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Greenfield at Large

How Can People Be Persuaded That the Future Is More Important Than the Past?

Aired June 26, 2001 - 22:30   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
JEFF GREENFIELD, HOST: The Gordian knot was legendary for resisting every attempt to untie it. It was simply impossible to undo. But when Alexander the Great confronted this challenge, he went at it in his own fashion, simply slicing it in two with his sword.

Might that be the only way to resolve a problem that has resisted the efforts of generations? Or is it that in some cases -- perhaps the Middle East, perhaps the Balkans -- there is no sword that can cut through the Gordian knot of those conflicts? Maybe.

But both here and around the world we have seen very real examples of seismic change, where it once seemed that fundamental beliefs would never change.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

GREENFIELD (voice-over): The American South, circa 1950. Segregated schools, segregated drinking fountains, segregate buses. Most blacks couldn't even vote. They risked their lives if they tried.

Today, black sheriffs, mayors, legislators, U.S. representatives are commonplace in the South. The same schools that fought pitched battles to keep blacks out now cheer their African-American sports heroes. A huge change.

The Soviet Union, circa 1950. A ruthless tyranny of worldwide ambitions. A state so totally controlled that reforms seemed impossible. Nations that tried to free themselves -- Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968, were crushed by invading Soviet troops. 40 years later, the Soviet Union and its empire had ceased to exist.

As did the white supremacist regime in South Africa. Black majority rule came there with relatively little bloodshed. But elsewhere on the African continent, old conflicts flourish.

In the Sudan, a civil war has raised on and for more than 40 years, fed by hatred between Christians and Muslims. That war has killed an estimated two million civilians.

In Rwanda, tribal hatred between Hutu and Tutsi led to the slaughter of some 800,000 men, women and children. And then, there's the Middle East. Violence between Arabs and Israelis half a century ago, bloody violence today. Yes, there is a peace treaty between Israel and Egypt, and the PLO talks with Israel, but at root it seems as if the same hatreds that go back thousands of years remain.

In the Balkans, conflicts that go back hundreds of years, resurfaced little more than a decade ago, among Serbs, Croats, Muslims, Ethnic Albanians, Kosovars, Macedonians, and there is no assurance today that peace among those groups is anything but shaky.

And for all the steps toward peace in Northern Ireland, Protestants and Catholics still face each other across a chasm of mistrust as they have for 800 years or more.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

GREENFIELD: So how do you persuade people that the future is more important than the past? We've brought together folks who have seen some historic changes first-hand, as well as conflicts that have resisted change.

A national correspondent for CBS news, Martha Teichner has covered the conflicts in Northern Ireland, South Africa, The Middle East and Bosnia.

Amy Wilentz, the former Jerusalem correspondent for "The New Yorker," has a new novel called "Martyr's Crossing," about both sides of the Mideast conflict.

And joining us from Washington, a veteran of the civil rights movement, now a Georgia congressman, John Lewis.

Martha, I came back from my first -- this is South Africa in 1985, telling everybody change was possible. This was intractable. Five years later I went back, Mandela was being released from jail, and apartheid was being dismantled.

When I watched the Middle East peace movement of 1979, Jimmy Carter and that famous handshake, I thought, well it may actually be changing -- and now, things look pretty gloomy.

Can you tell us, having covered conflicts all over the world, is there a key to knowing when a conflict can be resolved? And when at least for now it is hopeless?

MARTHA TEICHNER, CBS NEWS CORRESPONDENT: I don't think you can put your finger on the exact moment. But, there have to be tectonic shifts going on beneath the surface over a period of time. A number of different ingredients, that finally find their way out of the volcano, and something happens. Economics is a factor.

GREENFIELD: How so?

TEICHNER: Well, in South Africa for example, for a long time there was the slow development of a black middle class. And the economic progress was ahead of the political progress. Also leadership is a factor. There has to be some strong important leader who can make all the difference.

The leadership in South Africa, the white leadership, was terrified that Nelson Mandela would die in jail and become a martyr for a bloody conflict that the end of could never be seen. And, they were also afraid in the economic area, of the economy, withering down to nothing, because of sanctions.

GREENFIELD: OK, Amy, apply those two things that Martha talked about to the Middle East, where you spent 3 1/2 years: economics, can people -- if there would only be peace the Palestinians would end poverty, the region would bloom. Can economics be the key?

AMY WILENTZ, AUTHOR, "MARTYR'S CROSSING": Economics is one of the things that gives people even today, a tiny bit of optimism about what's happening there, because if you look at it, you have to say in the end, the economic need has to be satisfied, the economic need of the Palestinians, for work, and the economic need of the Israelis, for Palestinian labor, so that is a factor in the peace in the future.

