robert, I love Scheer Intelligence. So first of all, I don’t consider them films, and I don’t consider myself as a filmmaker, for lack of a better word, I’m an artist. And the work itself is called immersive art. It can be seen as a VR [virtual reality] it can be seen in planetarium, in a sphere, or in a room. So essentially, you’re inside a frame in the work, and you experience something for a period of time. In “Last Whispers,” the first chapter of the trilogy, you experience a chorus of languages, and you are inside a series of landscapes in outer space, in a forest, and you hear all these languages that are extinct in the chorus all around you. In this work, the new work that I just finished together with my team. It’s called “Any War, Any Enemy,” you experience the end of the world. But it’s not a realistic depiction. It’s kind of an immersive poem. It and I draw on some of the history of art and literature from Picasso Guernica to Dante’s Inferno. So that is the work that I’ve tried, I have created, and it is available now on all platforms.

Robert Scheer  

So let me just jump in. What we’re trying to see in this movie is the unimaginable. This is not nuclear bombs are not a weapon. What is the word you use? It’s omnicide. This is a way of the world’s population committing suicide, only they’re not all in on the decision to commit suicide. It’s like some weird cult leaders called political leaders, but they’re cult leaders convince people that it’s like Jonestown and they’re drinking the Kool Aid, that somehow nuclear weapons are really not the danger that we once feared when students went under their desk and you had drills. No, it’s just another way of and but they’re smaller, and we can use them maybe, but they could be controlled and so forth. It’s absolutely insane. And what your movie does, I just want to pay tribute to it. The reason I’m here to try, unashamedly, to promote it is, even though I’ve spent a good part of my life interviewing people about nuclear weapons and going to Livermore and Los Alamos. And actually, in the Soviet Union, in the old Soviet Union, I talked to many nuclear physicists and international conferences and so forth. Until I watched your film, I never really contemplated the moment after that explosion scene. We see it at the Oppenheimer movie in Hiroshima and Nagasaki explosions. It begins with the disorientation of birds who normally can fly in unison, coherently. It’s one of the great miracles of nature. How do these birds manage to fly and go from continent to continent and so forth, and the movie says, even the birds will be so disoriented. Forget about human beings who you present as just floating in water and dead and dropping and so forth. So really, what you’re trying to do in this movie, and I think succeeding admirably, is making us aware, once again, of something we should have never permitted ourselves to forget, that this is the horror of horrors.

Lena Herzog  

There’s so much to say here. The birds in the piece are a metaphor, I’m not sure exactly a metaphor for what, and they are meant to disorient. But it’s also, in my view, when I was making the piece, I was thinking about the forces that fall in sync, the way that birds, sometimes, a flock of birds, that fly in disoriented way, fall in sync in murmuration. Because I wanted to depict the forces that fall in sync for any war, including a nuclear war, industrialization of war, financialization of war, mythologizing of war. All of these forces without even one particular conductor, one director, they mysteriously fall in sync. Like before the First World War, in particular, you have that, where all of a sudden all these empires that actually went extinct after the First World War, Austria, Hungarian empire, Russian Empire, German, how they were enthusiastic, hysterically enthusiastic for war. How culturally they were prepared for it, how everybody was throwing flowers at these young boys, these kids that were going to die, but then they didn’t have nuclear war. Now we have nukes. And the quote that I used before my piece begins is by John Somerville nuclear: “The first thing to know about nuclear war is that it’s not war.” Because it’s not war and the word “war” is disorienting, because in the war, you can have a battle, you can lose a battle, you can win a war. You cannot win a nuclear exchange. It’s omnicide. It’s not war. It doesn’t have time that war has because the word war, the notion of war, has the notion of time embedded in it. It takes months, it takes years, and here it takes seconds. So whoever starts it has a benefit of what? Survival 10 minutes over the enemy? So it isn’t a war. What I wanted to show is, I wanted to show, in poetic but distinct way, an experience. What do we experience in it is a flash. This is how we’ll experience it, series of flashes. And in a real thing, you will be gone. You will become atom because even the tactical nuclear weapons, they are more powerful than the one that was dropped on Hiroshima, strategic nuclear weapons will wipe out a city just in one flash. Why did we lose fear? We lost fear of war because, first of all, all of the political leaders at the moment, they don’t know war. Which one of them had ever fought a war? Now, when Nikita Khrushchev and JFK had to deal with the Cuban Missile Crisis, these were two men that knew war. They were veterans of the Second World War. JFK was wounded, was a hero of the Second World War, and so was Nikita Khrushchev, who fought at Stalingrad. If you look at their letters that they have exchanged, how many Nikita Khrushchev described Stalingrad, and he said, we’re going to have worse destruction than in Stalingrad, but hundreds of times over. Of course, it’s not hundreds of times over. I think it’s a completely different factor, completely different paradigm of what a nuclear exchange will be. And I think part of a reason that we lost fear, other than not knowing war, the political leaders, I mean here, because there are plenty of Americans and there are plenty of people in the world, Russians, Chinese that remember still war, or have been in recent conflicts and recent wars. But I mean our political leaders who make the decisions of war and peace, they don’t know it. But also the scale, the scale of destruction in nuclear war, is so complete that, I think neurologically, we cannot handle understanding of it, and we reject thinking about it like we reject thinking about our own mortality, our own death, but the whole idea of all life on Earth going in series of flashes. I think we’re just not neurologically equipped to deal with the consequences of what we have created, and so we reject thinking about this, but we have to think about it, and we have to force ourselves to deal with it, because we have it. These new nuclear bombs, they are like, you know, like the rifle that’s hanging in the living room. What is it? [inaudible] that if in the first act, rifle is hanging in the room. In the second or third act, it has to fire. And the rule of history has been that weapons, once they were invented, they were used, and of course, nukes have been used. They were used in Japan so the way, even that they were used from the very beginning, I find kind of ominous, frankly, because when you think about that. The end of the war in the Pacific in the summer of 1945 Japan was already suing for peace, and these nuclear bombs were dropped in August of 1945. Now, people who were actually at the head of the fleet in the Pacific, like the fleet, Admiral William Leahy said, the use of this barbarous weapon that Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated, and they were ready to surrender. Another one also us, commander in the Pacific, Doug MacArthur said there was no military justification for the dropping of the bomb. Another one, commander in the chief of the Pacific Fleet, Admiral Nimitz, the Japanese had, in fact, already sued for peace. Atomic Bomb played no part, from purely military point of view, in the defeat of Japan. Eisenhower said Japan was, at the very moment, seeking some way to surrender to us at the minimum loss of face, it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing. These people said these things at the time of the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima, it was understood very well by the people at the top of the command that that was not necessary, and that it was intended to show the Russians who was it was. And general Leslie groves, who was the head of the Manhattan Project said, there was never any illusion on my part, that the main purpose of the project was to subdue the Russians. That’s what said General groves, he headed the Manhattan Project in the movie Oppenheimer, by [Christopher] Nolan. He’s played by Matt Damon.

