PRESS ROOM

For our 30th episode, we were psyched to once again speak with Danny Sjursen--this time about PTSD, mental illness, and suicide among U.S. veterans, sexual assault in the military, the poison of militarism, and more.

The Biden administration can and should revise U.S. arms export policies to prioritize human rights and long-term security over short-term profits and questionable military alliances. That would be an accomplishment worth bragging about

One prominent veteran—who straddled the military and presidential legacies of the Mexican War—Ulysses S. Grant, later wrote "I do not think there was ever a more wicked war than that waged by the United States on Mexico. I thought so at the time...only I had not moral courage enough to resign.” Major Sjursen explains why the war so haunted future President Grant, and why more Americans should know that it did!

When Nigerians began protesting against police brutality on 8 October, the demonstrations quickly spread across the globe. Especially in cities with large diaspora communities, people took to the streets to join calls for the abolition of the abusive Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS).

In Washington DC and New York, you could feel the energy of people’s solidarity. The diaspora protesters had something at stake too. They also experience the brutality of SARS when they visit home and suffer from the government’s lack of accountability and poor governance.

This moment is exactly the time for the diaspora to “pick up the shift”, to borrow the words of prominent #EndSARS protester FK Abudu.

The graceful and elegant writing of “The Promised Land” reflects the grace and elegance of its author: President Barack Obama. Unlike the current occupant of the White House, Obama, in his memoir, reveals his democratic principles, his willingness to give opponents the benefit of the doubt, and his pursuit of truth. Unlike so many presidential memoirs, there is a relative absence of self-promotion and an unusual admission of biases. Nevertheless, there are references that point to the mistakes of the Obama presidency that the man himself never explicitly acknowledges.

“The potential for conflicts is huge,” said William Hartung, the director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy, a progressive, nonprofit think tank. Hartung said that if Austin were to recuse himself from those potential conflicts of interest involving Raytheon, he wouldn’t even be able to carry out large parts of a defense secretary’s responsibilities.

Karen Kwiatkowski, USAF Lieutenant Colonel (retired), writer at LewRockwell.com, and senior fellow at the Eisenhower Media Center, stops by the podcast for an in-depth discussion of her career, to include serving at the height of the Cold War, the huge collection of personalities and political bends of her time at the Pentagon, to include the neocons early in the Bush II presidency, her expertise on the Africa continent and U.S. regime change policies there, and her regrets around her role as a whistleblower.

Scott interviews Danny Sjursen about two prominent conflicts facing the world in 2020. In Nagorno-Karabakh, an uneasy, Russian-brokered peace deal is holding between Armenia and Azerbaijan, but Sjursen worries that this peace won’t last forever, as each country still feels that it has an unresolved claim on the disputed territory. In Ethiopia, age-old ethnic tensions have been breaking through the surface ever since the country’s government postponed elections on account of the coronavirus pandemic.

As the #EndSARS movement continues, it is clear that the Nigerian government will keep pushing back. Policymakers in the US, UK, and elsewhere may be slow or reluctant to respond.

But as the youth in Nigeria stay mobilised, Nigerians in the diaspora must keep acting too.

There’s a whole mess of bloody messes around the world that few Americans care about. In fact, they could form a whole category of conflict labeled: "Top Ten Violent Hot Spots You’ve Never Heard Of (But Should Have)." The list might include, for starters, Nigeria’s resource war between herders and farmers (six times deadlier than the country’s well-publicized Boko Haram conflict in 2018); South Sudan’s dormant – for now – civil war (400,000 killed from 2013-18); and the Indo-Pakistani contest for Kashmir (70,000 dead in just the internal conflict over 30 years). Recently, I wrote four columns about another prime candidate – the Armenian-Azerbaijani war for Nagorno-Karabakh that isn’t so likely to be thrown back in the ice box with the other “frozen conflicts” this time around.

“People tend to focus on what the Saudi lobby is doing in DC, but they’ve long been active at the state and local level outside of DC too,” said Ben Freeman, the director of the Foreign Influence Transparency Initiative at the progressive Center for International Policy. “Given that Biden won’t be the royal family apologist that Trump was, it’s not surprising that the Saudi lobby is looking to expand its influence outside of Washington right now.”

Danny Sjursen is a retired U.S. Army major who served several tours in America’s forever wars on Iraq and Afghanistan in the late 2000s. Amid his deployments, he recognized these illegal wars of aggression for what they are and gave them an abrupt about-face. He’s now a staunch antiwar activist, writer, speaker, and podcaster.