GREENFIELD: If you look at the leadership issue...

WELENTZ: The leadership...

GREENFIELD: De Klerk and Mandela in South Africa both have their own reasons for coming to peace. Today: Sharon-Arafat, any analogy or is it the reverse?

WELENTZ: I think there is a problem. Arafat has been one of the big problems over time. He was a great leader for his people, they thought, a long time ago, but since then, confidence in him has eroded and he has never been courageous enough to be a few feet ahead of the people. He is always sort of judging the street before he goes ahead.

I think Mandela and especially the civil rights leaders in the U.S. were really willing to lead, instead of just to follow the people.

GREENFIELD: Speaking of that, John I want to turn -- to the American South and ask you one basic question, because it is going to set up where we go after we come back: Was it a matter of changing hearts and minds of white southerners? Or was it a matter of persuading the federal government in this case, to come in, with troops -- if necessary -- to say, look, whatever you white folks in the South may think about this, it is over, blacks are going to vote, they are go to public accommodations? Which came first: attitudes or just changing that legal structure?

REP. JOHN LEWIS (D), GEORGIA: Jeff, I think you had both at work here. You had people who had a change of heart. You have what I call a revolution in the minds, hearts, and souls of a people. And then you had a national government, a federal government. A sympathetic referee, saying that change would take place. Change must take place.

GREENFIELD: I got you. LEWIS: And you have an idea, like a philosophy and discipline in non-violence, saying that people the capacity to change, to grow, and to become better and do better.

GREENFIELD: OK. We're going to take a break. When we come back -- the reason I ask Congressman Lewis that question -- because it points to one possible provocative question I hope, which is this: Do fundamental hatreds ever go away? Or does it take one side simply saying, we give up?

And later we'll talk about some of the less serious, but still important, changes that we have seen in our time. That's all still ahead.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

GREENFIELD: This is the historic handshake among President Jimmy Carter, Egyptian President Sadat, Prime Minister Begin in 1979, a handshake that some people thought would lead to a start of an inevitable permanent peace in the Middle East, and it's now about 22 years later and we're still waiting.

And we're back, and we're discussing what does change and what doesn't in the world's historic conflicts. My guests are CBS news national correspondent Martha Teichner, who has covered wars and conflicts just about everywhere we've mentioned. Maybe she's the source of some of these, I don't think so. Author Amy Wilentz, who has worked as a journalist in Jerusalem and whose new work of fiction, "Martyr's Crossing," is set in the Middle East. And Georgia Congressman John Lewis, who has seen real change from the front lines of the civil rights movement.

Let me turn, Amy, to the question I ended with with John Lewis, and it is raised by an article in today's "Slate" online magazine by a correspondent named Anne Applebaum who asserts that in a war or in a long-running feud like in Northern Ireland, real peace comes about only when one side or another has effectively agreed to give up, and she mentions that in South Africa, basically the white government said: "We are giving up, black majority rule."

The Soviet Union, the Soviet empire basically said, "we are done, we are -- we quit. We are not going to go in and stop Poland and Czechoslovakia." The American South was made -- at least the white segregationists to give up. In a situation in the Middle East, who is going to give up?

WILENTZ: Well, the Israelis have trouble giving up, because if they give up to the extent to which the Palestinians would in their hearts like the Israelis to give up, there wouldn't be any more Israel. If they give up the West Bank, I think that is what they have been working to do, and I think that will happen eventually, and it is almost there. It is creaking toward that.

But they know that when they march unilaterally out of Lebanon, they still have problems. So, they are very reluctant to just go ahead and be, you know, the peaceful party. GREENFIELD: Martha, does this assertion of Anne Applebaum's make sense to you as someone who has covered these things, that in some sense, somebody has to say, "we are leaving the battlefield."

TEICHNER: Or they have to be made to say that. And in the case -- I think of Lebanon, the factional fighting that went on for years and years and years in Lebanon was stopped in essence by Syria pressing down on all the factions with force, and saying enough.

GREENFIELD: But in a larger sense, John Lewis talked about a sympathetic referee, how -- who is the sympathetic referee, for instance, in a place like Northern Ireland in a place like the Balkans, in a place even like the Middle East? And it almost seems like that idea is unworkable, barring something like an effective United Nations force.