Robert Scheer  

Well, you’re one. You’re one of those Russians— And by the way, I’m sorry, but if you could sit back a little bit yeah, and not lean in them, I appreciate the quotes. But all right, so it’s fascinating in the sense of it relates to your first movie of the loss of history and that we’re basically, you know, in the moment, and ignore everything that came before. And you make an interesting point. I happened to interview Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon, you know, Hans Bethe, who was involved in the product, one of the scientists, Gorbachev. And so forth, all of those people, even though they said, like Reagan, called the Russians monsters, they would use it, but no civilized person would ever think about that. You know, we’re not monsters like they are and so forth. And I’m going to mention your famous filmmaker husband, Werner [Herzog], because he’s German, and you’re Russian, and you were lived in the old Soviet Union until you were 20, and then you left and we’re basically talking about the objectification of people, beginning with the Japanese, you could kill them, and it wasn’t really barbaric with this horrible weapon. But we now we have this idea. We’ve actually even lost our fear of those monsters, the Russians, which Reagan at least had, you know that we have to have some kind of arms control. We’ve actually wiped out all arms control, and we’re being very belligerent. NATO’s expansion is the perfect example. We don’t have to worry what they think. They’re just going to brush them aside. Well, they turn out to still have these nuclear weapons, and they’re doing what we’ve always done, threatened to use them. We never really gave up first strike possibility and so forth. So I want to connect this, the reason I brought up your husband, who I think is one of the great filmmakers of all time, I think he’s just brilliant, but nonetheless, he is German and came out of a culture that we consider to be the most barbaric in modern history. Full confession, my father came from Germany to the United States, just like Trump, Trump’s family, Trump father. And my mother was Russian, Russian-Jewish, and so my father’s family in the war, which I had to deal with, because I was born in ’36 I dealt with it. My half brother bombed our hometown in Germany. And so the great thing that we left out of our history is who are the barbarians? And clearly in dropping the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was one of the great, maybe the greatest, act of terrorism. We use this word terrorism, but if by terrorism you mean attacking civilians, and certainly civilians in Japan who didn’t have an effective control over anything you are, this is the ultimate terror weapon, and it was used deliberately to maximize terror when school children were going to school in daylight and so forth, and just wipe them out. And but I want to get to the idea of the objectification of the other as expendable collateral damage. And so now we have this view that Putin must be another Hitler. He’s crazy, or what is he doing? But then the question is, why are we building these weapons? Why is the US modernizing these weapons? And on in the beginning of your film, you have some statistics, which I’d like you to share now with our audience. I don’t know if you have them handy. And about the time it takes for the bomb to drop. How many there are? How many nations can you do that? 

Lena Herzog  

Well, there are three nuclear superpowers. And at the moment, three nuclear superpowers are at, I wouldn’t even say at odds, but they they’re essentially in the state of war. And no one is talking about that fact, which is an astonishing fact that 12,000 nuclear bombs on high alert, all in all in the world. Once launched, that cannot be recalled, total destruction will follow. Now, all the weapons nuclear gaming have been shown that once they start flying, everything starts flying. And this is, of course, a horrifying scenario. Nobody knows how exactly it will unfold. Whatever it will unfold will be horrifying. And the problem, of course, with demonizing each other is that you remove one of the guardrails that prevented us, so far, of having nuclear war, which is, of course, not war, but nuclear double suicide or triple suicide, and that’s understanding of each other’s humanity. The one who made a breakthrough in that was John Hersey, when he wrote in the New Yorker, Hiroshima about the seven survivors of the bombing.

Robert Scheer  

By the way, I just want to say that’s exactly what was missing in the Oppenheimer movie. 

Lena Herzog  

Exactly. 

Robert Scheer  

Yes. So tell us about that, because you know, you and your husband are involved with film and so forth. And this is a celebrated movie, and there are aspects of it that are worth celebrating, even at least bringing up the subject and how Oppenheimer was treated by his own government for not having the right politics. But what was left out, glaringly, obviously intentionally, was any idea that the people that caught the bomb were human beings and should have the same right to live as any other human beings, and then you just bring up what Hershey did. So we need this in the conversation.

