People or Sheeple On JFK and 'The Whole Mess'

[Ed Jewett]

Well, folks, I'm working through this stuff slowly, and it's delicious.

I want to thank Peter for that James Macgregor bit which is juicy, agreeable, and eminently useful when broken into chunks and dropped into discussion threads. Magda, I haven't even gotten to your stuff yet, but I promise I will. Right now, I'm still working through the "198", and I will have to do the listening at a time when audio playback conditions in my domestic arena are more suitable.

Here's a quick question for Bruce: Are all those Force More Powerful books, DVD's and PC games still available? Those tools look mighty intriguing, being an old game-player and game-designer myself. I sense what you were talking about in terms of their potential as group training tools, certainly in a face-to-face setting or a seminar/colloquium but perhaps even online.

I'd like to spend some time talking about this in depth: "Most of the people we will encounter have to learn that they are oppressed, or have to be made to understand that oppression is coming." How? Where? With what tools (written, videos, audio, podcasts, pre-packaged documentaries -- there's a good library here -- )? Some of this is obvious: I guess what I'm asking for is some better understanding of how to approach and enroll someone into that discussion when they clearly are disinterested, unmotivated, zoned out, comfortable amongst the herd, or -- egads! -- involved or complicit. Well, those last ones are hopeless. If we are the wolves, how do we identify those lambs who are open to learning more? How do and where do we drop hints, tags, leaflets, or whatever?

Okay, so moving on... What struck me from within the list of "the 198" that we could work on easily even in a displaced global asynchronous discussion is the development of slogans, caricatures and symbols. How and where they would be used in fairly obvious, but "coining" a powerful phrase can work. Some call it memetic engineering. I'd rather focus on giving someone a good transformative or eye-opening experience; perhaps that's what those Force More Powerful tools do.

Street and guerrilla theater (43 and 178) always appealed to me as being effective. The use of swarming, particularly for items 144, 1622 ff, 175-176 seem to be pretty powerful if well-aimed. Social non-cooperation, withdrawal, renunciation and withholding allegiance are where some are now, but we need to sell more of it.

We clearly have some people who can and like to write, so perhaps we ought to fashion some plays, scripts or videos of mock trials or reverse trials, something easily done in an asynchronous digital world.

I'd envisioned briefly a Post-It notes campaign since apparently the FBI has been ordering up surveillance of journalists with Post-It note requests; maybe we ought to devise a Post-It note campaign to ask for what we want.

The delivery of symbolic objects seems to offer up a lot of promise; someone has already envisioned a campaign involving children, diapers and the Pentagon; it'd probably be more legal if the diapers weren't pre-loaded.

On that note, I'll leave you with these two quotes that have been sitting on my desk, written down from a source at least momentarily forgotten, although my brain is telling me it's connected to a movie made in the Derrick Jensen milieu....

"We've been too busy pretending that the system will willingly undergo some kind of magical transformation....

The task of the activist is not to navigate the systems of power with as much personal integrity as possible; the task is to dismantle the system."

Or at least slow it down and make it think and feel and acknowledge humanity, soul, sanity et al.

More later...

[Peter Lemkin]

One form of activism that is safe and relatively easy to sell is the concept of serving on juries...and hanging trials when a defendant is on trial unjustly. All it takes is one juror to not agree, and be steadfast, and they can't convict.

A person can make a hobby of getting on juries in trials where the State is prosecuting (persecuting?) an individual for a "crime" that has no victim and has harmed no one. Heaven knows we have plenty of those kinds of trials these days, and they will increase as the War on (people who choose to use) Drugs and the "War on Terrorism" continue to escalate.

http://fija.org/

I lived most of my life back in the good 'ol US of A and never once got called for jury duty. Had I been [there is a certain control mechanism used, however, which filtered me out], I'd likely have be challenged and excused as biased, due to my beliefs and/or political work. That said, it is possible for those without a progressive 'past' - only a progressive 'heart' to make it into juries and there do some good.

[Peter Lemkin]

Well, folks, I'm working through this stuff slowly, and it's delicious.

I want to thank Peter for that James Macgregor bit which is juicy, agreeable, and eminently useful when broken into chunks and dropped into discussion threads. Magda, I haven't even gotten to your stuff yet, but I promise I will. Right now, I'm still working through the "198", and I will have to do the listening at a time when audio playback conditions in my domestic arena are more suitable.

Here's a quick question for Bruce: Are all those Force More Powerful books, DVD's and PC games still available? Those tools look mighty intriguing, being an old game-player and game-designer myself. I sense what you were talking about in terms of their potential as group training tools, certainly in a face-to-face setting or a seminar/colloquium but perhaps even online.

I'd like to spend some time talking about this in depth: "Most of the people we will encounter have to learn that they are oppressed, or have to be made to understand that oppression is coming." How? Where? With what tools (written, videos, audio, podcasts, pre-packaged documentaries -- there's a good library here -- )? Some of this is obvious: I guess what I'm asking for is some better understanding of how to approach and enroll someone into that discussion when they clearly are disinterested, unmotivated, zoned out, comfortable amongst the herd, or -- egads! -- involved or complicit. Well, those last ones are hopeless. If we are the wolves, how do we identify those lambs who are open to learning more? How do and where do we drop hints, tags, leaflets, or whatever?

Okay, so moving on... What struck me from within the list of "the 198" that we could work on easily even in a displaced global asynchronous discussion is the development of slogans, caricatures and symbols. How and where they would be used in fairly obvious, but "coining" a powerful phrase can work. Some call it memetic engineering. I'd rather focus on giving someone a good transformative or eye-opening experience; perhaps that's what those Force More Powerful tools do.

Street and guerrilla theater (43 and 178) always appealed to me as being effective. The use of swarming, particularly for items 144, 1622 ff, 175-176 seem to be pretty powerful if well-aimed. Social non-cooperation, withdrawal, renunciation and withholding allegiance are where some are now, but we need to sell more of it.

We clearly have some people who can and like to write, so perhaps we ought to fashion some plays, scripts or videos of mock trials or reverse trials, something easily done in an asynchronous digital world.

I'd envisioned briefly a Post-It notes campaign since apparently the FBI has been ordering up surveillance of journalists with Post-It note requests; maybe we ought to devise a Post-It note campaign to ask for what we want.

The delivery of symbolic objects seems to offer up a lot of promise; someone has already envisioned a campaign involving children, diapers and the Pentagon; it'd probably be more legal if the diapers weren't pre-loaded.

On that note, I'll leave you with these two quotes that have been sitting on my desk, written down from a source at least momentarily forgotten, although my brain is telling me it's connected to a movie made in the Derrick Jensen milieu....

"We've been too busy pretending that the system will willingly undergo some kind of magical transformation....

The task of the activist is not to navigate the systems of power with as much personal integrity as possible; the task is to dismantle the system."

Or at least slow it down and make it think and feel and acknowledge humanity, soul, sanity et al.

More later...

I think the two persons who have guided me most in how to form a movement are Martin Luther King Jr. and Howard Zinn. There have been others, but listen to the talks of these two men and you will soon see how it can be done. It doesn't take long.

No, you are correct, the 'system' will never correct itself.....in its own mind it is exactly where it wants to be and intends to stay there - and in control. Any changes it makes from here on out will only be to the right and with more control, less freedom, more serfdom, etc.

What is amazing to me is that all the information needed to make an informed and 'aha' picture of what has really been happening and is happening now is in books and on the internet. More than can be read - yet most don't find it or can't trust themselves to decide if it is worthy of consideration [of course there are also much propaganda for the system and just pain insane websites and books too]. People have lost the ability to IMO think 'naturally', along the lines of natural philosophy, the wisdom that has guided all good peoples for tens of thousands of years - no hundreds of thousands. They mostly have become sheep, trusting in those who guide them this way and that, or fearful to think or act for themselves. They don't want trouble and they don't want to make waves....while they are dealt more trouble than they can take and nearly drowning in other's 'waves'.

It takes some anger at the injustice and then funneling it in productive ways. I think that kind of righteous anger is infective and spreads naturally. It did in all the great movements the People have won. But the Oligarchy always kills the leaders, infiltrates the groups and tries to co-opt them to make them powerless, or gives some concessions - only to withdraw them over some fake emergency imperative (war, terrorism, drugs, criminality...etc.).