TEICHNER: In Northern Ireland, it's not entirely unworkable because look at the progress that George Mitchell made. Look at the idea that you had people who at -- for a number of reasons, all these things percolating underneath the surface -- Gerry Adams wanted to make a step, the other parties in Northern Ireland wanted to make steps, and even though there are lurches backward as well as forward, you have a facilitator who gets you to the point where some progress can really be made, the sympathetic referee. The question is trusting the referee to be sympathetic.

GREENFIELD: And in fact, John Lewis, you mentioned this commitment to nonviolence, and it does sometimes seems to me that we Americans have an almost a kind of -- I won't call it a cock-eyed optimism, but perhaps an excessive sense of optimism, if -- if your -- if the movement in the South had not been committed to nonviolence, as so many movements around the world are not, I am not sure that you could have won the political support of the federal government, so what does that tell you about -- I'm sorry, go ahead.

LEWIS: It was the only way. It was the only way. We would not have won, we would not have been successful if we had not appeal to the conscience of the American people, and appeal to high officials in government by using the philosophy, using it, the tools and instruments of nonviolence.

And so maybe, just maybe, not just in the American South, but in other parts of the world, because the use of nonviolence people could come to that point, and say enough is enough. We are going to lay down the instrument of violence, we are going to lay down the burden of hate, and we will steady war no more.

If we can have the idea in Northern Ireland, in the Middle East, in the Balkans or wherever, that people come to that conclusion and say we all live in one house, and we are going to live in this big house together.

GREENFIELD: But that almost assumes the conclusion. I mean, it seems to me that if you have a situation -- Amy or Martha, you have both been in this region, where martyrs are celebrated, where young men -- particularly young boys -- are told, you know, die for your cause, and you will ascend into heaven, it doesn't strike me that that nonviolence is going to have much of a resonance there.

WILENTZ: I have to say nonviolence seems to me a bit like a Christian sort of philosophy, even though I know Mahatma Gandhi was one of its original proponents and he was not a Christian, but, you know, this not a Christian war that we're seeing in the Middle East, it's a war between two people who are quite warlike.

TEICHNER: I would speculate or I would -- I would offer that in the Middle East, whether it is in Lebanon dominated by Syria, whether it is in Israel with the Palestinians, that if you look back in history, you can contain hatred with force. That has been history in that region. And that the eye-for-an-eye idea has been part and parcel of the way that region has existed for thousands of years.

I'm not -- and I'm not sure that, as you say, that applying the concept of Christian ideals is necessarily the answer, and I also feel that my personal feeling -- and I may be absolutely wrong, I hope I'm wrong -- but I truly believe that even when the Intifada began in the sort of late mid-'80s, it was even then too late for a tidy peace, because you had -- like you had in Lebanon, like you had in Northern Ireland, like you had in South Africa -- a generation of young kids who were lawless and who were willing to risk their lives and lose their lives in the streets, throwing stones, confronting authority, and those people have now grown up, and they don't trust Yasser Arafat.

The Fatah movement to me is -- is not necessarily the right partner in this negotiation, because I think that they are considered irrelevant in many ways. The lawless kids who have grown up and are now powerful are Hamas, and so...

GREENFIELD: And that -- and John Lewis, that's what I wanted to come back and end this segment with, which is if you had had a large number of young folks in the South, young blacks who saw Martin Luther King as irrelevant, who rejected nonviolence, who were prepared to die and in fact felt that might be a noble end, the civil rights story probably still wouldn't be over, would it?

LEWIS: No. But the movement under the leadership of Martin Luther King, Jr. was able to bring hundreds and thousands and millions of young people black and white, in the South and in other parts of the country, to support that effort. People believed in that idea of redeemed America, the beloved community, and we taught people the way of love, the way of nonviolence.

You have to find a way to break the cycle of violence. People don't come into this world hating someone because of their race, their color or their nationality or their religion. So, we need to find a way in the Middle East and other parts of the world to teach people the way of peace, and not the way of violence.

GREENFIELD: I want to talk about that when we get back, but we have to take a break. And when we come back, it may sound pessimistic, but we want to ask the question: what if some conflicts simply have no real way of being resolved?

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

GREENFIELD: 1993, nearly 15 years after that first handshake we saw, President Clinton deems as Yasser Arafat of the PLO and Prime Minister Rabin of Israel shake hands. And that was another day on which many people might have thought peace, if not at hand, is close at hand.

And we are back discussing, in fact, which things change and which don't, in the Middle East and elsewhere. My guests are CBS News national correspondent, Martha Teichner, "Martyr's Crossing" author Amy Wilentz and Georgia Congressman John Lewis.

