Quotes
from books by Howard Zinn
You Can't Be Neutral On A Moving Train
The Founding Fathers were not just ingenious organizers of
a new nation (though they
certainly were that) but also rich white slaveholders, merchants,
bondholders, fearful of lowerclass rebellion, or as James Madison
put it, of "an equal division of property." Our military
heroes-Andrew Jackson, Theodore Roosevelt-were racists, Indian-killers,
war-lovers, imperialists. Our most liberal presidents-Jefferson,
Lincoln, Wilson, Roosevelt, Kennedy-were more concerned with political
power and national aggrandizement than with the rights of nonwhite
people.
*****
The prosperous elite of the world finds it convenient to ignore
starvation and sickness in poverty-ridden countries. The United
States and other powers continue to sell arms wherever it is profitable,
whatever the human costs...
The new political leadership of the country, like the old,
seems to lack the vision, the boldness, the will, to break from
the past. It maintains a huge military budget which distorts the
economy and makes possible no more than puny efforts to redress
the huge gap between rich and poor.
*****
People are practical. They want change but feel powerless,
alone, do not want to be the blade of grass that sticks up above
the others and is cut down. They wait for a sign from someone
else who will make the first move, or the second. And at certain
times in history, there are intrepid people who take the risk
that if they make that first move others will follow quickly enough
to prevent their being cut down. And if we understand this, we
might make that first move.
*****
...the tiniest acts of protest in whlich we engage may become
the invisible roots of social change.
*****
The power of a bold idea uttered publicly in defiance of dominant
opinion cannot be easily measured.
*****
Social movements may have many "defeats" - failing
to achieve objectives in the short run - but in the course of
the struggle the strength of the old order begins to erode, the
minds of people begin to change.
*****
Should not the real motivations of of governments be scrultinized
? They always claim to be fighting for democracy, for liberty,
against aggression, to end all wars - but is that not a handy
way to mobilize a population to support war, indeed, absolutely
necessary because people to not instinctively want to fight ?
*****
[War] is manufactured by political leaders, who then must
make a tremendous efort - by enticement, by propaganda, by coercion
- to mobilize a normally reluctant population to go to war.
*****
... the high school years must be the most important years
in shaping the social consciousness of young people, because at
no other level do parents and school officials become more hysterical
at the possibility that the students will be exposed to ideas
which challenge the authority of governemnt, of school administrations,
of parents.
*****
... unsparing criticism of government is an essential element
of a democratic society.
*****
... civil disobedience in American history ... [is] not an
ordinary crime but a form of protest engaged in by conscientious
citizens when traditional modes of expression are ineffective
in righting some wrong.
The Zinn Reader
If the world is destroyed it will be a white-collar crime,
done in a business-like way, by large numbers of individuals involved
in a chain of actions, each one having a touch of innocence
*****
... there is simllar principle, operating in domestic affairs
and foreign affairs-for presumably liberal states as for other
kinds of states: that in a world which has not yet developed either
the mind or the mechanism for humane cooperation, power and privilege
tend to be as rapacious as the degree of resistance bv the victims
will permit. That aggression at home is more disguised, more sporadic,
more controlled than aggression abroad, comes from the development
of countervailing forces at home, while those abroad have usually
been helpless before the marauding foreign power. Where internal
groups have been similarly helpless they have been treated as
ruthlessly as enemies in wartime: the blacks, the Indians, the
workingmen before they organized, the students when they dared
to challenge authority.
... this suggests that we need to stop looking with special
fondness on that group of Western states which represent, in those
millions of textbooks distributed in high schools and colleges
"Western civilization." Their external behavior is not
an unfortunate departure from character. It is what their internal
behavior would be if undeterred by a population whose greater
literacy and greater activity (a necessity of modern industrial
development) enabled them to at least partially resist.
*****
A year before the United States entered the European war,
Helen Keller, blind and deaf and a committed Socialist, told an
audience at Carnegie Hall:
Strike against war, for without you no battles can be fought!
Strike against manufacturing shrapnel and gas bombs and all other
tools of murder! Strike against preparedness that means death
and misery to millions of human beings! Be not dumb, obedient
slaves in an army of destruction! Be heroes in an army of construction!