Lena Herzog  

Exactly, well, but we also need to understand why is it that they were not depicted and that this is the history of the depiction of the nuclear war. It’s the history of depiction of nuclear war in gaming. Because one of the things we don’t even understand how young generations are brought up on war games, and for them, nukes are just part of the tool in the game, part of the selection in history of culture. It’s very rare to see work of art in painting or in literature or anywhere that is exactly anti-war, not anti-American or anti-Russian or anti-Japanese, because that would be pro-war, but anti-war, anti-war is an ocean, and the most important thing is the depiction of humanity, of the other side. Now here one of the worst culprits has been media, and I’m talking about mainstream media that have become prolific in caricaturizing and demonizing essentially everyone except themselves. And this has become a sport. It’s part of the business model. Matt Taibbi wrote a great book about it, called Hate Inc., but this has created generations now of people who all they know when they think of the other is that, Oh, I hate them. I hate the Russians. I hate the Chinese, or I hate the French. Remember, there were French fries or freedom fries, you know? And there was a [inaudible] the enemy of the day. You bring up Gorbachev, one of the most interesting for me, moments in Gorbachev interviews. And by the way, Werner, my husband of 30 years, has made a film meeting Gorbachev in Moscow. In that film, Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev did not bring it up, but in many other interviews, he had brought up one fascinating incident. When he is faced with the Western media, and is trying to describe to them that he single handedly voluntarily, is disbanding the Warsaw Pact, that he is withdrawing the troops from Germany, and he is barraged by media that do not believe it. And they say, Oh, it’s a trap, Mr. Gorbachev, this is a trap. They don’t believe him. And finally, he said, I looked at them and I shook my head sadly, and I said, I did a terrible thing to you. I took away your enemy. So the question is, do we really need for our sense of self, an enemy? Is that necessary? Do we really need a war, any war? I mean, look at the history of this country, where I’ve been living for 34 years, and I love America, but why has it been at war virtually all of its time of existence of the United States now the West doesn’t have the monopoly on violence. History is history of violence. The West has a monopoly on scaling up to continental proportions the violence and one thing that I think what happened is that the collective West has not understood that it’s announced publicly. States like Russia and China and the rest of the world, they learned how to scale up violence in the same way. So we have parity between the nuclear super states. So Russia and China the two other nuclear superpowers that are declared by United States as enemies can scale up violence the same way that the collective West has scaled up violence for the last 500 years. And when you’re bringing up the demonization of the Russians, actually it’s not. The last 100 years the Russians have been demonized. There are books written about that. I’ve read a few of them, Russophobia, and the demonization of Russians has been going on for at least 500 years. But they’re not the only ones. So were the Asiatics in quotation marks? So were the native people here. I mean the history of depiction of the native population on the continent of the United States, if you read it, your hair stands on end. So why is it that in our psyche we have that necessity to demonize the other so essentially, my my trilogy, and the last piece that I’m working now on is called “Reversal,” which is the most beautiful thing to create. My trilogy is about that is, is empathy, what the lack of empathy and what the lack of understanding brings you? You’re talking about the fact that we have demonized and we just discussed that of the other is crucial, but that’s not the only thing. It’s also clarity of insight, because what happened after Hiroshima nukes stopped being weapons of legitimate weapons of war in the battlefield, they they became something else. They became diabolical weapon. And by the way, in large part because of John Hersey essay Hiroshima, because all of a sudden, people read what it did to other human beings, and they were horrified, right, fear of war, which we, as we talked about, people in power have lost trust communication between heads of nuclear states, even Cuban Missile Crisis, there was a communication and the sense of basic humanity. Now another thing that has happened after Hiroshima and after particularly, I think, the Cuban Missile Crisis, everybody was stunned into mutually assured destruction, which was a horrible way to live, but mutually assured destruction was assured, and everybody knew it. Now, mutually assured destruction is still assured, but people are discussing about it as if it’s not assured, as if it’s maybe yes, maybe no. And they speak about it in this kind of nonchalant ways, by the way, not only in the United States, but also in Russia, also in China. I have my friends in China, and they tell me that there’s a loose talk about, well, if we have a nuclear exchange with the United States, we have many more people. So if they lose 300 million, there’s no more United States. If we lose 300 million, we still have quite a few 100 million left on Russia. Also, there’s this kind of a in this horrifies me that across the board, the kind of gravity of it, and one thing, if I may say, because there’s, there’s an important aspect that no one, for some reason, is bringing up, and that is that all of these things, psychological, cognitive, neurological, almost everything has to coalesce within seconds. In Cuban Missile Crisis, we had time. Now we don’t have time. So in Cuban Missile Crisis in the ’60s, we had days, we had hours. The new the heads of state of Soviet Union and United States could discuss, could could signal. But now it’s 90 seconds. It’s four minutes. And now, if you take a look about all the wars that collective West has had in the past, let’s say 100 years, and all the mistakes, all the catastrophes that they created. But these mistakes cost millions. Mistake now will cause life on earth, not just us, all life, the trees, the animals, all life. And are we really prepared? Are we wise enough for that? Are we human enough for that to make these profound, philosophical, existential decisions. And of course, I shouldn’t spread the demagogic way, because we, you and I, Robert, we make no difference. It’s the handful of people that make these decisions.

Robert Scheer  

Yes and we have no sway over them. I want to get to that and but first of all, I want to return to your film. It is incredibly powerful, enforcing, immersing us in what is the true horror of these weapons. I was at Chernobyl, which was, after all, supposed to be a civilian project. I was there a year after I was the first American print reporter to go in there, and even then, and I was accompanied by scientists from Harvard and other places, and Belikov from Russia, you know, leading nuclear experts. They were all afraid. What are you going to find? How was it work? Where can we go? How far has it spread? And this was a peaceful nuclear project, of which we have quite a few in the world. But they can be hit. They are targets. And the fear, the chaos that I experienced, and my own family members and people that the LA Times where I was working even said, Don’t go, you know. And we were checking our radiation all the time. This is not a weapon designed to kill and create hysteria. And when I was watching your film, I thought to my own visit to Chernobyl and my own fear, and because it is such, it’s not an unknown. We know exactly what will happen. Exactly what will happen. All of the space sounds and everything else that we take for granted, including human contact, will suddenly disappear. That’s the power of your film, you are forced immersed into an environment where your voice means nothing, your brain means nothing, your eyes mean nothing, because this weapon has destroyed any means of sustaining life. So you are these figures floating around in the water dead. That a couple that was just embracing, suddenly they are just pieces of plastic floating around or something. They

Lena Herzog  

They ash out.

Robert Scheer  

Yes and so what the viewer is forced to deal with, which, unfortunately, the movie. I don’t know why I’m picking on Oppenheimer, but it deserves to be picked on because it was this bold attempt to capture this reality that we’re all bent on ignoring during most of our waking hours. We ignore it, and when I’m in that I had the helmet on to watch your movie. I suddenly realized my words as a journalist, writing about this issue, and I did spend quite a bit of time, and we go every week up to the arms control center, Galvez house at Stanford University, as I said before, where Condoleezza Rice was one of the fellows I was there Ted Postol, who had worked on these, [inaudible] and Wolfgang Panofsky, major physicists have dealt with these issues. They were [inaudible]. They knew all the information. That’s when, when Star Wars was floating around. And Reagan had the view we could have a weapon that would wipe out the incoming missiles. And Edward Teller, who’s in the Oppenheimer movie, the advocate for building an even bigger bomb and but it took your short film, this immersion to me. I mean, obviously I’ve never, haven’t experienced waterboarding, but it was that disconnect of any human capacity. I wanted to get out of there. Frankly, not that people shouldn’t watch it, and it’s not that long, but you’re trapped, as you say, in the frame, in the frame of the film, and nothing is going to work. Your smile, your charm, your ability to persuade people to hustle, to convince, to call in your own troops, to demand that your government—all of that is not existent anymore. All you have is lifeless space. Lifeless space. Now the denial of that is not an accident. We have had a constant propaganda about the modernizing of weapons that they do serve a function. A lot of money is made for this. And, you know, there’s something inane about the discourse that comes from Joe Biden. Or, you know, even at least Ronald Reagan, when he met with Gorbachev, had the basic humanity and intelligence Ronald Reagan, whether he was somewhat senile, the Hawks waiting in Iceland and Reykjavík outside the Richard Perle and all that, they were convinced, oh, he’s lost his mind because he wanted to get rid of these weapons. Even the first President Bush, who were head of the CIA and knew a lot about this, had been the ambassador to China. He thought with the end of the Cold War, we could maybe cut nuclear, not only nuclear, we could cut military spending by a third and get rid of these things. We lost that whole thread. And this is something we should talk about, because that’s what you really were talking about when we look at the rest of the world, that arrogance, that we can control everything, and so we yes and so and but also, going back to your movie, The Last Whisper, we can destroy history. So what did we do right after the war? Bring you back to Werner Herzog, and you, Lena Herzog, you know, I couldn’t believe it, because my parents, half of my family, came from Germany. Many were there. I went back to Germany many times to visit my uncle who had been wounded at Stalingrad and everything. What was this all about? My mother’s family was totally eliminated in Lithuania. You know, Jewish family totally could not find a trace. I looked all over the world for these people could not find a trace. I could not find it in Lithuania, certainly and that. But what happened, almost in a matter of weeks, we decided, as you say, maybe the bomb was designed to really get Russia and not Germany. And we decided, Oh, now the Germans are wonderful people. They’re no longer the barbarians they were last month. And we will now work with them and bring them in and so forth. And we’ll now focus on the new devil. At the heart of it always is a notion which is the most threatening force in the world today, this notion of American exceptionalism, American innocence. We may do bad things, but there are always mistakes, little torture at Abu Ghraib or dropping the bomb in Hiroshima or invading Iraq with total pretense. But the we are the bearers of civilization and virtue and Christianity and godliness and so forth. Everyone else is either a danger to human history, a work of the devil, or irrelevant anyway,

