Hamburg: Jello Biafra Interview/ korrigiert II [english]

Hamburg

Wir haben nochmal die gröbsten Fehler entfernt und Sachen die beim ersten mal nicht im Interview waren (weil die Qualität des Tapes so schlecht war)ergänzt. Jello Biafra ist ehemaliger Sänger der US-Punk Band Dead-Kennedys.Biafra hat in den letzten Jahren viel für die Backgroundstruktur der US-Antiglobalisierungsbewegung gearbeitet. Anlässlich einer Spoken.Word-Performance in Hamburg haben wir mit Ihm dieses Interview geführt

Question: Let´s start with a more general question; comparing the situation before and after the attacks on the pentagon and the World Trade Center, what is the major difference?

Jello: Oh, the difference is obvious, people are all flapped up and coping with a national desaster, they feel wounded, they feel angry, and that anger is being manipulated and channelled into a lot of blind macho and feudal patriotism. I mean, war fever wasn´t even around five weeks ago, let alone five years ago. My biggest fear is, that they´re trying to use this all over the world to crush the anti-globalisation movement. You know, if you´re not down with the program, youre some kind of a terrorist.

Question: Apart from just being a reaction on the attack on the WTC, what is the fight against terrorism about?
Is it really about fighting islam or fundamentalism?

Jello: I think it´s an umbrella term to open the door for dirty military adventures. You know, I don´t think, the bush crowd even know, how the hell they´re gonna fight a war on terrorism because, Osama bin Laden is right, you kill him, a hundred more are gonna grow in his place with money and military tactical smart and the rage and commitment that people like that have. I mean how can you defend yourselves against somebody who is going to strap a bomb on themselves and go in the middle of who you are and blow you up? There is no way you can totally stop that even if you adress all the root problems thad made people so mad in the first place, there is gonna be after that many generations of healing.

Question: Don´t you think, the attack comes very handy for the international capitalist system to crush down on the anti-globalisation movement?

Jello: Well, yeah, I´m sure that´s not lost on them but that´s more of a nice little side bonus. I don´t think it´s the main purpose of the war on terrorism, but it´s certainly the major, major part of it. You know all the sudden anybody who opposes the government for any reason must be a terrorist.

Question: Do you think, that the bush victory in the last elections is a sign that the radical right wing movement are becoming more of a majority in the US?

Jello: A majority probably not. Militias have dwindled down. You know there aren´t that many people playing GI Joe in the woods any more. The numbers have gone down, but bush was very carefully tacit during the elections to avoid looking like the rabbit fascist that he is today. He claimed he was an environmentalist, he said he wanted to do more for education and to help people in other countries and all the usual bullshit. And, though the sad thing in america is, that the majority of the american people don´t vote at all, they´re too disgusted and they don´t see anybody or anything worth voting for. But the fact that one of four every american adults voted for George Bush does terrify me.

Question: If you compare the left wing movement in europe and the US, what differences do you see? As for example this neighbourhood/community thing seems to be stronger in the US than in europe.

Jello: It´s hard to say with a wrench being thrown in the machinery called the „war on terrorism“ plus Demokrats are going to be really haevy-handed trying to anybody running for office as a Green at any level in the next elections, saying „oh, look what you did, you got Bush in, you´re spoilers, you are gonna ti the race to the other side“. They are still non stop complaining that the Greens cost Gore the elections, with all too little debate on what a poor quality candidate Gore was in the first place. What I forgot to mention on stage was that just one example of all the outrage about Bush pulling Amerika out of the Kyoto Treaty against Global Warming that hardly anybody seems to remember that the guy who went over to Kyoto when they were negotiating and trying to cut the treaty and stop it right there was Gore.

Question: You were talking on stage about shopping and buying local goods at local shops as being a kind of a way out of being dependent on transnational corporate power and politics. How far do you think this can lead because locals become globals or all global players have been local at one point. Don´t you think that going local is also a question of if you can afford it as a customer?

Jello: It isn´t always more expensive than going to the supermarket. It depends. I don´t see that as a magic answer, I just see it as one important step in not giving so much of our money to support the big corporations that screw us.

Question: When you say that, that the radical left can´t cut itself off from the majority any longer, what do you think we can do? What is a radical way of acting?