We BEAT them over Vietnam. The Civil Rights Movement WON a lot of turf. Once Unions had made some progress. And on and on...but now there is a period I feel they [THEY] are taking it all back....what few concessions they were forced into are all to disappear soon - most have already been. Yet the average sheeple doesn't notice...or do they?....I think they do!...yet they are misdirected as by a magician to blame the wrong source of their problems. Its the terrorists. Its the inner city drug addicts. NO! Its the bankers and the policy makers, the engines of war and hate, and the destruction built into the system and the big corporations! In America, people are even taught to blame themselves. (If you're not rich and happy - it is your own damn fault!)

We are, IMO, at a turning point in history. Not the first, but perhaps nearly the last if we don't make the correct choices.

As to Macgregor's article, I think it has much merit, but he oversimplifies a bit and leaves out some of the forces and players - but it is only a short piece and generally is good for a wake-up call. Read Zinn. Read Bill Blum. Look at that list of traits of fascist nations and tell me it doesn't start to look like things today. Read Klein's End of America. Read Jensen. Listen to MLK.

[Peter Lemkin]

HOWARD ZINN: Well, we thought bombing missions were over. The war was about to come to an end. This was in April of 1945, and remember the war ended in early May 1945. This was a few weeks before the war was going to be over, and everybody knew it was going to be over, and our armies were past France into Germany, but there was a little pocket of German soldiers hanging around this little town of Royan on the Atlantic coast of France, and the Air Force decided to bomb them. Twelve hundred heavy bombers, and I was in one of them, flew over this little town of Royan and dropped napalm—first use of napalm in the European theater.

And we don’t know how many people were killed or how many people were terribly burned as a result of what we did. But I did it like most soldiers do, unthinkingly, mechanically, thinking we’re on the right side, they’re on the wrong side, and therefore we can do whatever we want, and it’s OK. And only afterward, only really after the war when I was reading about Hiroshima from John Hersey and reading the stories of the survivors of Hiroshima and what they went through, only then did I begin to think about the human effects of bombing. Only then did I begin to think about what it meant to human beings on the ground when bombs were dropped on them, because as a bombardier, I was flying at 30,000 feet, six miles high, couldn’t hear screams, couldn’t see blood. And this is modern warfare.

In modern warfare, soldiers fire, they drop bombs, and they have no notion, really, of what is happening to the human beings that they’re firing on. Everything is done at a distance. This enables terrible atrocities to take place. And I think, reflecting back on that bombing raid and thinking of that in Hiroshima and all the other raids on civilian cities and the killing of huge numbers of civilians in German and Japanese cities, the killing of 100,000 people in Tokyo in one night of fire-bombing, all of that made me realize war, even so-called good wars against fascism like World War II, wars don’t solve any fundamental problems, and they always poison everybody on both sides. They poison the minds and souls of everybody on both sides. We’re seeing that now in Iraq, where the minds of our soldiers are being poisoned by being an occupying army in a land where they are not wanted. And the results are terrible.

HOWARD ZINN: No matter what we’re told, no matter what tyrant exists, what border has been crossed, what aggression has taken place, it’s not that we’re going to be passive in the face of tyranny or aggression, no, but we’ll find ways other than war to deal with whatever problems we have, because war is inevitably—inevitably—the indiscriminant massive killing of huge numbers of people. And children are a good part of those people. Every war is a war against children.

So it’s not just getting rid of Saddam Hussein, if we think about it. Well, we got rid of Saddam Hussein. In the course of it, we killed huge numbers of people who had been victims of Saddam Hussein. When you fight a war against a tyrant, who do you kill? You kill the victims of the tyrant. Anyway, all this—all this was simply to make us think again about war and to think, you know, we’re at war now, right? In Iraq, in Afghanistan and sort of in Pakistan, since we’re sending rockets over there and killing innocent people in Pakistan. And so, we should not accept that.


We should look for a peace movement to join. Really, look for some peace organization to join. It will look small at first, and pitiful and helpless, but that’s how movements start. That’s how the movement against the Vietnam War started. It started with handfuls of people who thought they were helpless, thought they were powerless. But remember, this power of the people on top depends on the obedience of the people below. When people stop obeying, they have no power. When workers go on strike, huge corporations lose their power. When consumers boycott, huge business establishments have to give in. When soldiers refuse to fight, as so many soldiers did in Vietnam, so many deserters, so many fraggings, acts of violence by enlisted men against officers in Vietnam, B-52 pilots refusing to fly bombing missions anymore, war can’t go on. When enough soldiers refuse, the government has to decide we can’t continue. So, yes, people have the power. If they begin to organize, if they protest, if they create a strong enough movement, they can change things. That’s all I want to say. Thank you.

A lot of people are troubled by civil disobedience. As soon as you talk about committing civil disobedience, they get a little upset. That’s exactly the purpose of civil disobedience: to upset people, to trouble them, to disturb them. We who commit civil disobedience are disturbed, too, and we mean to disturb those who are in charge of the war.

Yeah, it’s true that people have asked that question again and again. You know, should we tell kids that Columbus, whom they have been told was a great hero, that Columbus mutilated Indians and kidnapped them and killed them in pursuit of gold? Should we tell people that Theodore Roosevelt, who is held up as one of our great presidents, was really a warmonger who loved military exploits and who congratulated an American general who committed a massacre in the Philippines? Should we tell young people that?


And I think the answer is: we should be honest with young people; we should not deceive them. We should be honest about the history of our country. And we should be not only taking down the traditional heroes like Andrew Jackson and Theodore Roosevelt, but we should be giving young people an alternate set of heroes.


Instead of Theodore Roosevelt, tell them about Mark Twain. Mark Twain—well, Mark Twain, everybody learns about as the author of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, but when we go to school, we don’t learn about Mark Twain as the vice president of the Anti-Imperialist League. We aren’t told that Mark Twain denounced Theodore Roosevelt for approving this massacre in the Philippines. No.


We want to give young people ideal figures like Helen Keller. And I remember learning about Helen Keller. Everybody learns about Helen Keller, you know, a disabled person who overcame her handicaps and became famous. But people don’t learn in school and young people don’t learn in school what we want them to learn when we do books like A Young People’s History of the United States, that Helen Keller was a socialist. She was a labor organizer. She refused to cross a picket line that was picketing a theater showing a play about her.


And so, there are these alternate heroes in American history. There’s Fannie Lou Hamer and Bob Moses. They’re the heroes of the civil rights movement. There are a lot of people who are obscure, who are not known. We have in this Young People’s History, we have a young hero who was sitting on the bus in Montgomery, Alabama, refused to leave the front of the bus. And that was before Rosa Parks. I mean, Rosa Parks is justifiably famous for refusing to leave her seat, and she got arrested, and that was the beginning of the Montgomery Bus Boycott and really the beginning of a great movement in the South. But this fifteen-year-old girl did it first. And so, we have a lot of—we are trying to bring a lot of these obscure people back into the forefront of our attention and inspire young people to say, “This is the way to live.”
--------------------------
"Beyond Vietnam"
Address delivered to the Clergy and Laymen
Concerned about Vietnam, at Riverside Church
4 April 1967
New York City





Mr. Chairman, ladies and gentlemen, I need not pause to say how very delighted I am to be here tonight, and how very delighted I am to see you expressing your concern about the issues that will be discussed tonight by turning out in such large numbers. I also want to say that I consider it a great honor to share this program with Dr. Bennett, Dr. Commager, and Rabbi Heschel, some of the distinguished leaders and personalities of our nation. And of course it's always good to come back to Riverside Church. Over the last eight years, I have had the privilege of preaching here almost every year in that period, and it is always a rich and rewarding experience to come to this great church and this great pulpit.

I come to this magnificent house of worship tonight because my conscience leaves me no other choice. I join you in this meeting because I am in deepest agreement with the aims and work of the organization which has brought us together, Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Vietnam. The recent statements of your executive committee are the sentiments of my own heart, and I found myself in full accord when I read its opening lines: "A time comes when silence is betrayal." That time has come for us in relation to Vietnam.