*****
Mark Twain, observing the United States at the turn of the
century, its wars in Cuba and the Philippines, described in The
Mysterious Stranger the process by which wars that are at first
seen as unnecessary by the mass of the people become converted
into "just" wars:
The loud little handful will shout for war. The pulpit will
warily and cautiously protest at first.... The great mass of the
nation will rub its sleepy eyes, and will try to make out why
there should be a war, and they will say earnestly and indignantly:
"It is unjust and dishonorable and there is no need for war."
Then the few will shout even louder.... Before long you will
see a curious thing: anti-war speakers will be stoned from the
platform, and free speech will be strangled by hordes of furious
men who still agree with the speakers but dare not admit it...
Next, the statesmen will invent cheap lies...and each man
will be glad of these lies and will study them because they soothe
his conscience; and thus he will bye and bye convince himself
that the war is just and he will thank God for a better sleep
he enjoys by his self-deception.
*****
Bruce Catton, a writer and historian working in Washington
during the war (WWII), commented bitingly on the retention of
wealth and power in the same hands, despite a war that seemed
to promise a new world of social reform. He wrote:
We were committed to a defeat of the Axis but to nothing else...
It was solemnly decided that the war effort must not be used to
bring about social or economic reform and to him that hath shall
be given...
And through it all... the people were not trusted with the
facts or relied on to display that intelligence, sanity, and innate
decency of spirit, upon which democracy...finally rests. In a
very real sense, our government spent the war years looking desperately
for some safe middle ground between Hitler and Abraham Lincoln.
*****
The actor Richard Burton once wrote an article for the New
York Times about his experience playing the role of Winston Churchill
in a television drama:
In the course of preparing myself...I realized afresh that
I hate Churchill and all of his kind. I hate them virulently.
They have stalked down the corridors of endless power all through
history.... What man of sanity would say on hearing of the atrocities
committed by the Japanese against British and Anzac prisoners
of war, 'We shall wipe them out, everyone of them, men, women,
and children. There shall not be a Japanese left on the face of
the earth? Such simple-minded cravings for revenge leave me with
a horrified but reluctant awe for such single-minded and merciless
ferocity.
*****
A United Nations official reported, with great bitterness
that:
" in pursuit of political objectives in the Nigerian
Civil War, a number of great and small nations, including Britain
and the United States, worked to prevent supplies of food and
medicine from reaching the starving children of rebel Biafra.
"
*****
The extraordinary black writer Zora Neale Hurston wrote her
memoir, Dust Tracks on a Road, at the start of World War II. Just
before it was to come out, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor,
and her publisher, Lippincott, removed a section of the book in
which she wrote bitterly about the "democracies" of
the West and their hypocrisy. She said:
All around me, bitter tears are being shed over the fate of
Holland, Belgium, France and England. I must confess to being
a little dry around the eyes. I hear people shaking with shudders
at the thought of Germany collecting taxes in Holland. I have
not heard a word against Holland collecting one twelfth of poor
people's wages in Asia. Hitler's crime is that he is actually
doing a thing like that to his own kind...
As I see it, the doctrines of democracy deal with the aspirations
of men's souls, but the application deals with things. One hand
in somebody else's pocket and one on your gun, and you are highly
civilized.... Desire enough for your own use only, and you are
a heathen. Civilized people have things to show to their neighbors.
*****
Black writer Zora Neale Hurston, in a letter she wrote to
a journalist friend in 1946, showed her indignation at the hypocrisy
that accompanied the war:
I am amazed at the complacency of Negro press and public.
Truman is a monster. l can think of him as nothing else but the
Butcher of Asia. Of his grin of triumph on giving the order to
drop the Atom bombs on Japan. Of his maintaining troops in China
who are shooting the starving Chinese for stealing a handful of
food.
*****
The French worker philosopher Simone Weil, early in 1945,
wrote in a new magazine called Politics:
Whether the mask is labeled Fascism, Democracy, or Dictatorship
or the Proletariat, our great adversary remains the Apparatus-the
bureaucracy, the police, the military.... No matter what the circumstances,
the worst betrayal will always be to subordinate ourselves to
this Apparatus, and to trample underfoot, in its service, all
human values in ourselves and in others.
*****
Some of the participants in that "good war" had
second thoughts. Former GI Tommy Bridges, who after the war became
a policeman in Michigan, expressed his feelings to Studs Terkel:
It was a useless war, as every war is.... How gaddamn foolish
it is, the war. They's no war in the world that's worth fighting
for, I don't care where it is. They can't tell me any different.