Amy, it may sound gloomy, but let's just put it on the table, that there may be some issues that, at least as far as any of us can tell, are so rooted in fundamental differences, two people each believing that, in effect, God has given them this land, that they're never going to put aside those differences. Is there any hope for a kind of middle-ground peace, even though the two sides may harbor very ill feelings about each other?

WILENTZ: I think for a long time they're going to harbor ill feelings about each other. We see it every day. But there is hope for a middle ground. Israelis are always putting forth the idea of separation, as though the two states will never really touch each other. I don't think that's plausible. I think that economics and geography militate toward a peace, and I think all the Israeli people, with some fundamentalists apart, really want peace, and polls have shown that.

And they have controlled Ariel Sharon's hawklike tendencies, to an extent, and I think that that bodes well. I think there can be a tiny, tiny glimpse of optimism in what looks like a bloody sea.

GREENFIELD: Well, at the risk of trying to snuff out that even tiny glimpse, Martha, and I don't really mean to, but it seems to me that there are some places where economics don't do the trick. I mean, if you have -- in the Balkans, they've been fighting to redress grievances that literally go back to 1480. If tribes in Africa regard each other, literally, as something less than human to be slaughtered at will, if people in Northern Ireland have been at each other's throats for 800 years, is the prospect of economics really going to bridge this gap, which seems to me to be about as fundamental as you can imagine?

TEICHNER: I think it can go some of the way. But, like in South Africa, you've got to have two peoples who need, as well as want, to make peace for some reason -- that they all have vested interests in sitting down at the table. Certainly that was true in northern Ireland. In the Balkans, it's going to take a very, very long time before they need to make peace, because they have -- and will then have to go beyond the tribal memory of violence that motivates everything now.

GREENFIELD: Which is no easy...

TEICHNER: Tito -- it's interesting that what Tito did, the supposed economic miracle of Yugoslavia, was Tito, a Croat, holding the pieces together with might, but also with economic interests. And it took eight years after he died, or no, 12 years, to fall apart.

GREENFIELD: I don't want to end on so pessimistic a note, so, John Lewis, let me turn to you and ask you. When you were a young man working in civil rights, when you, I believe at one point, almost lost your life to violence, could have you foreseen a time when they would not only be blacks voting, but there would be African-Americans in every state legislature in the United States Congress, from states throughout the Confederacy? Did you actually envision what turned out to be?

LEWIS: Yes. I was always hopeful and optimistic that somehow in some way we would secede. We didn't sing "We Shall Overcome" for nothing. We did believe. We really did believe that we could build a truly interracial democracy in the South, that we could build a beloved community. We truly believe, and I still believe today, that humankind must evolve to a much higher level, where we will lay down the instruments and tools of violence and hatred.

We may not create the perfect land, the perfect world, but if you take this idea that we all live in this one little house, we must learn to live together. As Dr. King would say, we must learn to live together as brothers and sisters, or we will perish as fools.

GREENFIELD: I'm glad we ended on that note after what has sometimes been a rather grim tour of the conflict spots of the world. I want to thank my guests, CBS News national correspondent Martha Teichner who, next year, will celebrate 25 years with CBS; Amy Wilentz, author of "Martyr's Crossing"; and Georgia Congressman John Lewis.

When we come back, "And Another Thing": some of the smaller things that do change, right after this.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

GREENFIELD: "And Another Thing": Not every change involves a life-and-death conflict, but those lesser changes can, in fact, alter the way we live. Take smoking. The idea that it was once a universally accepted practice seems like something out of the stone age.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP, "WINSTON COMMERCIAL")

UNIDENTIFIED MALE (singing): Winston tastes good like a cigarette should.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

GREENFIELD: As late as the '50s, smokers lit up everywhere, even in the doctor's office. The guy telling you to turn your head and cough might be puffing on a Pall Mall. Today, the only place you find smokers in the workplace is outside the workplace -- those poor huddled masses shivering or sweating outside the entrance. Another big change in the culture: entertainers like Dean Martin once made a career as the genial drunk. Thanks to Mothers Against Drunk Driving and other groups, we really don't see alcohol portrayed quite that way.

And we're not even talking about how our culture now treats the idea of women in the workplace, or gays who step out of the closet. Of course, it does really help if you are talking about habits -- habits of mind, habits of personal behavior -- instead of conflicts where the true believers believe that those on the other side have literally forfeited their right to live.

I'm Jeff Greenfield. And speaking of less than life and death conflicts, "SPORTS TONIGHT" is next.

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