The truth of these words is beyond doubt, but the mission to which they call us is a most difficult one. Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth, men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government's policy, especially in time of war. Nor does the human spirit move without great difficulty against all the apathy of conformist thought within one's own bosom and in the surrounding world. Moreover, when the issues at hand seem as perplexing as they often do in the case of this dreadful conflict, we are always on the verge of being mesmerized by uncertainty. But we must move on.

Some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak. And we must rejoice as well, for surely this is the first time in our nation's history that a significant number of its religious leaders have chosen to move beyond the prophesying of smooth patriotism to the high grounds of a firm dissent based upon the mandates of conscience and the reading of history. Perhaps a new spirit is rising among us. If it is, let us trace its movement, and pray that our own inner being may be sensitive to its guidance. For we are deeply in need of a new way beyond the darkness that seems so close around us.

Over the past two years, as I have moved to break the betrayal of my own silences and to speak from the burnings of my own heart, as I have called for radical departures from the destruction of Vietnam, many persons have questioned me about the wisdom of my path. At the heart of their concerns, this query has often loomed large and loud: "Why are you speaking about the war, Dr. King? Why are you joining the voices of dissent?" "Peace and civil rights don't mix," they say. "Aren't you hurting the cause of your people?" they ask. And when I hear them, though I often understand the source of their concern, I am nevertheless greatly saddened, for such questions mean that the inquirers have not really known me, my commitment, or my calling. Indeed, their questions suggest that they do not know the world in which they live. In the light of such tragic misunderstanding, I deem it of signal importance to try to state clearly, and I trust concisely, why I believe that the path from Dexter Avenue Baptist Church -- the church in Montgomery, Alabama, where I began my pastorate -- leads clearly to this sanctuary tonight.

I come to this platform tonight to make a passionate plea to my beloved nation. This speech is not addressed to Hanoi or to the National Liberation Front. It is not addressed to China or to Russia. Nor is it an attempt to overlook the ambiguity of the total situation and the need for a collective solution to the tragedy of Vietnam. Neither is it an attempt to make North Vietnam or the National Liberation Front paragons of virtue, nor to overlook the role they must play in the successful resolution of the problem. While they both may have justifiable reasons to be suspicious of the good faith of the United States, life and history give eloquent testimony to the fact that conflicts are never resolved without trustful give and take on both sides. Tonight, however, I wish not to speak with Hanoi and the National Liberation Front, but rather to my fellow Americans.

Since I am a preacher by calling, I suppose it is not surprising that I have seven major reasons for bringing Vietnam into the field of my moral vision. There is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I and others have been waging in America. A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor, both black and white, through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam, and I watched this program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war. And I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic, destructive suction tube. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.

Perhaps a more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population. We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem. So we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. So we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would hardly live on the same block in Chicago. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.

My third reason moves to an even deeper level of awareness, for it grows out of my experience in the ghettos of the North over the last three years, especially the last three summers. As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they asked, and rightly so, "What about Vietnam?" They asked if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.

For those who ask the question, "Aren't you a civil rights leader?" and thereby mean to exclude me from the movement for peace, I have this further answer. In 1957, when a group of us formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, we chose as our motto: "To save the soul of America." We were convinced that we could not limit our vision to certain rights for black people, but instead affirmed the conviction that America would never be free or saved from itself until the descendants of its slaves were loosed completely from the shackles they still wear. In a way we were agreeing with Langston Hughes, that black bard of Harlem, who had written earlier:

O, yes, I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath --
America will be!

Now it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war. If America's soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read "Vietnam." It can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of men the world over. So it is that those of us who are yet determined that "America will be" are led down the path of protest and dissent, working for the health of our land.

As if the weight of such a commitment to the life and health of America were not enough, another burden of responsibility was placed upon me in 1954.* And I cannot forget that the Nobel Peace Prize was also a commission, a commission to work harder than I had ever worked before for the brotherhood of man. This is a calling that takes me beyond national allegiances.

But even if it were not present, I would yet have to live with the meaning of my commitment to the ministry of Jesus Christ. To me, the relationship of this ministry to the making of peace is so obvious that I sometimes marvel at those who ask me why I am speaking against the war. Could it be that they do not know that the Good News was meant for all men -- for communist and capitalist, for their children and ours, for black and for white, for revolutionary and conservative? Have they forgotten that my ministry is in obedience to the one who loved his enemies so fully that he died for them? What then can I say to the Vietcong or to Castro or to Mao as a faithful minister of this one? Can I threaten them with death or must I not share with them my life?

Finally, as I try to explain for you and for myself the road that leads from Montgomery to this place, I would have offered all that was most valid if I simply said that I must be true to my conviction that I share with all men the calling to be a son of the living God. Beyond the calling of race or nation or creed is this vocation of sonship and brotherhood. Because I believe that the Father is deeply concerned, especially for His suffering and helpless and outcast children, I come tonight to speak for them. This I believe to be the privilege and the burden of all of us who deem ourselves bound by allegiances and loyalties which are broader and deeper than nationalism and which go beyond our nation's self-defined goals and positions. We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for the victims of our nation, for those it calls "enemy," for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers.

And as I ponder the madness of Vietnam and search within myself for ways to understand and respond in compassion, my mind goes constantly to the people of that peninsula. I speak now not of the soldiers of each side, not of the ideologies of the Liberation Front, not of the junta in Saigon, but simply of the people who have been living under the curse of war for almost three continuous decades now. I think of them, too, because it is clear to me that there will be no meaningful solution there until some attempt is made to know them and hear their broken cries.

They must see Americans as strange liberators. The Vietnamese people proclaimed their own independence in 1954 -- in 1945 rather -- after a combined French and Japanese occupation and before the communist revolution in China. They were led by Ho Chi Minh. Even though they quoted the American Declaration of Independence in their own document of freedom, we refused to recognize them. Instead, we decided to support France in its reconquest of her former colony. Our government felt then that the Vietnamese people were not ready for independence, and we again fell victim to the deadly Western arrogance that has poisoned the international atmosphere for so long. With that tragic decision we rejected a revolutionary government seeking self-determination and a government that had been established not by China -- for whom the Vietnamese have no great love -- but by clearly indigenous forces that included some communists. For the peasants this new government meant real land reform, one of the most important needs in their lives.

For nine years following 1945 we denied the people of Vietnam the right of independence. For nine years we vigorously supported the French in their abortive effort to recolonize Vietnam. Before the end of the war we were meeting eighty percent of the French war costs. Even before the French were defeated at Dien Bien Phu, they began to despair of their reckless action, but we did not. We encouraged them with our huge financial and military supplies to continue the war even after they had lost the will. Soon we would be paying almost the full costs of this tragic attempt at recolonization.

After the French were defeated, it looked as if independence and land reform would come again through the Geneva Agreement. But instead there came the United States, determined that Ho should not unify the temporarily divided nation, and the peasants watched again as we supported one of the most vicious modern dictators, our chosen man, Premier Diem. The peasants watched and cringed as Diem ruthlessly rooted out all opposition, supported their extortionist landlords, and refused even to discuss reunification with the North. The peasants watched as all of this was presided over by United States influence and then by increasing numbers of United States troops who came to help quell the insurgency that Diem's methods had aroused. When Diem was overthrown they may have been happy, but the long line of military dictators seemed to offer no real change, especially in terms of their need for land and peace.

The only change came from America as we increased our troop commitments in support of governments which were singularly corrupt, inept, and without popular support. All the while the people read our leaflets and received the regular promises of peace and democracy and land reform. Now they languish under our bombs and consider us, not their fellow Vietnamese, the real enemy. They move sadly and apathetically as we herd them off the land of their fathers into concentration camps where minimal social needs are rarely met. They know they must move on or be destroyed by our bombs.

So they go, primarily women and children and the aged. They watch as we poison their water, as we kill a million acres of their crops. They must weep as the bulldozers roar through their areas preparing to destroy the precious trees. They wander into the hospitals with at least twenty casualties from American firepower for one Vietcong-inflicted injury. So far we may have killed a million of them, mostly children. They wander into the towns and see thousands of the children, homeless, without clothes, running in packs on the streets like animals. They see the children degraded by our soldiers as they beg for food. They see the children selling their sisters to our soldiers, soliciting for their mothers.