Money, money is the thing that causes it all. I wouldn't be a
bit surprised that the people that start wars and promote 'em
are the men that make the money, make the ammunition, make the
clothing and so forth. Just think of the poor kids that are starvin'
to death in Asia and so forth that could be fed with how much
you make one big shell out of.
*****
Higher up in the military ranks was Admiral Gene LaRocque,
who also spoke to Studs Terkel about the war:
I had been in thirteen battle engagements, had sunk a submarine,
and was the first man ashore in the landing at Roi. In that four
years, I thought, What a hell of a waste of a man's life. I lost
a lot of friends. I had the task of telling my roommate's parents
about our last days together. You lose limbs, sight, part of your
life-for what? Old men send young men to war. Flag, banners, and
patriotic sayings...
We've institutionalized militarism. This came out of World
War Two... It gave us the National Security Council. It gave us
the CIA, that is able to spy on you and me this very moment. For
the first time in the history of man, a country has divided up
the world into military districts.... You could argue World War
Two had to be fought. Hitler had to be stopped. Unfortunately,
we translate it unchanged to the situation today...
I hate it when they say, "He gave his life for his country."
Nobody gives their life for anything. We steal the lives of these
kids. We take it away from them. They don't die for the honor
and glory of their country. We kill them.
*****
Two Americans who visited El Salvador in 1983 for the New
York City Bar Association described for the New York Times a massacre
of eighteen peasants by local troops in Sonsonate province:
Ten military advisers are attached to the Sonsonate armed
forces... The episode contains all the unchanging elements of
the Salvadoran tragedy- uncontrolled military violence against
civilians, the apparent ability of the wealthy to procure official
violence...and the presence of United States military advisers,
working with the Salvadoran military responsible for these monstrous
practices... after 30,000 unpunished murders by security and military
forces and over 10,000 "disappearances" of civilians
in custody, the root causes of the killings remain in place, and
the killing goes on.
*****
The democratic state uses force when persuasion does not work.
It uses it against its own citizens when they cannot be persuaded
to obey the laws. It uses it against other peoples in the act
of war, not always in self-defense, but often when it cannot persuade
other nations to do its bidding. For example, at the start of
the twentieth century, although Colombia was willing to sell the
rights to the Panama Canal to the United States, it wanted more
money than the United States was willing to pay. So the warships
were sent on their way, a little revolution was instigated in
Panama, and soon the Canal Zone was in the hands of the United
States. As one U.S. Senator described the operation. "We
stole it fair and square."
*****
Why should the citizen tie his or her fate to the nation-state,
which is perfectly willing to sacrifice the lives and liberties
of its own citizens for the power, the profit, and the glory of
politicians or corporate executives or generals?
*****
The U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, which interviewed 700 Japanese
military and political officials after the war came to this conclusion:
Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts and supported
by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it
is the Survey's opinion that certainly prior to 31 December 1945,
and in all probability prior to I November 1945, Japan would have
surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even
if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had
been planned or contemplated.
*****
from Declarations of Independence
*****
Americans have been taught that their nation is civilized
and humane. But, too often, U.S. actions haave been uncivilized
and inhumane.
*****
Once weapons exist, targets have to be found.
*****
If those in charge of our society - politicians, corporate
executives, and owners of press and television - can dominate
our ideas, they will be secure in their power. They will not need
soldiers patrolling the streets. We will control ourselves.
*****
... What normally operates day by day is the quiet dominance
of certain ideas, the ideas we are expected to hold by our neighbors,
our employers, and our political leaders; the ones we quickly
learn are the most acceptable. The result is an obedient, acquiescent,
passive citizenry-a situation that is deadly to democracy.
If one day we decide to reexamine these beliefs and realize
they do not come naturally out of our innermost feelings or our
spontaneous desires, are not the result of independent thought
on our part, and, indeed, do not match the real world as we experience
it, then we have come to an important turning point in life. Then
we find ourselves examining, and confronting, American ideology.
*****
In the United States today, the Declaration of Independence
hangs on schoolroom walls, but foreign policy follows Machiavelli.
*****
Robert W. Tucker, political scientist, 1980
"We have regularly played.a determining role in making
and in unmaking governments, and we have defined what we have
considered to be the acceptable behavior of governments."
... Right-wing governments will have to be given steady outside
support, even, if necessary, by sending in American forces."