Lena Herzog  

That is the genuine danger, and it is at the core of the horror of war. Americans call it exceptionalism. Germans called it Ubermensch. They were the Ubermensch, and the rest were untermensch. The generation of foreign…

Robert Scheer  

The Soviets thought they were the proletarian Vanguard that was going to liberate the west of the world.

Lena Herzog  

that’s right, they also had a sort of a missionary zeal, and they were theirs was ideological. It wasn’t about race and it wasn’t about the other it was more about the ideology of communism. And of course, the it is peculiar because I lived in two societies that took one aspect of human nature and and ignored the other. In the Soviet Union, the ideology was all about community. It was all about the common value and ignoring the individual freedom and took too far and the ideology collapsed. It collapsed under its own weight and because it did not satisfy the desire for individual freedom, because it cannot hold on like that. One cannot ignore the idea of an individual here in the United States and in general in the collective West, individual is at the core, but also at the expense of the commons. Now we have both of these vectors in US, where both have the inner vector about our own self, but also we are common animal. We want to be in the company of others, and they, if you ignore one over another, then society cannot function, because, of course, United States, the West, but also Russia as well, when they go out and have these wars, they also internalized violence. Chris Hedges writes about this extremely well, how what we give away the kind of violence that we visit upon others we end up visiting upon ourselves. It’s only philosophically clear and understandable. Of course, it would have to be this way. You know, once you’re a hammer, everything is a nail, once you know how to be with others, that’s what you do to yourselves. That’s also why we ignore that as a danger. As to Germans in the history between Germany and Russia during the Second World War, between 1941 and 1945, Germans killed over 27 million Russians, but Russian soldiers killed eight out of 10 soldiers, German soldiers, they fought. They lost millions, but they fought valiantly, and for a long time, my grandfather, on my mother’s side, was a sapper. He was demining the Balkans and Latvia up until 1946 so and of course, before the Germans invaded Russia, they demonized Russians. They essentially saturnized Russians because they had to prepare an entire population of feeling very good about exterminating them just the way that they demonized and satanized Jewish people, because they had to prepare a collective psyche of the country to accept such horror. So whenever you feel that you hate somebody, when you hate another nation, you’ve been prepared. And by the way, one of the incidents about the Second World War that keeps fascinating me is the story of Goebbels in the bunker, because Goebbels the propaganda minister for the…

Robert Scheer  

I should mention that I’m glad you brought it up, because what we’re here to discuss is your two films, and the third one that we haven’t discussed, that you’re going to be working on, that you’re working on to complete the trilogy, but also your reflection, and I forget the words that you use,

Lena Herzog  

Self mesmerism.

Robert Scheer  

And yet you begin with the scene which we will post this what you wrote about the madness of the bunker and it’s very easy to say, okay, Hitler was nuts. The Germans were nuts. But you know, Germany before Hitler, and actually for Henry Ford and a lot of other people, even under Hitler, Germany was much admired as the center of science and logic and reason and so forth, yes, and ironically, ironically, one of the great, one of the great disappointments is that Germany now Even the Green Party, which, you know, believed in [inaudible]. We want to stay out of this. No is now warmongering. And the same thing has happened in the United States. We have no effective peace movement, none. We have some individuals who stand out well because first of all, we found a way. To do war where you don’t have a draft, so other people will die, except if they volunteer here, then it’s a career move. They take their chance. But the whole idea, it kind of ultimately leads to nuclear war, fighting, because, after all, this is what Putin is doing right now. He’s telling the Russian people, there’s a limit to how many of our own sons and daughters will die, because we have these big weapons, and if it gets ugly in any way, more than it is now, we’ll use those weapons because we can’t sacrifice more, and we have to win, right? Because that’s the reason we do this, we have to obtain our objects, and it’s the same logic that will inevitably lead to using nuclear weapons. Because, why did you build these weapons? You know, why do we have them? Why do we spend all this money refining them? And there is a haze now, a zaniness, really, that maybe they are usable.

Lena Herzog  

You are correct to bring it up.

Robert Scheer  

I just wanted to say, just to tie the two points together, the piece you wrote about the Hitler bunker, yeah, there is, once again, there the illusion that there’s some secret airplane, or airplanes that will, yeah, you know. So talk about that, because Russia, for instance, just now used what Ray McGovern, who used to be one of the leading experts in the CIA for 27 years, and briefed American presidents about Russia, and knows the language and everything, he warns that, you know, they have, they seem to have created a wonder weapon, but that’s just like our wonder weapons that makes you somehow you have the way of checkmate or stopping, you know, so forth. And the fact is, if you get desperate enough, instead of having your own society destroyed the way we did to Japan and Germany in the bombing. You’re going to use the weapons? Israel has a weapon. Are they going to use it if they feel threatened by you know, if their significant forces arrayed them, and so forth. China, which we haven’t talked about right now, the main war mongering United States is about China, and we’re angry with China because they’re more effective at capitalism than we are. So we’re going to take it to a military level. The ultimate hypocrisy, the champions of capitalism now are threatened because China makes better EVs better. Solar Panels can make them cheaper, can get them out there, and we can’t stand the competition. And so what we’re going to do, we’ll take it to war, okay? And so they’re going to meet us in kind that’s what other nations do. They have a nuclear force. They have advanced weaponry. And ironically, at a time when we’re supposed to be worried about global warming, you know, we’re back to making weapons and destroying things. Forget about saving the planet that way, but the reminder of your movie, I want to keep bringing it back. Any war, any enemy that we are on. I know Jerry Brown, for instance, a very practical politician, four times a governor of California. I happened to talk to him just a couple of weeks ago. He is actually a backer of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. I don’t know if he’s the publisher or something, and he was telling me the main danger we have now. And he had as governor, he knew all about Livermore, and he had a lot of contact at Stanford with famous nuclear scientists and former Secretaries of Defense. And he said the real danger now is nuclear war, and we’re ignoring it, totally ignoring it. So I’m going to we’re only going to take four more minutes, and we’ll have a solid hour here with our overflow five minutes. Tell me what we left out of this discussion and what you were hoping to accomplish with your trilogy, and talk a little bit about the third movie in this trilogy?