What do the peasants think as we ally ourselves with the landlords and as we refuse to put any action into our many words concerning land reform? What do they think as we test out our latest weapons on them, just as the Germans tested out new medicine and new tortures in the concentration camps of Europe? Where are the roots of the independent Vietnam we claim to be building? Is it among these voiceless ones?

We have destroyed their two most cherished institutions: the family and the village. We have destroyed their land and their crops. We have cooperated in the crushing of the nation's only noncommunist revolutionary political force, the unified Buddhist Church. We have supported the enemies of the peasants of Saigon. We have corrupted their women and children and killed their men.

Now there is little left to build on, save bitterness. Soon the only solid physical foundations remaining will be found at our military bases and in the concrete of the concentration camps we call "fortified hamlets." The peasants may well wonder if we plan to build our new Vietnam on such grounds as these. Could we blame them for such thoughts? We must speak for them and raise the questions they cannot raise. These, too, are our brothers.

Perhaps a more difficult but no less necessary task is to speak for those who have been designated as our enemies. What of the National Liberation Front, that strangely anonymous group we call "VC" or "communists"? What must they think of the United States of America when they realize that we permitted the repression and cruelty of Diem, which helped to bring them into being as a resistance group in the South? What do they think of our condoning the violence which led to their own taking up of arms? How can they believe in our integrity when now we speak of "aggression from the North" as if there were nothing more essential to the war? How can they trust us when now we charge them with violence after the murderous reign of Diem and charge them with violence while we pour every new weapon of death into their land? Surely we must understand their feelings, even if we do not condone their actions. Surely we must see that the men we supported pressed them to their violence. Surely we must see that our own computerized plans of destruction simply dwarf their greatest acts.

How do they judge us when our officials know that their membership is less than twenty-five percent communist, and yet insist on giving them the blanket name? What must they be thinking when they know that we are aware of their control of major sections of Vietnam, and yet we appear ready to allow national elections in which this highly organized political parallel government will not have a part? They ask how we can speak of free elections when the Saigon press is censored and controlled by the military junta. And they are surely right to wonder what kind of new government we plan to help form without them, the only party in real touch with the peasants. They question our political goals and they deny the reality of a peace settlement from which they will be excluded. Their questions are frighteningly relevant. Is our nation planning to build on political myth again, and then shore it up upon the power of a new violence?

Here is the true meaning and value of compassion and nonviolence, when it helps us to see the enemy's point of view, to hear his questions, to know his assessment of ourselves. For from his view we may indeed see the basic weaknesses of our own condition, and if we are mature, we may learn and grow and profit from the wisdom of the brothers who are called the opposition.

So, too, with Hanoi. In the North, where our bombs now pummel the land, and our mines endanger the waterways, we are met by a deep but understandable mistrust. To speak for them is to explain this lack of confidence in Western words, and especially their distrust of American intentions now. In Hanoi are the men who led the nation to independence against the Japanese and the French, the men who sought membership in the French Commonwealth and were betrayed by the weakness of Paris and the willfulness of the colonial armies. It was they who led a second struggle against French domination at tremendous costs, and then were persuaded to give up the land they controlled between the thirteenth and seventeenth parallel as a temporary measure at Geneva. After 1954 they watched us conspire with Diem to prevent elections which could have surely brought Ho Chi Minh to power over a united Vietnam, and they realized they had been betrayed again. When we ask why they do not leap to negotiate, these things must be remembered.

Also, it must be clear that the leaders of Hanoi considered the presence of American troops in support of the Diem regime to have been the initial military breach of the Geneva Agreement concerning foreign troops. They remind us that they did not begin to send troops in large numbers and even supplies into the South until American forces had moved into the tens of thousands.

Hanoi remembers how our leaders refused to tell us the truth about the earlier North Vietnamese overtures for peace, how the president claimed that none existed when they had clearly been made. Ho Chi Minh has watched as America has spoken of peace and built up its forces, and now he has surely heard the increasing international rumors of American plans for an invasion of the North. He knows the bombing and shelling and mining we are doing are part of traditional pre-invasion strategy. Perhaps only his sense of humor and of irony can save him when he hears the most powerful nation of the world speaking of aggression as it drops thousands of bombs on a poor, weak nation more than eight hundred, or rather, eight thousand miles away from its shores.

At this point I should make it clear that while I have tried in these last few minutes to give a voice to the voiceless in Vietnam and to understand the arguments of those who are called "enemy," I am as deeply concerned about our own troops there as anything else. For it occurs to me that what we are submitting them to in Vietnam is not simply the brutalizing process that goes on in any war where armies face each other and seek to destroy. We are adding cynicism to the process of death, for they must know after a short period there that none of the things we claim to be fighting for are really involved. Before long they must know that their government has sent them into a struggle among Vietnamese, and the more sophisticated surely realize that we are on the side of the wealthy, and the secure, while we create a hell for the poor.

Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. I speak for the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home, and dealt death and corruption in Vietnam. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as one who loves America, to the leaders of our own nation: The great initiative in this war is ours; the initiative to stop it must be ours.

This is the message of the great Buddhist leaders of Vietnam. Recently one of them wrote these words, and I quote:

Each day the war goes on the hatred increases in the hearts of the Vietnamese and in the hearts of those of humanitarian instinct. The Americans are forcing even their friends into becoming their enemies. It is curious that the Americans, who calculate so carefully on the possibilities of military victory, do not realize that in the process they are incurring deep psychological and political defeat. The image of America will never again be the image of revolution, freedom, and democracy, but the image of violence and militarism.

Unquote.

If we continue, there will be no doubt in my mind and in the mind of the world that we have no honorable intentions in Vietnam. If we do not stop our war against the people of Vietnam immediately, the world will be left with no other alternative than to see this as some horrible, clumsy, and deadly game we have decided to play. The world now demands a maturity of America that we may not be able to achieve. It demands that we admit that we have been wrong from the beginning of our adventure in Vietnam, that we have been detrimental to the life of the Vietnamese people. The situation is one in which we must be ready to turn sharply from our present ways. In order to atone for our sins and errors in Vietnam, we should take the initiative in bringing a halt to this tragic war.

I would like to suggest five concrete things that our government should do immediately to begin the long and difficult process of extricating ourselves from this nightmarish conflict:
Number one: End all bombing in North and South Vietnam.

Number two: Declare a unilateral cease-fire in the hope that such action will create the atmosphere for negotiation.

Three: Take immediate steps to prevent other battlegrounds in Southeast Asia by curtailing our military buildup in Thailand and our interference in Laos.

Four: Realistically accept the fact that the National Liberation Front has substantial support in South Vietnam and must thereby play a role in any meaningful negotiations and any future Vietnam government.

Five: Set a date that we will remove all foreign troops from Vietnam in accordance with the 1954 Geneva Agreement. [sustained applause]

Part of our ongoing [applause continues], part of our ongoing commitment might well express itself in an offer to grant asylum to any Vietnamese who fears for his life under a new regime which included the Liberation Front. Then we must make what reparations we can for the damage we have done. We must provide the medical aid that is badly needed, making it available in this country if necessary. Meanwhile [applause], meanwhile, we in the churches and synagogues have a continuing task while we urge our government to disengage itself from a disgraceful commitment. We must continue to raise our voices and our lives if our nation persists in its perverse ways in Vietnam. We must be prepared to match actions with words by seeking out every creative method of protest possible.

As we counsel young men concerning military service, we must clarify for them our nation's role in Vietnam and challenge them with the alternative of conscientious objection. [sustained applause] I am pleased to say that this is a path now chosen by more than seventy students at my own alma mater, Morehouse College, and I recommend it to all who find the American course in Vietnam a dishonorable and unjust one. [applause] Moreover, I would encourage all ministers of draft age to give up their ministerial exemptions and seek status as conscientious objectors. [applause] These are the times for real choices and not false ones. We are at the moment when our lives must be placed on the line if our nation is to survive its own folly. Every man of humane convictions must decide on the protest that best suits his convictions, but we must all protest.

Now there is something seductively tempting about stopping there and sending us all off on what in some circles has become a popular crusade against the war in Vietnam. I say we must enter that struggle, but I wish to go on now to say something even more disturbing.