*****
Robert W. Tucker, political scientist, 1980
" The great object of American foreign policy ought to
be the restoration of a more normal political world, a world in
which those states possessing the elements of great power once
again play the role their power entitles them to play."
*****
...the democratic state ... uses force when persuasion does
not work. It uses is against its own citizens when they cannot
be persuaded to obey the laws. It uses it against other peoples
in the act of war ... often when it cannot persuade other nations
to do its bidding.
*****
The modern liberal state ... often uses deception to gain
its ends -- not so much deception of the foreign enemy, but of
its own citizens, who have been taught to trust their leaders.
*****
[Henry] Kissinger, secretary of state to Nixon, ... surrendered
himself with ease to the princes of war and destruction. In private
discussions with old colleagues from Harvard who thought the Vietnam
War immoral, he presented himself as someone trying to bring it
to an end, but in his official capacity he was the willing intellectual
tool of a policy that involved the massive killing of civilians
in Vietnam.
Kissinger approved the bombing and invasion of Cambodia, an
act so disruptive of the delicate Cambodian society that it can
be considered an important factor in the rise of the murderous
Pol Pot regime in the country. After he and the representatives
of North Vietnam had negotiated a peace agreement to end the war
in late 1972, he approved the breaking off of the talks and the
brutal bombardment of residential districts in Hanoi by the most
ferocious bombing plane of the time, the B-52.
[Henry] Kissinger's biographers describe his role [in the
bombing of Cambodia]: "If he had disapproved of Nixon's policy,
he could have argued against the Cambodian attack. But there is
no sign that he ever mustered his considerable influence to persuade
the President to hold his fire. Or that he ever considered resigning
in protest. Quite the contrary, Kissinger supported the policy."
*****
Why should the citizen tie his or her fate to the nation-state,
which is perfectly willing to sacrifice the lives and liberties
of its own citizens for the power, the profit, and the glory of
politicians or corporate executives or generals?
*****
For a prince, a dictator, or a tyrant national power is an
end unquestioned. A democratic state ... must present national
power as benign, serving the interests of liberty, justice, and
humanity.
*****
We had been brought up to believe that our political leaders
had good motives and could be trusted to do right in the world;
we had learned that the world had good guys and bad guys, good
countries and bad countries, and ours was good. We had been trained
to fly planes, fire guns, operate bombsights, and to take pride
in doing the job well. And we had been trained to follow orders,
which there was no reason to question, because everyone on our
side was good, and on the other side, bad. Besides, we didn't
have to watch a little girl's leg' get blown off by our bombs;
we were 30,000 feet high and no human being on the ground was
visible, no scream could be heard. Surely that is enough to explain
how men can participate in war.
*****
Once in the war [Vietnam], the tensions of combat on top of
the training in obedience produced atrocities. In the My Lai Massacre
we have an extreme example of the power of a culture in teaching
obedience. In My Lai, a hamlet in South Vietnam, a company of
U.S. soldiers landed by helicopter early one morning in March
1968, with orders to kill everybody there. In about one hour,
although not a single shot was fired at them, they slaughtered
about 400 Vietnamese, most of them old people, women, and children.
Many of them were herded into ditches and then mowed down with
automatic rifles.
One of the American soldiers, Charles Hutto, said later, "The
impression I got was that we was to shoot everyone in the village....
An order came down to destroy all of the food, kill all the animals
and kill all the people ... then the village was burned.... I
didn't agree with the killings but we were ordered to do it.
*****
History, so diligent at recording disasters, is largely silent
on the enormous number of courageous acts by individuals challenging
authority and defying orders.
*****
In May of 1976 the New York Times published a series of articles
in which it lamented the ignorance of American students about
their own history. The Times was pained. Four leading historians
whom it consulted were also pained. It seemed students did not
know that James Polk was president during the Mexican War, that
James Madison was president during the War of 1812, that the Homestead
Act was passed arlier than Civil Service reform, or that the Constitution
authorizes Congress to regulate interstate commerce but says nothing
about the cabinet.
We might wonder if the Times, or its historian-consultants,
learned anything from the history of this century. It has been
a century of atrocities: the death camps of Hitler, the slave
camps of Stalin, and the devastation of Southeast Asia by the
United States. All of these were done by powerful leaders and
obedient populations in countries that had achieved high levels
of literacy and education. ...