Lena Herzog  

Well, the third chapter is “Reversal,” and it’s really about connection, because the first two are about obliterating each other, the figure of the lovers that you see in any way, any enemies, the first figure that dies, because it’s a metaphor that the first thing that goes in war is love, is the connection between human beings. But I don’t, you know, I’m an artist, I’m not a pundit, but I have to bring up a little a little bit something important. When I was a teenager, I knew that Soviet Union was falling apart. I knew it because it was everywhere, and nobody believed in a system that was based on an idea. Nobody believed in this idea anymore, and the most important thing is nobody believed the media at all anymore. In fact, they read the media just to assume the opposite, because there was just so much lying accumulated. Now, the problem about the question of nuclear obliteration, the collective suicide. The collective nuclear suicide is that it’s seconds. Within seconds, people at the head of state will have to make decisions, including misreading, including mistakes. So the question is, when duck or geese fly over the radar and show like rockets, are we going to assume that they are rockets, or are we going to suspect that they could be ducks? Now, with the hatred that is pummeled daily in mainstream media, in the entire cultural climate of the other the truth is that I’m afraid that we’re going to look at any signal that the others did something and fire nukes. Is it going to be a weather balloon. Is it going to be moon light on the clouds like it happened once. Is it going to be a 42 cent chip like it once failed, and we were 15 minutes away from nuclear exchange because a 42 cent chip malfunctioned in the United States. Brzezinski did not wake up his wife and went into the command past to initiate nuclear war. Reagan watched a movie The day after, which was a B movie, but a pretty good movie, and he was horrified, and he initiated a contact with Gorbachev, who was right after Chernobyl. You went to Chernobyl, so did he. He went there with his wife. He always blamed himself for doing that, because his wife, whom he loved very much. Died of cancer, and he always thought it was because of Chernobyl. So both leaders, Gorbachev and Reagan came together to abolish nuclear weapons. And indeed, as you bring up the Prince of Darkness, Richard Perle jumped on the plane to stop him from doing that. Now they did not abolish nuclear weapons. They didn’t manage to do that, but they came incredibly close. And treaties came out, systems of controls, systems to put brakes on omnicide, because this will not be a war. This will be omnicide. Now you ask me, for example, why would an artist discuss this thing? You know, what is my competence, right? Which would be, by the way, a legitimate question. And I would tell you that I have a problem with the fact that everybody who speaks about matters of war and peace seem to be working either for think tanks or directly for the military industrial complex. It’s very easy to find now, I never look up people who come up for dinner at our house, but I look up for people who tell me about matters of war and peace, nine out of 10 times these are people who are working for Lockheed Martin via think tank or directly, or for Northrop Grumman or for Raytheon. It’s like people who are advising us about health, working for pharma or for, I don’t know agricultural complex. So this is a problem. I am a daughter of scientists who feverishly believes in science, but I would like my competence not to be purchased by people who profiteer from the world being worse rather than better. And another question is, what side are you on? One would ask, you know, oh, they would say you’re Russian, even though I’ve been in America for most of my life now. What side are you on? Your side on Russian, or are you side of Chinese? Are your side of Americans? They would ask. Well, I will tell you exactly what side I’m on. I’m on the side of existence, because the question isn’t about Russia versus America or China versus America. This is a question of existence versus non existence, and the fact that we. Do not think about that. The fact that we don’t understand it is, I think, catastrophic, and that’s what will lead to just a flash in your face and it’s all gone and again. You know, I I’ve lived 54 years on this planet. It’s not long enough, but I’ve had a life you’ve lived a little longer, but what about the world? What about the trees and the butterflies? What about the children? What about life? And remember, the only reason that we have Mozart or we have Beethoven or we have Caravaggio, is not only because they exist as scores, because they exist in our mind. So once we are gone, all that culture, all that accomplishment, that spectacular accomplishment of Germans, of Russians, of Americans, that will all be gone, that will all be gone. And I have to tell you, when I look at the people who are making decisions in war and peace, my skin crawls. I’m mortified, and I find it’s such an offense, such an insult, up on omnicide, that these kind of people, these idiots, are going to finish all life on Earth. It’s kind of really, truly a cherry on the cake. 

Robert Scheer  

You know, what’s so bizarre about your comments now is that the people we thought were the adults watching the store, those of us who are on the more liberal left, progressive side of American politics, have to acknowledge it was someone from that side, Harry Truman, who made the decision to drop the bombs in Hiroshi and Nagasaki and, oddly enough, and of course, the war mongering of Joe Biden most recently, but go back to Bill Clinton and so forth. Not to absolve any of the Republican warmongers, but it’s really maybe the most frightening thing about this moment is that we might have a better chance with Donald Trump, who at least says he prefers economic expansion and tariffs and everything to actual shooting war, and who actually did pledge in the campaign to try or promise to end of hot flashpoint of Ukraine. Of course, he’s probably going to exacerbate the hot flashpoint of Israel and Gaza, and forgetting that Israel also has nuclear weapons and what have you. But nonetheless, it’s pretty pathetic that it remained for somebody that is generally all the people that I run into, while most of them deride as irrational and egotistical and maniac, and you get all the terrible things and so forth. But he has one point of knowledge, he was red baited. And he was red baited about a Russia that was no longer communist. He’s red baited as an agent of Putin who basically renounced communism and embraced the Russian Orthodox Church. And if he is an imperial motive, it’s not Marxism, it’s the old Russian czarist empire and so forth. So the irony is that the people who we have spent, I can’t speak for you, most of people I know spent their life accepting as at least the lesser evil and supporting have turned out to be really the big menace. And now, to underscore just how frightening our current situation is that the survival of all life on this planet, it comes down to Donald Trump making the right decision. He’s the guy’s got the finger on the button and Donald Trump, who has control of the Congress and so forth. And this guy that all of the people I know think is crazy and dangerous and mean and everything else. Yet, He gives signs of at least on this, I shouldn’t say at least, most importantly on this subject, maybe having an idea that negotiation and some kind of compromise is a necessary alternative to the all of life going here at poof Exactly.