The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit, and if we ignore this sobering reality [applause], and if we ignore this sobering reality, we will find ourselves organizing "clergy and laymen concerned" committees for the next generation. They will be concerned about Guatemala and Peru. They will be concerned about Thailand and Cambodia. They will be concerned about Mozambique and South Africa. We will be marching for these and a dozen other names and attending rallies without end unless there is a significant and profound change in American life and policy. [sustained applause] So such thoughts take us beyond Vietnam, but not beyond our calling as sons of the living God.

In 1957 a sensitive American official overseas said that it seemed to him that our nation was on the wrong side of a world revolution. During the past ten years we have seen emerge a pattern of suppression which has now justified the presence of U.S. military advisors in Venezuela. This need to maintain social stability for our investments accounts for the counterrevolutionary action of American forces in Guatemala. It tells why American helicopters are being used against guerrillas in Cambodia and why American napalm and Green Beret forces have already been active against rebels in Peru.

It is with such activity in mind that the words of the late John F. Kennedy come back to haunt us. Five years ago he said, "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." [applause] Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken, the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investments. I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin [applause], we must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life's roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. [applause]

A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say, "This is not just." It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of South America and say, "This is not just." The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just.

A true revolution of values will lay hand on the world order and say of war, "This way of settling differences is not just." This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death. [sustained applause]

America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing except a tragic death wish to prevent us from reordering our priorities so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war. There is nothing to keep us from molding a recalcitrant status quo with bruised hands until we have fashioned it into a brotherhood.

This kind of positive revolution of values is our best defense against communism. [applause] War is not the answer. Communism will never be defeated by the use of atomic bombs or nuclear weapons. Let us not join those who shout war and, through their misguided passions, urge the United States to relinquish its participation in the United Nations. These are days which demand wise restraint and calm reasonableness. We must not engage in a negative anticommunism, but rather in a positive thrust for democracy [applause], realizing that our greatest defense against communism is to take offensive action in behalf of justice. We must with positive action seek to remove those conditions of poverty, insecurity, and injustice, which are the fertile soil in which the seed of communism grows and develops.

These are revolutionary times. All over the globe men are revolting against old systems of exploitation and oppression, and out of the wounds of a frail world, new systems of justice and equality are being born. The shirtless and barefoot people of the land are rising up as never before. The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light. We in the West must support these revolutions.

It is a sad fact that because of comfort, complacency, a morbid fear of communism, and our proneness to adjust to injustice, the Western nations that initiated so much of the revolutionary spirit of the modern world have now become the arch antirevolutionaries. This has driven many to feel that only Marxism has a revolutionary spirit. Therefore, communism is a judgment against our failure to make democracy real and follow through on the revolutions that we initiated. Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism. With this powerful commitment we shall boldly challenge the status quo and unjust mores, and thereby speed the day when "every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low [Audience:] (Yes); the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain."

A genuine revolution of values means in the final analysis that our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Every nation must now develop an overriding loyalty to mankind as a whole in order to preserve the best in their individual societies.

This call for a worldwide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one's tribe, race, class, and nation is in reality a call for an all-embracing and unconditional love for all mankind. This oft misunderstood, this oft misinterpreted concept, so readily dismissed by the Nietzsches of the world as a weak and cowardly force, has now become an absolute necessity for the survival of man. When I speak of love I am not speaking of some sentimental and weak response. I'm not speaking of that force which is just emotional bosh. I am speaking of that force which all of the great religions have seen as the supreme unifying principle of life. Love is somehow the key that unlocks the door which leads to ultimate reality. This Hindu-Muslim-Christian-Jewish-Buddhist belief about ultimate reality is beautifully summed up in the first epistle of Saint John: "Let us love one another (Yes), for love is God. (Yes) And every one that loveth is born of God and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God, for God is love. . . . If we love one another, God dwelleth in us and his love is perfected in us." Let us hope that this spirit will become the order of the day.

We can no longer afford to worship the god of hate or bow before the altar of retaliation. The oceans of history are made turbulent by the ever-rising tides of hate. History is cluttered with the wreckage of nations and individuals that pursued this self-defeating path of hate. As Arnold Toynbee says: "Love is the ultimate force that makes for the saving choice of life and good against the damning choice of death and evil. Therefore the first hope in our inventory must be the hope that love is going to have the last word." Unquote.

We are now faced with the fact, my friends, that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked, and dejected with a lost opportunity. The tide in the affairs of men does not remain at flood -- it ebbs. We may cry out desperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is adamant to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residues of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words, "Too late." There is an invisible book of life that faithfully records our vigilance or our neglect. Omar Khayyam is right: "The moving finger writes, and having writ moves on."

We still have a choice today: nonviolent coexistence or violent coannihilation. We must move past indecision to action. We must find new ways to speak for peace in Vietnam and justice throughout the developing world, a world that borders on our doors. If we do not act, we shall surely be dragged down the long, dark, and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight.

Now let us begin. Now let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter, but beautiful, struggle for a new world. This is the calling of the sons of God, and our brothers wait eagerly for our response. Shall we say the odds are too great? Shall we tell them the struggle is too hard? Will our message be that the forces of American life militate against their arrival as full men, and we send our deepest regrets? Or will there be another message -- of longing, of hope, of solidarity with their yearnings, of commitment to their cause, whatever the cost? The choice is ours, and though we might prefer it otherwise, we must choose in this crucial moment of human history.

As that noble bard of yesterday, James Russell Lowell, eloquently stated:
Once to every man and nation comes a moment to decide,
In the strife of Truth and Falsehood, for the good or evil side;
Some great cause, God's new Messiah offering each the bloom or blight,
And the choice goes by forever `twixt that darkness and that light.
Though the cause of evil prosper, yet `tis truth alone is strong
Though her portions be the scaffold, and upon the throne be wrong
Yet that scaffold sways the future, and behind the dim unknown
Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own.

And if we will only make the right choice, we will be able to transform this pending cosmic elegy into a creative psalm of peace. If we will make the right choice, we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our world into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. If we will but make the right choice, we will be able to speed up the day, all over America and all over the world, when justice will roll down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream. [sustained applause]

*King says "1954," but most likely means 1964, the year he received the Nobel Peace Prize.

[Peter Lemkin]

I'm quite sure MLK signed his own death warrant with the love and truth in the speech above. It was the one move too far for the Oligarchy and their profits from war and hate. They killed the dreamer. But not the Dream. Dream.

[Bruce Clemens]

Are all those Force More Powerful books, DVD's and PC games still available? Those tools look mighty intriguing, being an old game-player and game-designer myself. I sense what you were talking about in terms of their potential as group training tools, certainly in a face-to-face setting or a seminar/colloquium but perhaps even online.

Yes.

[url=http://www.aforcemorepowerful.org/images/game170.jpg][/url]

http://www.aforcemorepowerful.org/

The game is very good, especially for being at this point somewhat dated. Unfortunately it is highly cerebrial, a very good simulation of how activist operations under a tyrannical regime can be done and the challenges they face. It has little visual action. It is definately not a first-person-shooter type game and therefore has, in my opinion, little appeal to someone who isn't actively using it to train themselves.

However to an organized group willing to put in the time the game is a valuable tool of training.

What would be much better, in my opinion, to attract newcomers to the cause would be rich on-line environment like Second-Life where people can adopt avatars and interact with others in real time, using a USA of 2030 (complete with everything we envision it to be) as a basis in which to survive. The game would require a successful player to overcome the tyranny using similar tools and techniques taught in A Force More Powerful and could also include the same hints of truth about all the things we deal with every day on this forum. Peter's "red-pill truth" would slowly be unveiled to the participant over time.

Wish I had the money and connections to develop something like that.

The other items at the web site are also excellent, especially the documentaries.

[Bruce Clemens]

I'd like to spend some time talking about this in depth: "Most of the people we will encounter have to learn that they are oppressed, or have to be made to understand that oppression is coming." How? Where? With what tools (written, videos, audio, podcasts, pre-packaged documentaries -- there's a good library here -- )? Some of this is obvious: I guess what I'm asking for is some better understanding of how to approach and enroll someone into that discussion when they clearly are disinterested, unmotivated, zoned out, comfortable amongst the herd, or -- egads! -- involved or complicit.