In the case of the United States the killing of a million
Vietnamese and the sacrifice of 55,000 Americans were carried
out by highly educated men around the White House who scored very
well in tests and who undoubtedly would have made impressive grades
in the New York Times exam. It was a Phi Beta Kappa, McGeorge
Bundy, who was one of the chief planners of the bombing of civilians
in Southeast Asia. It was a Harvard professor, Henry Kissinger,
who was a strategist of the secret bombing of peasant villages
in Cambodia.
Going back a bit in history, it was our most educated president,
Woodrow Wilson-a historian, a Ph.D., and a former president of
Princeton-who bombarded the Mexican coast, killing hundreds of
innocent people, because the Mexican government refused to salute
the American flag. It was Harvard-educated John Kennedy, author
of two books on history, who presided over the American invasion
of Cuba and the lies that accompanied it.
What did Kennedy or Wilson learn from all that history they
absorbed in the best universities in America? What did the American
people learn in their high-cschool history texts that caused them
to submerge their own common sense and listen to these leaders?
Surely ... how "educated" someone is, tells you nothing
about whether that person is decent or indecent, violent or peaceful,
and whether that person will resist evil or become a consultant
to warmakers. It does not tell you who will become a Pastor Niemoller
(a German who resisted the Nazis) or an Albert Speer (who worked
for them), a Lieutenant Calley (who killed children at My Lai),
or a Warrant Oflficer Thompson who tried to save them). ...
We do need to learn history, the kind that does not put its
main emphasis on knowing presidents and statutes and Supreme Court
decisions, but inspires a new generation to resist the madness
of governments trying to carve the world and our minds into their
spheres of efluence.
*****
Erasmus described war: "There is nothing more wicked, more
disastrous, more widely destructive, more deeply tenacious, more
loathsome." He said this was repugnant to nature: "Whoever
heard of a hundred thousand animals rushing together to butcher
each other, as men do everywhere?"
Erasmus saw war as useful to governments, for it enabled them
to enhance their power over their subjects; " . . . once
war has been declared, then all the affairs of the State are at
the mercy of the appetites of a few."
*****
I would suggest another way of looking at the facts: that
there is a ... principle, operating in domestic affairs and foreign
affairs-for presumably liberal states as for other kinds of states:
that in a world which has not yet developed either the mind or
the mechanism for humane cooperation, power and privilege tend
to be as rapacious as the degree of resistance by the victims
will permit. That aggression at home is more disguised, more sporadic,
more controlled than aggression abroad, comes from the development
of countervailing forces at home, while those abroad have usually
been helpless before the marauding foreign power. Where internal
groups have been similarly helpless they have been treated as
ruthlessly as enemies in wartime: the blacks, the Indians, the
workingmen before they organized, he students when they dared
to challenge authority.
... this suggests that we need to stop looking with special
fondness on that group of Western states which represent, in those
millions of textbooks distributed in high schools and colleges
"Western civilization." Their external behavior is not
an unfortunate departure from character. It is what their internal
behavior would be if undeterred by a population whose greater
literacy and greater activity (a necessity of modern industrial
development) enabled them to at least partially resist.
*****
... a nation may be relatively liberal at home and yet totally
ruthless abroad. Indeed, it may more easily enlist its population
in cruelty to others by pointing to the advantages at home. An
entire nation is made into mercenaries, being paid with a bit
of democracy at home for participating in the destruction of life
abroad.
*****
Tom Paine, in America, saw war as the creature of governments,
serving their own interests, not the interests of justice for
their citizens. "Man is not the enemy of man but through
the medium of a false system of government."
*****
One certain effect of war is to diminish freedom of expression.
Patriotism becomes the order of the day, and those who question
the war are seen as traitors, to be silenced and imprisoned.
*****
Roman biographer Plutarch
"The poor go to war, to fight and die for the delights,
riches, and superfluities of others."
*****
Britain and the United States opposed fascism only because
it threatened their own control over resources and people. Yes,
Hitler was a maniacal dictator and invader of other countries.
But, what of the British Empire and its long history of wars against
native peoples to subdue them for the profit and glory of the
empire."
*****
British Air Marshal Sir Robert Saundby after the bombing of
Dresden:
... It is not so much this or the other means of making war
that is immoral or inhumane. What is immoral is war itself. Once
full-scale war has broken out it can never be humanized or civilized....
So long as we resort to war to settle differences between nations,
so long will we have to endure the horrors, the barbarities and
excesses that war brings with it.