Jello: Getting rid of the whole concept of left versus right all together. You know the issues now are the top versus the bottom. And the top went to a very drastic class war against the bottom and tossing more and more people into the bottom. You know, poeple´s real wages have declined all over the world except for a handful of superwealthy people running off with all the money. You know, for every action there needs to be an equal reaction and the more we can speed up the reaction the better. Another way of saying this is when things aren´t framed left/right you can look and think outside the box, the english or american phrase is. Michael Moore the filmmaker makes the point in saying that so many people that are looked down on as blue collar working class rednecks are actually concerned about the exact same things we are, the wedge-issue being why can´t I put food on the table. In a lot of cases I´d say it´s a matter of language on how to get people to know that you´re on the same side. I mean I was at the national Green gathering in July and pointed out, that ten Green key values they lift and the language they use do not communicate with people. You don´t go into South Central Los Angeles and talk about ecological wisdom. And yet when some of the gangs got together after the Rodney King Riots and presented a list of demands to the City of L.A., one of the tops of the list was plant some goddamned trees in the ´hood. They just use a different language.

Question: One of the problems I see is that capitalism is being pesonalised by many people and seen as an american disease or that Bush is the Evil. How can we put it across to people that it is a system, that it´s not just persons, that it doesn´t matter much, who is in power? If you agree on that...

Jello: I´m not even sure, I agree, I think it´s both. I mean some people are more in a run-amok society where capitalism gets abused like it does here. Some poeple are slimier than others, of course there is a personal angle. Not every computer genius turned into Bill Gates, thank god.

Question:...If you had to be a computer genius to turn into a Bill Gates at all... . What power do we have mediawise? I mean, indymedia is a great thing, but like 99 % of the world´s population does not have internet. How do we get the message across to them?

Jello: Maybe it´s best to just build it up over here as an example of how it can be done in other areas and hooking up with people in other areas when you can. But don´t try to spread yourself so thin that..., you know, what good is it going to do to build indymedia in germany when you need to get it started in nigeria. You can only do so much. It´s something that´s slowly but surely spreading, but in order to keep it spreading the force of what is spreading it has to be kept strong and alive and evolving. If people burn out, new people come in.

Question: about the cultural component, can you see things like performances and happenings coming together with other parts of the fight like the media?

Jello: Well the fact that it´s live performance makes it media in a way. I mean it´s entertainment but it´s got content to it, you know ist suppressed informations and political views. So it´s infotainment. I don´t know whether to draw a line between media and performance or not.

Question: On your tour, have you met many people that don´t use information from independent sources and just get their information from magazines like the „Spiegel“ (a german weekly magazine, that interviewed Jello right before we did an wouldn´t allow us to turn the recorder on because they were afraid, we´d get it out on, indymedia or something, before they did in the Spiegel), which is a very fucked-up magazine by the way? Do you think europeans see things differently from people in the US?

Jello: I would say, a little more cautious. I mean not just wanting to plunge whole hog into war, I mean after all it wasn´t your territory that got blown up this time, too. I mean the deeper wound in America is because americans aren´t used to being attacked on their own soil. You know from day one they were labelling this the Pearl Harbour of Terrorism. Some of my dim memory as a child of the Kennedy assassination the country was even more in shock from that. But, I would say the level of shock is deeper, the level of rage is certainly deeper and that´s kind of dangerous.
Question: Do you get a lot of aggression from poeple now, from people you used to be able to talk to because of the situation and your own point of view or opinions?

Jello: Usually I´m too small a person to get a lot of government interference, if that´s what you´re talking about. The way I am countered was the way all of punk was countered until Green Day got big and that is that you just don´t admit it exists. You know, don´t admit this guy exists, don´t even even give his music or spoken word albums a bad review, don´t review them at all. That´s a very effective tool. What do I need government harrasment for when the former members of my band do such a good job on their own?

Question: In your show you talked about the anti gulf war movement and you said it was a very big movement in the US. Do you see any signs that the movement now can grow like it did back then?

Jello: It´s going to take longer and it´s going to be harder, because this time people saw the WTC getting bombed over and over and over again on TV for days without an end. The people are a lot madder and they see it a lot more personally, they feel a deeper wound than just flying over to the gulf and save the royal family of Kuwait. So it´s going to be harder and it has to be done carefully respecting people´s emotions when they´re so upset. But ultimately I think it´s pretty much guaranteed that because of the kind of people Bush has around him and what they think they´re gonna do, even if they don´t know how the hell they´re gonna do it, that they are gonna fuck up. Slowly but surely, but they will fuck up. And the more they fuck up, the more poeple are gonna realize it´s fucked up, and it was very unpopular to protest against the Vietnam war, when that started, you were called a communist, traitor, pinko, a faggot, whatever, and beat up. It took longer than I wish it had, but in the long run the american people rose up against both the democrats and the republicans and the whole military-industrial complex and stopped the Vietnam war. And all the pressure coming down from europe and especially canada who were letting people who didn´t want to go in the american military have asylum there, that did bring down the vietnam war and ist gonna take longer than in the gulf war, but as soon as the americans themselves are gonna start coming home in body bags, I think people are gonna wake up.