I'd like to add an additional category of person, those preemptively in denial. Back when I first discovered the material on Jim Fetzer's great Scholars for 911 Truth site I approached an acquaintance whom I knew had an engineering background and whose intellegence I greatly respect. After we spoke a while about the things that that site brings out so well he got rather quiet and I could see him withdrawing. Then he looked at me and, almost in a whisper said "When I saw those buildings come down I knew it couldn't have been what the government was telling us. It is physically impossible for a black-smoke jet fuel fire to do that...but...I just can't allow myself to go there." His discomfort was palpable. We changed the subject and I have never brought it up with him again. As far as I know, he lives his life today just as if he never understood the truth. You can take some people to the precipice and they just can't look in.

I don't know what it takes to lead someone to their own realization and acceptance that everything they think about their world is upside down. It is a stage by stage process exactly like the five stages of grief. Your whole world paradigm has to die and a new one established.

Again my point about establishing resistance movements in populations who are already firmly repressed- that paradigm switch has already taken place and they are ready to do something.

In our case, I think the most sensible thing would be to strategize with people whose paradigm is already where it needs to be (like we are starting to do here) and try to establish an infrastructure within which to employ tactical moves when "mainstream" people's paradigms are forced to change. If they can't yet see the glaring events of 9/11 (for just one example) as the event it really was, maybe they will change their minds when the camps begin to fill...

[Bruce Clemens]

...could be a useful paradigm-changer. This is the graphic-novel version of Dr. Zinn's excellent history. I found it fun to read and engrossing. Certainly it is of necessity a little less deep and detailed than his scholarly works but I think it becomes very accessible to the average person.
Graphic novels depicting the true events of JFK, 911, etc. might be valuable tools to develop.

I recall as a youth my father (a technical illustrator) in California worked with a gentleman who developed small, cheaply produced comic-book type religious tracts.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_T._Chick



They were very successful and his Spanish versions were extremely popular within the Southern California Hispanic community.

I could see a very useful niche here for truthers...and we may want to seriously consider the growing Hispanic population as a target market for this...they may have an easier time accepting the paradigm of truth albiet may be less powerful in instituting change...

Just brainstorming here.

[Ed Jewett]

[quote=Bruce Clemens][QUOTE]

"I just can't allow myself to go there." ....

You can take some people to the precipice and they just can't look in.

I don't know what it takes to lead someone to their own realization and acceptance that everything they think about their world is upside down. It is a stage by stage process exactly like the five stages of grief. Your whole world paradigm has to die and a new one established.

Again my point about establishing resistance movements in populations who are already firmly repressed- that paradigm switch has already taken place and they are ready to do something.

In our case, I think the most sensible thing would be to strategize with people whose paradigm is already where it needs to be (like we are starting to do here) and try to establish an infrastructure within which to employ tactical moves when "mainstream" people's paradigms are forced to change. [/QUOTE]
Thanks for your many responses and contributions, significant enough that I can't begin to respond in much detail but rich enough so as to provide fuel and fodder for my further outreach and work. I especially like the idea of "technically-illustrated" comic books combined with the idea of plays, scripts, mock trials (or Congressional hearings?) and the like. (There is such a person, a cartoonist, who has collaborated with Jensen.)

Perhaps one of the things we ought to do is, individually or collectively, to post links and invitations to readers and consider inviting, as contributing members to DPF and this discussion, key people from other groups, movements, research, etc.

[Peter Lemkin]

AMY GOODMAN: Howard Zinn is one of this country’s most celebrated historians. His classic work, A People’s History of the United States, changed the way we look at history in America. First published a quarter of a century ago, the book has sold over a million copies and is a phenomenon in the world of publishing, selling more copies each successive year.

After serving as a bombardier pilot in World War II, Howard Zinn went on to become a lifelong dissident and peace activist. He was active in the civil rights movement and many of the struggles for social justice over the past half-century. He taught at Spelman College, the historically black college for women in Atlanta, and was fired for insubordination for standing up for the women.

Howard Zinn has written numerous books. He’s Professor Emeritus at Boston University. He recently spoke at Binghamton University, Upstate New York, a few days after the 2008 presidential election. His speech was called “War and Social Justice.”

HOWARD ZINN: Why is all the political rhetoric limited? Why is the set of solutions given to social and economic issues so cramped and so short of what is needed, so short of what the Universal Declaration of Human Rights demands? And, yes, Obama, who obviously is more attuned to the needs of people than his opponent, you know, Obama, who is more far-sighted, more thoughtful, more imaginative, why has he been limited in what he is saying? Why hasn’t he come out for what is called a single-payer system in healthcare?

Why—you see, you all know what the single-payer system is. It’s a sort of awkward term for it, maybe. It doesn’t explain what it means. But a single-payer health system means—well, it will be sort of run like Social Security. It’ll be a government system. It won’t depend on intermediaries, on middle people, on insurance companies. You won’t have to fill out forms and pay—you know, and figure out whether you have a preexisting medical condition. You won’t have to go through that rigamarole, that rigamarole which has kept 40 million people out of having health insurance. No, something happens, you just go to a doctor, you go to a hospital, you’re taken care of, period. The government will pay for it. Yeah, the government will pay for it. That’s what governments are for.

Governments, you know—they do that for the military. Did you know that? That’s what the military has. The military has free insurance. I was once in the military. I got pneumonia, which is easier to get in the military. I got pneumonia. I didn’t have to fool around with deciding what health plan I’m in and what—you know. No, I was totally taken care of. I didn’t have to think about money. Just—you know, there are a million members of the armed forces who have that. But when you ask that the government do this for everybody else, they cry, “That’s socialism!” Well, if that’s socialism, it must mean socialism is good. You know.

No, I was really gratified when Obama called for “Let’s tax the rich more, and let’s tax the poor and middle class less.” And they said, “That’s socialism.” And I thought, “Whoa! I’m happy to hear that. Finally, socialism is getting a good name.” You know, socialism has been given bad names, you know, Stalin and all those socialists, so-called socialists. They weren’t really socialist, but, you know, they called themselves socialist. But they weren’t really, you see. And so, socialism got a bad name. It used to have a really good name. Here in the United States, the beginning of the twentieth century, before there was a Soviet Union to spoil it, you see, socialism had a good name. Millions of people in the United States read socialist newspapers. They elected socialist members of Congress and socialist members of state legislatures. You know, there were like fourteen socialist chapters in Oklahoma. Really. I mean, you know, socialism—who stood for socialism? Eugene Debs, Helen Keller, Emma Goldman, Clarence Darrow, Jack London, Upton Sinclair. Yeah, socialism had a good name. It needs to be restored.

And so—but Obama, with all of his, well, good will, intelligence, all those qualities that he has, and so on—and, you know, you feel that he has a certain instinct for people in trouble. But still, you know, he wouldn’t come out for a single-payer health system, that is, for what I would call health security, to go along with Social Security, you see, wouldn’t come out for that; wouldn’t come out for the government creating jobs for millions of people, because that’s what really is needed now. You see, when people are—the newspapers this morning report highest unemployment in decades, right? The government needs to create jobs. Private enterprise is not going to create jobs. Private enterprise fails, the so-called free market system fails, fails again and again. When the Depression hit in the 1930s, Roosevelt and the New Deal created jobs for millions of people. And, oh, there were people on the—you know, out there on the fringe who yelled “Socialism!” Didn’t matter. People needed it. If people need something badly, and somebody does something for them, you can throw all the names you want at them, it won’t matter, you see? But that was needed in this campaign. Yes.

Instead of Obama and McCain joining together—I know some of you may be annoyed that I’m being critical of Obama, but that’s my job. You know, I like him. I’m for him. I want him to do well. I’m happy he won. I’m delighted he won. But I’m a citizen. I have to speak my mind. OK? Yeah. And, you know—but when I saw Obama and McCain sort of both together supporting the $700 billion bailout, I thought, “Uh-oh. No, no. Please don’t do that. Please, Obama, step aside from that. Do what—I’m sure something in your instincts must tell you that there’s something wrong with giving $700 billion to the same financial institutions which ruined us, which got us into this mess, something wrong with that, you see.” And it’s not even politically viable. That is, you can’t even say, “Oh, I’m doing it because people will then vote for me.” No. It was very obvious when the $700 billion bailout was announced that the majority of people in the country were opposed to it. Instinctively, they said, “Something is wrong with this. Why give it to them? We need it.”