*****
Two million people died in Korea; 2 to 5 million in Vietnam,
Cambodia, and Laos; I million in Indonesia; perhaps million in
the Nigerian civil war; I million in the Iran-Iraq War; and many
more in Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East. It is estimated
that, in the forty years after 1945, there were 150 wars, with
20 million casualties.
*****
It is the great challenge of our time: How to achieve justice,
with struggle, but without war.
*****
In the 1960s, a student at Harvard Law School addressed parents
and alumni with these words:
"The streets of our country are in turmoil. The universities
are filled with students rebelling and rioting. Communists are
seeking to destroy our country. Russia is threatening us with
her might. And the republic is in danger. Yes! danger from within
and without. We need law and order! Without law and order our
nation cannot survive." When the applause died down, the
student quietly told his listeners: "These words were
spoken in 1932 by Adoff Hitler."
*****
Surely, peace, stability, and order are desirable. Chaos and
violence are not. But stability and order are not the only desirable
conditions of social life. There is also justice, meaning the
fair treatment of all human beings, the equal right of all people
to freedom and prosperity. Absolute obedience to law may bring
order temporarily, but it may not bring justice. And when it does
not, those treated unjustly may protest, may rebel, may cause
disorder, as the American revolutionaries did in the eighteenth
century, as antislavery people did in the nineteenth century,
as Chinese students did in this century, and as working people
going on strike have done in every country, across the centuries.
Are we not more obligated to achieve justice than to obey
the law? The law may serve justice, as when it forbids rape and
murder or requires a school to admit all students regardless of
race or nationality. But when it sends young men to war, when
it protects the rich and punishes the poor, then law and justice
are opposed to one another. In that case, where is our greater
obligation: to law or to justice?
*****
The answer is given in democratic theory at its best, in the
words of Jefferson and his colleagues in the Declaration of Independence.
Law is only a means. Government is only a means. "Life, Liberty,
and the pursuit of Happiness"-these are the ends. And "whenever
any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is
the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute
new government."
*****
The law appears impersonal... And because it has the look
of neutrality, its injustices are made legitimate ... A code of
law is more easily deified than a flesh-and-blood ruler.
*****
The rule of law does not do away with the unequal distribution
of wealth and power, but reinforces that inequality with the authority
of law. It allocates wealth and poverty ... but in such complicated
and indirect ways as to leave the victim bewildered.
*****
... while the Constitution was certainly an improvement over
the royal charters of England, it was still a document drawn up
by rich men, merchants, and slaveowners who wanted a bit of political
democracy, but had no sympathy for economic democracy. It was
designed to set up a "rule of law," which would efficiently
prevent rebellion by dissatisfied elements in the population.
As the Founding Fathers assembled in Philadelphia, they still
had in mind farmers who had recently taken up arms in western
Massachusetts (Shays' Rebellion) against unjust treatment by the
wealth-controlled legislature.
*****
... the system of laws, to maintain its standing in the eyes
of the citizenry and to provide safety valves by which the discontented
can let o ff steam, must keep up the appearance of fairness. And
so the law itself provides for change. When the pressure of discontentment
becomes great, laws are passed to satisfy some part of the grievance.
*****
In society, the rich and strong get what they want by the
law of contract, the rules of the market, and the power of the
authorities to change the rules or violate them at will.
*****
In [the] system, the occasional victories may ease some of
the pain of economic injustice. They also reveal the usefulness
of protest and pressure, suggest even greater possibilities for
the future. And they keep you in the game, giving you the feeling
of fairness, preventing you from getting angry and upsetting the
wheel. It is a system ingeniously devised for maintaining things
as they are, while allowing for limited reform.
*****
Obligation to government ... is not natural. It must be taught
to every generation.
*****
In society, the rich and strong get what they want
*****
If patriotism were defined, not as blind obedience to government,
not as submissive worship to flags and anthems, but rather as
love of one's country, one's fellow citizens (all over the world),
as loyalty to the principles of justice and democracy, then patriotism
would require us to disobey our government, when it violated those
principles.
*****
Martin Luther King, Jr.In his "Letter from Birmingham
City Jail," written in the spring of 1963:
"I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience
tells him is unjust, and willingly accepts the penalty by staying
in jail to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustices
is in reality expressing the very highest respect for law."
The "law" that King respected ... was not man-made
law. He meant respect for the higher law, the law of morality,
of justice.