Question: On of the effects of the attacks in europe is stricter immigration laws, more of this law and order crap and so on. Is anything happening in the US that´s comparable to that?More pressure on society for security reasons?

Jello: Well that´s been going on at least since Reagan got in. And I would call it a class war disguised as a race war often called the drug war. A widely disproportionate number of african american kids are thrown in jail for long sentences, whereas if it was powdercocaine like white people use, they get off with three months. So until there was that war on terrorism, that was the way they went after people, it was „Oh, you´re on the side of those drug.dealers, oh, you must be on drugs“. So they were testing people for drugs at work, the whole „just say no to drugs“-campaign and the partnership for the preferred drug free america, which was funded by tobacco and liquor companies among others, and all the hype about drug-crazed people and this epidemic of drugs, drugs drugs, is that it makes people more frightened and more willing to tolerate ridiculously long sentences for small drug offences. And worse! California is only one state that passed the „three strikes you´re out“ law, where by if you´re a convicted fellon and you get caught for any crime the third time you go to jail for life. There are people now in jail for life in California for stealing a slice of pizza, sitting in a stolen truck, stealing a can of soda, stealing their cousins TV-set. And the reason that law got in was that there was a kidnapping where somebody who was on parole for another crime kidnapped a twelve year old girl and killed her. And the father of teh girl began beating the drums for stricter laws denying people parole, sentencing them to life in prison once you realize they are bad persons. Right before the elections he realized what kind of a law he was really promoting and disowned it. But by then it was already too late. So that´s the way it´s done, you put more and more crime on the front page and TV even though there is less and less of it according to the FBI´s own statistics. And another part of it is these TV-shows, I don´t know, if you have them over here, they definitely get on in skandinavia and Britain, where they have these live cop shows, when they plant TV cameras into the cop-cars and its edited and narrated like a sporting event where it´s the superbowl and you´re supposed to be rooting for the good kids, the cops and the african american or latino kids they pull over are the bad team and so the good team always wins, go cops! It definitely promotes a lot of racism, paranoia and crime in people and, which I think is the purpose of these shows, it decentizises people to the brutality of the police state. If they would have shown the Rodney King video on this show called COP´s instead of on the news people would have clapped their hands. Or the fans of that show would have clapped their hands.

Question: To wrap it up, do you have any recommendations for websites for people to look up to get information?

Jello: You mean recommending websites? I would say indymedia, oh, wait a minute, that´s you, okay, but we were putting stuff up by Michael Moore and others on our own website to deal with the "war on terrorism", but I don´t do much with the net myself, I don´t even have a computer. I respect it´s value but I don´t participate,
I only have so much time in one day. I´m not up on exactly which website does what. I mean  http://www.globalexchange.org/ is a good one to look into, they have a lot of 3rd world labour abuse as well as the attempts to get a movement going to boycott the world bank by putting pressure on the people who fund them to pull their money out just like we did with the people propping up the white regime in south africa. I think that might even be a winable battle if it can catch on. In any global exchange you got frankenfood stuff on, too, they´re all over the place. I mean one of their leaders, Medea Benjamin, ran for senator in california on the green party against Dianne Feinstein (?) and she has proven to be quite a dynamic individual. I think she will run for much more of an office in the near future, I´m not sure. In San Francisco they have the Greens on this city-board of supervisors now and on the schoolboard

Us: I think that´s it. Thank you, Jello.
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This is an interview by redaktion1 and Paul, that we made it after Jello Biafra´s Performance at the Fabrik in Hamburg on the 27th of september 2001. Thanks to the horrible quality of the tape and my deteriorating knowledge of the english language, I may have made a mistake or two, but I think everything is quite quoteable. For further questions contact me at  fischfernsehen69@gmx.de or  http://www.alternativetentacles.com/.

redaktion eins bei nadir-aktuell
 redaktion1@mail.nadir.org
 http://www.nadir.org