That’s when the government—you know, Obama should have been saying, “No, let’s take that $700 billion, let’s give it to people who can’t pay their mortgages. Let’s create jobs, you know.” You know, instead of pouring $700 billion into the top and hoping that it will trickle down to the bottom, no, go right to the bottom, where people need it and get—so, yes, that was a disappointment. So, yeah, I’m trying to indicate what we’ll have to do now and to fulfill what Obama himself has promised: change, real change. You can’t have—you can say “change,” but if you keep doing the old policies, it’s not change, right?

So what stands in the way of Obama and the Democratic Party, and what stands in the way of them really going all out for a social and economic program that will fulfill the promise of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights? Well, I can think of two things that stand in the way. Maybe there are more, but I can only think of two things at a time. And, well, one of them is simply the great, powerful economic interests that don’t want real economic change. Really, they don’t. The powerful—I mean, you take in healthcare, there are powerful interests involved in the present healthcare system. People are making lots of money from the healthcare system as it is, making so much money, and that’s why the costs of the healthcare system in the United States are double what the healthcare costs are—the percentage, you know, of money devoted to healthcare—percentage is double, administrative costs in the United States, compared to countries that have the single-payer system, because there are people there who are siphoning off this money, who are making money. You know, they’re health plans. They’re insurance companies. They’re health executives and CEOs, so that there are—yeah, there are interests, economic interests that are in the way of real economic change.

And Obama so far has not challenged those economic interests. Roosevelt did challenge those economic interests, boldly, right frontally. He called them economic royalists. He wasn’t worried that people would say, “Oh, you’re appealing to class conflict,” you know, the kind of thing they pull out all the time, as if there isn’t, hasn’t always been class conflict, just something new, you know. Class conflict. “You’re creating class conflict. We’ve never had class conflict. We’ve always all been one happy family.” You know, no. And so, yeah, there are these interests standing in the way, and, you know, unfortunately, the Democratic Party is tied to many of those interests. Democratic Party is, you know, tied to a lot of corporate interests. I mean, look at the people on Obama’s—the people who are on Obama’s economics team, and they’re Goldman Sachs people, and they’re former—you know, people like that, you know? That’s not—they don’t represent change. They represent the old-style Democratic stay-put leadership that’s not good.

So, the other factor that stands in the way of a real bold economic and social program is the war. The war, the thing that has, you know, a $600 billion military budget. Now, how can you call for the government to take over the healthcare system? How can you call for the government to give jobs to millions of people? How can you do all that? How can you offer free education, free higher education, which is what we should have really? We should have free higher education. Or how can you—you know. No, you know, how can you double teachers’ salaries? How can you do all these things, which will do away with poverty in the United States? It all costs money.

And so, where’s that money going to come from? Well, it can come from two sources. One is the tax structure. And here, Obama [has] been moving in the right direction. When he talked about not giving the rich tax breaks and giving tax breaks to the poor—in the right direction, but not far enough, because the top one percent of—the richest one percent of the country has gained several trillions of dollars in the last twenty, thirty years as a result of the tax system, which has favored them. And, you know, you have a tax system where 200 of the richest corporations pay no taxes. You know that? You can’t do that. You don’t have their accountants. You don’t have their legal teams, and so on and so forth. You don’t have their loopholes.

The war, $600 billion, we need that. We need that money. But in order to say that, in order to say, “Well, one, we’re going to increase taxes on the super rich,” much more than Obama has proposed—and believe me, it won’t make those people poor. They’ll still be rich. They just won’t be super rich. I don’t care if there’s some rich people around. But, you know, no, we don’t need super rich, not when that money is needed to take care of little kids in pre-school, and there’s no money for pre-school. No, we need a radical change in the tax structure, which will immediately free huge amounts of money to do the things that need to be done, and then we have to get the money from the military budget. Well, how do you get money from the military budget? Don’t we need $600 billion for a military budget? Don’t we have to fight two wars? No. We don’t have to fight any wars. You know.

And this is where Obama and the Democratic Party have been hesitant, you know, to talk about. But we’re not hesitant to talk about it. The citizens should not be hesitant to talk about it. If the citizens are hesitant to talk about it, they would just reinforce the Democratic leadership and Obama in their hesitations. No, we have to speak what we believe is the truth. I think the truth is we should not be at war. We should not be at war at all. I mean, these wars are absurd. They’re horrible also. They’re horrible, and they’re absurd. You know, from a human, human point of view, they’re horrible. You know, the deaths and the mangled limbs and the blindness and the three million people in Iraq losing their homes, having to leave their homes, three million people—imagine?—having to look elsewhere to live because of our occupation, because of our war for democracy, our war for liberty, our war for whatever it is we’re supposed to be fighting for.

No, we don’t need—we need a president who will say—yeah, I’m giving advice to Obama. I know he’s listening. But, you know, if enough people speak up, he will listen, right? If enough people speak up, he will listen. You know, there’s much more of a chance of him listening, right, than those other people. They’re not listening. They wouldn’t listen. Obama could possibly listen, if we, all of us—and the thing to say is, we have to change our whole attitude as a nation towards war, militarism, violence. We have to declare that we are not going to engage in aggressive wars. We are going to renounce the Bush Doctrine of preventive war. “Oh, we have to go to”—you know, “We have to go to war on this little pitiful country, because this little pitiful country might someday”—do what? Attack us? I mean, Iraq might attack us? “Well, they’re developing a nuclear weapon”—one, which they may have in five or ten years. That’s what all the experts said, even the experts on the government side. You know, they may develop one nuclear weapon in five—wow! The United States has 10,000 nuclear weapons. Nobody says, “How about us?” you see. But, you know, well, you know all about that. Weapons of mass destruct, etc., etc. No reason for us to wage aggressive wars. We have to renounce war as an instrument of foreign policy.


AMY GOODMAN: That was Howard Zinn. He’s speaking at Binghamton University, Upstate New York. If you’d like a copy of today’s broadcast, you can go to our website at democracynow.org. Back to his speech in a minute.

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AMY GOODMAN: We return now to the legendary historian Howard Zinn. This was his first speech after the 2008 election. He was speaking on November 8th at Binghamton University, Upstate New York. He called his speech “War and Social Justice.”

HOWARD ZINN: A hundred different countries, we have military bases. That doesn’t look like a peace-loving country. And besides—I mean, first of all, of course, it’s very expensive. We save a lot of money. Do we really need those—what do we need those bases for? I can’t figure out what we need those bases for. And, you know, so we have to—yeah, we have to give that up, and we have to declare ourselves a peaceful nation. We will no longer be a military superpower. “Oh, that’s terrible!” There are people who think we must be a military superpower. We don’t have to be a military superpower. We don’t have to be a military power at all, you see? We can be a humanitarian superpower. We can—yeah. We’ll still be powerful. We’ll still be rich. But we can use that power and that wealth to help people all over the world. I mean, instead of sending helicopters to bomb people, send helicopters when they face a hurricane or an earthquake and they desperately need helicopters. You know, you know. So, yeah, there’s a lot of money available once you seriously fundamentally change the foreign policy of the United States.

Now, Obama has been hesitant to do that. And it has something to do with a certain mindset, because it doesn’t have anything to do really with politics, that is, with more votes. I don’t think—do you think most Americans know that we have bases in a hundred countries? I’ll bet you if you took a poll and asked among the American people, “How many countries do you think we have bases in?” “No, I don’t know exactly what the answer is. What I would guess, you know, there’d be like five, ten.” But I think most people would be surprised. In other words, there isn’t a public demanding that we have bases in a hundred countries, so there’s no political advantage to that. Well, of course, there’s economic advantage to corporations that supply those bases and build those bases and make profit from those bases, you know.

But in order to—and I do believe that the American people would welcome a president who said, “We are not going to wage aggressive war anymore.” The American people are not war-minded people. They become war-minded when a president gets up there and creates an atmosphere of hysteria and fear, you know, and says, “Well, we must go to war.” Then people, without thinking about it, without thinking, you know, “Why are we bombing Afghanistan?” “Because, oh, Osama bin Laden is there.” “Uh, where?” Well, they don’t really know, so we’ll bomb the country. You know, if we bomb the country, maybe we’ll get him. You see? Sure, in the process, thousands of Afghans will die, right? But—so, people didn’t have time to stop and think, think. But the American people are not war-minded people. They would welcome, I believe, a turn away from war. So there’s no real political advantage to that.