*****
If it is right to disobey unjust laws, it is right to disobey
unjust punishment for breaking those laws.
*****
Can a decent society exist ... if people ... obey all laws,
even those the violate human rights.
*****
Protest beyond the law is not a departure from democracy;
it is absolutely essential to it. ... It is disruptive and troublesome,
but it is a necessary disruption, a healthy troublesomeness.
*****
The test of justification for [a law] is not its legality
but its morality. The ultimate test is not law but justice.
*****
Historically, the most terrible things -- war, genocide, and
slavery -- have resulted not from disobedience, but from obedience.
*****
Justice is more important than law.
*****
What kind of person can we admire, can we ask young people
of the next generation to emulate -- the strict follower of law
or the dissident who struggles, sometimes within, sometimes outside,
sometimes against the law, but always for justice? What life is
best worth living -- the life of the proper, obedient, dutiful
follower of law and order or the life of the independent thinker,
the rebel?
*****
The weapons addiction of all our political leaders ... has
the same characteristics as drug addiction. It is enormously costly,
very dangerous, provokes ugly violence, and is self-perpetuating
-- all on a scale far greater than drug addicton.
*****
from A People's History of the United States
*****
Chief Black Hawk's surrender speech, 1832
"I fought hard. But your guns were well aimed. The bullets
flew like birds in the air, and whizzed by our ears like the wind
through the trees in the winter. My warriors fell around me....
The sun rose dim on us in the morning, and at night it sunk in
a dark cloud, and looked like a ball of fire. That was the last
sun that shone on Black Hawk.... He is now a prisoner to the white
men.... He has done nothing for which an Indian ought to be ashamed.
He has fought for his countrymen, the squaws and papooses, against
white men, who came year after year, to cheat them and take away
their lands. You know the cause of our making war. It is known
to all white men. They ought to be ashamed of it. Indians are
not deceitful. The white men speak bad of the Indian and look
at him spitefully. But the Indian does not tell lies. Indians
do not steal.
An Indian who is as bad as the white men could not live in
our nation; he would be put to death, and eaten up by the wolves.
The white men are bad schoolmasters; they carry false books, and
deal in false actions; they smile in the face of the poor Indian
to cheat him; they shake them by the hand to gain their confidence,
to make them drunk, to deceive them, and ruin our wives. We told
them to leave us alone, and keep away from us; they followed on,
and beset our paths, and they coiled themselves among us, like
the snake. They poisoned us by their touch. We were not safe.
We lived in danger. We were becoming like them, hypocrites and
liars, adulterous lazy drones, all talkers and no workers....
The white men do not scalp the head; but they do worse-they
poison the heart.... Farewell, my nation! ... Farewell to Black
Hawk."
*****
Frederick Douglass, Fourth of July, 1852
"Fellow Citizens: Pardon me, and allow me to ask, why
am I called upon to speak here today? What have I or those I represent
to do with your national independence? Are the great principles
of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that
Declaration of Independence, extended to us? And am I, therefore,
called upon to bring our humble offering to the national altar,
and to confess the benefits, and express devout gratitude for
the blessings resulting from your independence to us? . . .
What to the American slave is your Fourth of July? I answer,
a day that reveals to him more than all other days of the year,
the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim.
To him your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty an unholy
license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds
of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants,
brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality,
hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings,
with all your religious parade and solemnity, are to him mere
bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy-a thin veil
to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There
is not a nation of the earth guilty of practices more shocking
and bloody than are the people of these United States at this
very hour.
Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all
the monarchies and despotisms of the Old World, travel through
South America, search out every abuse and when you have found
the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices
of this nation, and you will say with me that, for revolting barbarity
and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival.
Frederick Douglass, 1853
"Let me give you a word of the philosophy of reforms.
The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that
all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of
struggle.... If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those
who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation, are
men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain
without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the
awful roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one;
or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical,
but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand.
It never did and it never will...."
*****
Theodore Roosevelt wrote to a friend in the year 1897
"In strict confidence . . . I should welcome almost any
war, for I think this country needs one."
*****
A Washington Post editorial on the eve of the Spanish-American
war (Cuba):
"A new consciousness seems to have come upon us-the consciousness
of strength-and with it a new appetite, the yearning to show our
strength.... Ambition, interest, land hunger, pride, the mere
joy of fighting, whatever it may be, we are animated by a new
sensation. We are face to face with a strange destiny. The taste
of Empire is in the mouth of the people even as the taste of blood
in the jungle...."