Lena Herzog  

And for the people who think that climate change is the most catastrophic danger staring us in the face, have to remember that after nuclear exchange, there will be simply no climate, nothing.

Robert Scheer  

Nuclear war is the elimination of climate.

Lena Herzog  

And in my view, it’s a redirection.

Robert Scheer  

Okay, but a last flattering, well, actually maybe we have a few minutes to round out the hour. But a last flattering observation about your film is that our egos, our concept, and we’re not alone. The human experience has largely become a secular experience where we take ourselves very seriously. We’re really not accountable to either nature or gods. You know, basically, we are in the world of Huxley and drugs and amusement and madness and consumerism all over the world, you know, but it’s really frightening that none of this stuff will matter if 12 minutes, if something goes wrong. And what is it? You said, 10 minutes trauma, whatever it is. And right now, at this moment, I have to remind people, the Russians used a weapon, whatever you think about their whether they’re crazy or not, but they used a weapon, a wonder weapon, or whatever you want to call it, that seems that no one can stop that’s the whole idea of these weapons. That’s why we have stealth bombers. That’s why we have a triage so you can get through and and what they used to say in this madness, the MAD doctrine, mutual assured destruction. Now the Russians have a weapon that if the European, Western Europeans and the US do accomplish the humiliation of Russia, which is what they want, Russia has a way of okay, we’ll see your humiliation and we’ll raise it to the end of the world, because they have a weapon that can actually okay, you take out a target with one of these weapons you got from England or France or maybe Germany. Eventually, you take out a big target in Moscow. Or take out part of our command and control system for our nuclear weapons. We will take out London, where the weapons originally came from, let alone, you know, Warsaw, you know, we’ll take out Berlin, because that’s what these weapons are designed to do. They eliminate cities and all of the people living in them.

Lena Herzog  

Just think about the most important thing is, what stands between having a nuclear obliteration or not having it because it’s just a button, just pressing a button, it’s what’s in your head. So what’s in your head, and it’s not only knowledge and understanding. It’s not only do you have spectacular hubris or not, do you understand that you will die too, and everyone and all your children will die. Yes, it’s also humanity, everything. You know, I’m a photographer, the question of time has always fascinated me, because I began as a photographer, and now I make immersive art. I don’t call it film. It’s immersive art. It’s a question of time. I take a photograph in this one second divided by 125 so in 125th of one second everything I am as a human being, intellectually more than anything emotionally and psychologically coalesces in that second. There is no price to pay for that, but there is a price to pay to getting it wrong or just going into a cult state of dervishes and decided that you will win in this unwinnable game who you are. What is it that you have in your head? What is it that you have in your psyche? What brought you up? And another thing that horrifies me, just even if we make it over the next few months. And by the way, everybody I know who is serious, who understands what’s going on, like you, like John Mearsheimer, like Jeffrey Sachs, and people who used to work in the military and that are not purchased by the military industrial complex. They’re all saying this is far more dangerous than the Cuban Missile Crisis, far more dangerous. And part of the danger is the fact that the heads of state are not talking to each other. So we went from Khrushchev and Kennedy talking to each other. Having a line open Mao talking to Nixon, and now we’re what down to mean girls, Heathers? Who are these people? Are they mean girls don’t sit with you in cafeteria? I mean, in a kind of triviality, the kind of nonchalance of this attitude is just kind of staggering, I must say so. But I also have to say that there is a media is really a culprit. If I think about my favorite journalists that were journalists were not just critical of the system or critical of politics, but you knew that they told the truth. You, Robert, Seymour Hersh, Chris Hedges, Andrew Cockburn, Matt Taibbi, Glenn Greenwald, Aaron Mate, Jeffrey Sachs, John Mearsheimer, Noam Chomsky, all these people. Put some women in there, Hannah Arendt, Francis Fitzgerald. Now look at all they are vaporized into Substacks from mainstream media. Now you and Sy Hersh, you’re not just part of the immune system of the country. You are the immune system, your immunity for the health of the Republic. The Founding Fathers, when I’m thinking about that, they were not, you know, sweet chums that thought about this and that and decided to write a constitution they wrote First Amendment, the freedom of speech as first because they cared about the longevity of this republic, of this country. Well, now all of a sudden, you hear the people who call themselves liberals and who call themselves Democrats that they have objection to the First Amendment they didn’t like it. No, it’s neither liberal, nor is it democratic, and I am. But the reason I’m bringing it up, Robert is because that’s what helped helped us understand, and understanding is key to not having war. So when you have you, when you have Matt Taibbi  and have Seymour Hersh or Glenn Greenwald or Noam Chomsky being part of the culture, part of the cultural bloodstream, you actually have sophisticated, complex understanding of this very complex and very beautiful world.

Robert Scheer  

Yes but you know, I have to disagree with you on this. I think really no much, too much credit put on intellectuals, journalists, what have you. The fact is, we are saved by the wisdom of ignorance of people who have grabbed power, whether we like it or not, whether we like it or not. You know, Putin as an example. So was Gorbachev. They there was that was the center of their obsession. Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, a number of the people we talk about, and the saddest thing of all is our future because of the way power operates, does not depend on the media, which is in every society reduced to a really most often insignificant role. There are some breakthrough moments. Leonard Cohen said there’s a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets through. I think I’m gonna deflect your very flattering

Lena Herzog  

…underestimate yourself and the role that you as media.

Robert Scheer  

I got it, but I want to make a somewhat different cautionary point. The fact is, the Cold War ended because of a guy that many of my friends, I didn’t quite go that far, thought was an absolute war mongering monster, red baiting, blah, blah, blah, Richard Nixon and accompanied by Henry Kissinger. But as I point out at the time, it was Richard Nixon really had the idea of the opening to China and ending the worst moments of the Cold War and the worst demonization of the Red Ants of China. No, the Mao Zedong of all people, and be able to basically end, took him his sweet time, and I don’t mean to be cynical here, but probably a million more Indochinese died while he sorted it out, or maybe even more, one of the great crimes in human history, probably 5 million people in that region. McNamara once said 3,500,000 was probably much higher by the time the war settled. Nonetheless, it was Richard Nixon, just like Gorbachev ending the Soviet Union, who said, Wait a minute for all of my power schemes and all of my being involved with power and careerism is over. This is utter madness has to be stopped. As you pointed out, Ronald Reagan came to that conclusion, and so right now you have this oddball situation where everybody wants to now demonize Trump, because, after all, he’s supposed to be the most horrible blah, blah, blah. It seems to me, one thing the voters said in voting for Trump is they didn’t buy russiagate. They didn’t buy the drive for a new Cold War. And this guy did tell him that he’s going to end wars. He said that. He said, I’m not going to start wars. I’m going to end them. He said that. Okay, now maybe once again, we’re being grotesquely lied to

Lena Herzog  

But they don’t like to kill either. People don’t like to die and they don’t like to kill either.