*****
"Every unit of brigade size has its My Lai hidden someplace."
Colonel Oran Henderson, charged with covering up the My Lai
killings in Vietnam, 1971:
*****
The control of women in society was ingeniously effective.
It was not done directly by the state. Instead, the family was
used-men to control women, women to control children, all to be
preoccupied with one another, to turn to one another for help,
to blame one another for trouble, to do violence to one another
when things weren't going right. Why could this not be turned
around. Could women liberating themselves, children freeing themselves,
men and women beginning to understand one another, find the source
of their common oppression outside rather than in one another?
Perhaps then they could create nuggets of strength in their own
relationships, millions of pockets of insurrection. They could
revolutionize thought and behavior in exactly that seclusion of
family privacy which the system had counted on to do its work
of control and indoctrination. And together, instead of at odds-male,
female, parents, children-they could undertake the changing of
society itself.
Adrienne Rich, author
*****
Sammuel Huntington, political science professor, Harvard University
A long-time consultant to the White House on the war in Vietnam,
he wrote a report called: "The Democratic Distemper"
and identified the problem he was about to discuss: "The
1960's witnessed a dramatic upsurge of democratic fervor in America."
In the sixties, Huntington wrote, there was a huge growth of citizen
participation "in the forms of marches, demonstrations, protest
movements, and 'cause' organizations." There were also "markedly
higher levels of self consciousness on the part of blacks, Indians,
Chicanos, white ethnic groups, students and women, all of whom
became mobilized and organized in new ways...." There was
a "marked expansion of white collar unionism," and all
this added up to "a reassertion of equality as a goal in
social, economic and political life."
Huntington pointed to the signs of decreasing government author
ity: The great demands in the sixties for equality had transformed
the federal budget. In 1960 foreign affairs spending was 53.7
percent of the budget, and social spending was 22.3 percent. By
1974 foreign affairs took 33 percent and social spending 31 percent.
This seemed to reflect a change in public mood: In 1960 only 18
percent of the public said the government was spending too much
on defense, but in 1969 this jumped to 52 percent.
Huntington was troubled by what he saw:
"The essence of the democratic surge of the 1960's was
a general challenge to existing systems of authority, public and
private. In one form or another, this challenge manifested itself
in the family, the university, business, public and private associations,
politics, the governmental bureaucracy, and the mili tary services.
People no longer felt the same obligation to obey those whom they
had previously considered superior to themselves in age, rank,
status, expertise, character, or talents."
All this, he said, "produced problems for the governability
of democracy in the 1970's...."
Critical in all this was the decline in the authority of the
President. And:
"To the extent that the United States was governed by
anyone during the decades after World War Il, it was governed
by the President acting with the support and cooperation of key
individuals and groups in the executive office, the federal bureaucracy,
Congress, and the more important businesses, banks, law firms,
foundations, and media, which constitute the private sector's
'Establishment'."
This was probably the frankest statement ever made by an Establishment
adviser.
Huntington further said that the President, to win the election,
needed the support of a broad coalition of people. However: "The
day after his election, the size of his majority is almost-if
not entirely- irrelevant to his ability to govern the country.
What counts then is his ability to mobilize support from the leaders
of key institutions in a society and government.... This coalition
must include key people in Congress, the executive branch, and
the private-sector 'Establishment.'" He gave examples:
"Truman made a point of bringing a substantial number
of non-partisan soldiers, Republican bankers, and Wall Street
lawyers mto hls Admlnistratlon. He went to the existing sources
of power in the country to get help he needed in ruling the country.
Eisenhower in part inherited this coalition and was in part almost
its creation.... Kennedy attempted to recreate a somewhat slmllar
structure of alliances."
What worried Huntington was the loss in governmental authority.
For instance, the opposition to Vietnam had brought the abolition
of the draft. "The question necessarily arises, however,
whether if a new threat to security should materialize in the
future (as it inevitably will at some point), the government will
possess the authority to command the resources, as well as the
sacrifices, which are necessary to meet that threat."
Huntington saw the possible end of that quarter century when
"the United States was the hegemonic power in a system of
world order." His conclusion was that there had developed
"an excess of democracy," and he suggested "desirable
limits to the extension of political democracy."
Howard
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