Robert Scheer  

Yeah, but the people are not players. This is the illusion of Western democracy. Was the illusion of Soviet communism. The people just don’t matter, and they can be manipulated. They should matter. Obviously, this is the end of the world and all life we’re talking about. But I’m just trying to be realistic here. We’re in the hands of nutty power seeking, mostly male egotistical schizophrenic characters, whatever they say about love and virtue and patriot. Remember, it was George Washington who, yes, he participated in the conquest of the continent and the killing of the entire the genocide of entire native culture. He certainly but he did warn us in his farewell address, beware the impostors of pretended patriotism. No wiser words were ever uttered by any politician, let alone a general turned politician. That’s why it was so amazing that Eisenhower warned us about the military industrial complex. These are people who saw power and violence and war firsthand. And there is George Washington farewell address. You never hear it mentioned anywhere. Beware the imposters of pretended patriotism pursue Yes, World presence, world connection by peaceful and gentle means. That’s the general talking. It’s what Eisenhower said. And, you know, Eisenhower was the guy who did the opening to Khrushchev that preceded the end of the brought about the deton so

Lena Herzog  

And Robert, we do matter, because if we didn’t matter, they, powers that be, wouldn’t spend such spectacular amounts of money and effort to brainwash us.

Robert Scheer  

They brainwash us because war pays and there’s money to do it, and they brainwashed are able to brainwash us because we do believe we’re superior, and we’ve made foreign policy like a football season in this and USA, USA, and that’s what was happening. Has happened in other cultures. It happened, obviously in Germany, it happened in the Soviet Union. It’s a menace. It’s a menace everywhere. Is happening with Israel right now, a previously rational people, certainly that was for tradition. Jewish people somehow end up with the fanaticism of state imperialism, state violence. And so we got to end this, though, because I could be going on, but we can’t have a podcast.

Lena Herzog  

Yeah, one thing that we really need to to remember is that, yes, our history is history of violence, but this is something different, because history of violence may end up being the end of history, not in Fukuyama sense, but just the end of history, because it could be the end of us.

Robert Scheer  

All right, so let me push back a little bit. 

Lena Herzog  

All right. We need to remember and and somehow savor what we have Anyway, okay,

Robert Scheer  

But you know, you’re a child compared to me. I’m 88 years old, you know, and so forth. I’ve been dealing with this issue my whole life, and it is appalling to me. In fact, Chomsky, I interviewed Chomsky a few years back. And he quoted, I forget, the famous biologist, maybe intelligence is the enemy of survival, because, after all, the beetle will be around after they used to say, we’ll make the rubble bounce with all out nuclear war, the only ones who survive are the cockroaches and the beetles and, I guess, bacteria, simple forms of life that found their niche and what we use intelligence for. Let’s just be clear about this, because I’ve been in endless conferences and interviews. I have been at Los Alamos and Livermore. I spent a large part of my working time at the Los Angeles Times. I went to Russia for the Soviet Union for Los Angeles Times, I reviewed Gorbachev’s book. And what I’ve learned from all this is that the good people are the enemy because they’re more effective in rationalizing madness than the people we have think of as our enemy. Maybe

Lena Herzog  

Maybe they’re not good people. Maybe they’re not well the self

Robert Scheer  

Well self-defined good people. Look you got right now you have, you know the situation with Russia Ukraine better than I do right now. What did the Biden administration do to save its legacy, or whatever the hell they’re doing, they made sure that every last penny that they have allocated to Ukraine will put more weapons in instead of trying to find a peace agreement or negotiate that was available going back 15 years you could have had, you know, so, you know, I just don’t want to end this on some peace agreement

Lena Herzog  

Peace agreement was available…

Robert Scheer  

What your movie did for me. What your movie did for me is shocked me out of I wouldn’t call it apathy. I’m not apathetic, but a weariness, a weariness, has shocked me out of it, because there’s a lot of people around that I care about, a lot of things about human history that I respect and don’t want to see just disappear. And spending 15 minutes in your helmet watching your movie was the most sobering experience I’ve had in a long, long time, because I realize the fundamental irrationality of having built these weapons in the first place, having them around all this time, and now having junked arms control. And you keep telling me about us, wonderful people in the media, who the hell invented Russiagate and pushed it? It was, it was the people in the media, you know, who invented the whole idea of the Cold War was people in the media. So yes, we’ve had some journalists who’ve gone against the grain. You’ve mentioned almost all of them right there, you know. But the point is, the point is the system does not reward that kind of rational behavior and thinking and adult behavior. It rewards just the opposite. And these warmongers have had a field day. And I mean, one of them, the most disgraceful period I’ve known for, certainly post World War Two journalism has been this Russian gate thing, a total scandal, which continues. And I actually knew Jonah. I mean, he’s still alive, Jonah Raskin. I knew his father, Mark Raskin, I knew him, you know, didn’t know him well, but I met him when he was three years old. How the hell did an otherwise enlightened liberal person, decent in every respect, get into this charade of the warmongers that we have to see Russia and now China, you know, we can’t accept, hey, it’s great. They lifted at least 400 million, maybe seven, 800 million, out of poverty. They built, you know, the second world largest there are enemy now, that is madness. It’s absolute madness. And if you try to discuss it with them, they will, they will tell you you’re an enemy agent. They will deny you funding. They’ll fire you from a university

Lena Herzog  

That’s how demented the discourse has become and of course, that’s part and parcel of the dangerous situation. So what we have to remember is that with the weapons that we have created that can and all life on Earth, and at the moment when three nuclear superstates are in a proxy and near direct war with each other, that we have to remember there will be no winners. It will have to be all on on. It will be all on on, so everyone has to somehow understand the gravity of the situation and treat it as a grave situation that it is if you want to live. I mean, we keep apologizing. Saying that we’re spoiling the mood for everybody. We have to spoil the mood.

Robert Scheer  

Let me end this then, because what you just said, one cannot disagree with a word in there. But I take you back to your growing up in the Soviet Union. Yeah, and I visited the Soviet, I think, the first time in the early 60s. My mother was a refugee from communism. She was in the Jewish socialist bund in Lithuania that Lenin banned, and she had to get out of town and get steerage and come to United States with her sister, you know, in 1920-21 so I was raised on, you know, how did this Bolshevik thing get crazy, go crazy, which it did from the beginning, power corrupts absolute. Power corrupts absolutely. But I kept when I would go to Russia, which I did a number of occasions. You know, I brought out, you have Yevtushenko, writing poetry and Voznesensky and I did, you know, published it at city lights that was in the early 60s, and got it. I would there was be no shortage of people that I ran into who knew much more about the world and thought clearly and knew a lot of what was happening in Soviet Union was madness. Madness. They knew it. They knew it clearly, but they had made their accommodation to it. Some of the people I mentioned didn’t. They stood up with some vitality, like Yevtushenko and others, but nonetheless, people could get through their day and and this was true everywhere I’ve gone as a journalist. I was in, you know, in Egypt during the end of the Six Day War, and I was in Algeria, and I was in Cuba, and I’ve been in a lot of places. I was in Vietnam. I was I interviewed [inaudible] in China after he was forced out of Cambodia. So I’ve seen a lot around the world, and there’s no shortage of people in any society, no matter how totalitarian it is. If this was true in Orwell’s, you know, 1984 you know, who know it’s all bullshit. They know it’s dangerous, they know it’s murderous. They know their government is capable of genocide, but they accommodate to it. And, and the fact that matter is, history is made by lunatics who can seize power, you know, and, and it’s been, unfortunately, a downward spiral. We would have not talked about climate change and global warming and destruction of all life on the planet by forget about nuclear weapons now, by just our industrialization, our mad consumption and everything with indigenous culture anywhere in the world, indigenous culture in Cambodia, they had a good plumbing system in water works, in anchor what you know? Before England had it, you know. So we know. And this goes back to your first movie, which I think is no less brilliant than your second one. The first movie has longer, has more texture and so forth. But it really gets to the fact that people were able to communicate and build decent societies before they ever heard German or English or Russian, that they had their own languages, their own ways of communicating, and there was nothing primitive about it. It was incredibly sophisticated in its connection with nature. That’s the power of your first movie, which we should re mention here last whispers. That it’s a brilliant, absolutely brilliant film. We got to wrap this up. I see we’re getting to the witching hour, even so forth. But I mean, the fact that matters, it’s triggering some emotion in me about this, the brilliance of that film. I recommend to everyone. Last but you must go see this about language distinction. It’s about destruction of history, of historical memory, because that’s expressed through language and the stories grandparents tell their grandchildren then communicate. We it’s been wiped out. We have no oral histories, or we have very few. We have no real records. We can’t read the writing in most cases, that was there, but there’s no question. And yes, people had wars. They fought each other, they had tribal differences. They had lot they had lots of contradictions and lots of the bad with the good. But and the basic element is they had to be harmonious with their environment, where the environment would destroy him very quickly. The crops wouldn’t come in, the buildings would burn and so forth. So there had to be balance with nature. That’s not because they were smarter than anybody else, or more educated, but they were in closer proximity to reality. What you. A second movie that we’re here to discuss, putting my head in that helmet to do your immersive artwork.

Lena Herzog  

It’s a VR headset.

Robert Scheer  

It’s my nose, my eyeballs right up against the reality of this horror of nuclear war that the most civilized intelligent people, if you take the movie Oppenheimer, the real revelation in that movie is that these super brilliant people spent almost next to no time considering the horror of what they were creating. Yes, there were some discussions. Yes, there were some concerns. Most of those people were concerned then leaked the information to try to get some balance and we shouldn’t be one country that had it. But the fact of the matter is, this is another example of the best and the brightest destroying us. Because what what systems of power do is they co opt the best and the brightest to do the most dangerous, treacherous betrayal of the human condition. That is to listen.

Lena Herzog  

…them into idiots. Because all these people, they weren’t born indeed idiots. They were born smart. They were educated in best of schools. But they became idiots because they were brainwashed to by propaganda system that is akin to a cult, and this propaganda system of superiority of self. And by the way, the Margaret Atwood said, every war is a failure of language, meaning it’s a failure of understanding, of understanding, not only of each other, but what is our place in this world, in this life? And so out of my trilogy is trying to make these connections, and the next one is reversal, and it is all about human connection, and it’s all about love. And it’s, I have to say, a pleasure to to make, and I hope that the world is still there for you and I.

Robert Scheer  

So how do people get—okay, we’ve gone so long, I’ll list it and everything to see this movie. They could see it on their computers, but the best way would be in some

Lena Herzog  

VR headset, Oculus Quest.

Robert Scheer  

You don’t have to go find the headset. You can. I watched it yesterday, again, on my on this computer, this laptop, it was fine. Gets the point across very nicely. Will list all the thing, hey, I got to stop it now, or we’ll just go on and on. Thank you so much. Yes, “Any War, Any Enemy,” and we’ll list all the connections with it, and that’s it. Oh, I have to give credit, though, for the people allowed us to happen. Christopher Ho and Laura Kondourajian and at KCRW, I think the very strong NPR station in Santa, Monica for hosting these podcasts. Joshua Scheer, our executive producer, who has attacked me for having too many white males on, I’m glad that we have the opposite. And I want to thank Diego Ramos, who writes the introduction and is the managing editor of ScheerPost, which runs all this. Max Jones, who does the video and takes make sure that this all is usable in some way. I want to thank the JKW foundation the memory of Jean Stein, one of those writer-journalists who really broke the barriers to our understanding challenge the arrogance of our society, even though she had contact with President Kennedy and all kinds of famous people, but she saw through a lot of stuff, and so it’s in her memory. And I want to thank Integrity Media, because it’s real hard to survive in this business of independent journalism. And these are folks based in Chicago, ran a very successful attorney, Len Goodman, who come up with some money to help us put these shows on. I want to thank them. Integrity Media, who are interested in expansion, the integrity has to come from what you were just celebrating, but it’s only in a small group of journalists, a revitalized journalism that is open to ideas that challenge power, comfort the afflicted and afflict the powerful. So that’s it for this issue. See you next week with another edition of Scheer Intelligence.

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Robert Scheer

Robert Scheer, publisher of ScheerPost and award-winning journalist and author of a dozen books, has a reputation for strong social and political writing over his nearly 60 years as a journalist. His award-winning journalism has appeared in publications nationwide—he was Vietnam correspondent and editor of Ramparts magazine, national correspondent and columnist for the Los Angeles Times—and his in-depth interviews with Jimmy Carter, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, Mikhail Gorbachev and others made headlines. He co-hosted KCRW’s political program Left, Right and Center and now hosts Scheer Intelligence, a KCRW podcast with people who discuss the day’s most important issues.

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