But it has to do with a mindset, a certain mindset that—well, that a lot of Americans have and that Obama, obviously, and the Democratic leadership, Pelosi and Harry Reid and the others, that they all still have. And when you talk about a mindset that they have, which stands in the way of the declaring against war, you’re reminded that during the campaign—I don’t know if you remember this—that at one point Obama said—and, you know, there were many times in the campaign where he said really good things, if he had only followed up on them, you see, and if he only follows up on them now. But at one point in the campaign, he said, “It’s not just a matter of getting out of Iraq. It’s a matter of changing the mindset that got us into Iraq.” You see? That was a very important statement. Unfortunately, he has not followed through by changing his mindset, you see? He knows somewhere in—well, then he expressed it, that we have to change our mindset, but he hasn’t done it. Why? I don’t know. Is it because there are too many people around him and too many forces around him, and etc., etc., that…? But, no, that mindset is still there. So I want to talk about what that mindset is, what the elements of that mindset are.

And I have to look at my watch, not that it matters, not that I care, but, you know, I feel conscience-stricken over keeping you here just to hear the truth.

Here are some of the elements of the mindset that stand in the way, in the way for Obama, in the way for the Democratic Party, in the way for many Americans, in the way for us. One of the elements in our mindset is the idea, somehow, that the United States is exceptional. In the world of social science, in, you know, that discipline called social science, there’s actually a phrase for it. It’s called American exceptionalism. And what it means is the idea that the United States is unique in the world, you know, that we are different, that we—not just different, we’re better. Right? We are better than other people. You know, our society is better than other societies. This is a very dangerous thing to think. When you become so arrogant that you think you are better and different than other countries in the world, then that gives you a carte blanche to do nasty things. You can do nasty things, because you’re better. You’re justified in doing those things, because, yeah, you’re—we’re different. So we have to divest ourselves of the idea that, you know, we are somehow better and, you know, we are the “City on the Hill,” which is what the first governor of Massachusetts, John Winthrop, said. “We are the”—Reagan also said that. Well, Reagan said lots of things, you know that. But we are—you know, we’re—you know, everybody looks to—no, we’re an empire, like other empires.

There was a British empire. There was a Russian empire. There was a German empire and a Japanese empire and a French and a Belgian empire, the Dutch empire and the Spanish empire. And now there’s the American empire. And our empire—and when we look at those empires, we say, “Oh, imperialism! But our empire, no.” There was one sort of scholar who wrote in the New York Times, he said, “We are an empire lite.” Lite? Tell that to the people of Iraq. Tell that to the people in Afghanistan. You know, we are an empire lite? No, we are heavy.

And yes—well, all you have to do is look at our history, and you’ll see, no, our history does not show a beneficent country doing good all over the world. Our history shows expansion. Our history shows expansion. It shows us—well, yeah, it shows us moving into—doubling our territory with the Louisiana Purchase, which I remember on our school maps looked very benign. “Oh, there’s that, all that empty land, and now we have it.” It wasn’t empty! There were people living there. There were Indian tribes. Hundreds of Indian tribes were living there, you see? And if it’s going to be ours, we’ve got to get rid of them. And we did. No. And then, you know, we instigated a war with Mexico in 1848, 1846 to 1848, and at the end of the war we take almost half of Mexico, you know. And why? Well, we wanted that land. That’s very simple. We want things. There’s a drive of nations that have the power and the capacity to bully other nations, a tendency to expand into those—the areas that those other nations have. We see it all over the world. And the United States has done that again and again. And, you know, then we expanded into the Caribbean. Then we expanded out into the Pacific with Hawaii and the Philippines, and yeah. And, of course, you know, in the twentieth century, expanding our influence in Europe and Asia and now in the Middle East, everywhere. An expansionist country, an imperialist power.

For what? To do good things for these other people? Or is it because we coveted—when I say “we,” I don’t mean to include you and me. But I’ve gotten—you know, they’ve gotten us so used to identifying with the government. You know, like we say “we,” like the janitor at General Motors says “we.” No. No, the CEO of General Motors and the janitor are not “we.”

So, no, we’re not—we’re not—exceptionalism is one part of the mindset we have to get rid of. We have to see ourselves honestly for what we are. We’re an empire like other empires. We’re as aggressive and brutal and violent as the Belgians were in the Congo, as the British were in India, and all these other empires. Yeah, we’re just like them. We have to face it. And when you face that, you sober up a little, and then you don’t think you can just go all over the world and say, “Ah, we’re doing this for liberty and democracy,” because then, if you know your history, you know how many times that was said. “Oh, we’re going into the Philippines to bring civilization and Christianity to the Filipinos.” “We’re going to bring civilization to the Mexicans,” etc., etc. No. You’ll understand that. Yeah, that’s one element in this mindset.

And then, of course, when you say this, when you say these things, when you go back into that history, when you try to give an honest recounting of what we have been—not “we,” really—what the government, the government, has done, our government has done. The people haven’t done it. People—we’re just people. The government does these things, and then they try to include us, involve us in their criminal conspiracy. You know, we didn’t do this. But they’re dragooning us into this.

But when you start criticizing, when you start making an honest assessment of what we have done in the world, they say you’re being unpatriotic. Well, you have to—that’s another part of the mindset you have to get rid of, because if you don’t, then you think you have to wear a flag in your lapel or you think you have to always have American flags around you, and you have to show, by your love for all this meaningless paraphernalia, that you are patriotic. Well, that’s, you know—oh, there, too, an honest presidential candidate would not be afraid to say, “You know, patriotism is not a matter of wearing a flag in your lapel, not a matter of this or not—patriotism is not supporting the government. Patriotism is supporting the principles that the government is supposed to stand for.” You know, so we need to redefine these things which we have come—which have been thrown at us and which we’ve imbibed without thinking, not thinking, “Oh, what really is patriotism?” If we start really thinking about what it is, then we will reject these cries that you’re not patriotic, and we’ll say, “Patriotism is not supporting the government.” When the government does bad things, the most patriotic thing you can do is to criticize the government, because that’s the Declaration of Independence. That’s our basic democratic charter. The Declaration of Independence says governments are set up by the people to—they’re artificial creations. They’re set up to ensure certain rights, the equal right to life, liberty, pursuit of happiness. So when governments become destructive of those ends, the Declaration said, “it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish” the government. That’s our basic democratic charter. People have forgotten what it is. It’s OK to alter or abolish the government when the government violates its trust. And then you are being patriotic. I mean, the government violates its trust, the government is being unpatriotic.

Yeah, so we have to think about these words and phrases that are thrown at us without giving us a time to think. And, you know, we have to redefine these words, like “national security.” What is national security? Lawyers say, “Well, this is for national security.” Well, that takes care of it. No, it doesn’t take care of it. This national security means different things to different people. Ah, there’s some people—for some people, national security means having military bases all over the world. For other people, national security means having healthcare, having jobs. You know, that’s security. And so, yeah, we need to sort of redefine these things.

We need to redefine “terrorism.” Otherwise, the government can throw these words at us: “Oh, we’re fighting against terrorism.” Oh, well, then I guess we have to do this. Wait a while, what do you mean by “terrorism”? Well, we sort of have an idea what terrorism means. Terrorism means that you kill innocent people for some belief that you have. Yeah, you know, sure, blowing up on 9/11, yeah, that was terrorist. But if that’s the definition of “terrorism,” killing innocent people for some belief you have, then war is terrorism.


AMY GOODMAN: Howard Zinn, the legendary historian, author of A People’s History of the United States and much more, he was speaking at Binghamton University. If you’d like a copy of today’s broadcast, you can go to our website at democracynow.org. We’ll come back to the conclusion of his address in a minute.

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AMY GOODMAN: We return to historian Howard Zinn’s first speech after the 2008 election. The author of A People’s History of the United States discusses the election, war, peace, and what this country symbolizes to the rest of the world.

HOWARD ZINN: We have to stop thinking that solutions to problems are military solutions, that you can solve problems with violence. You can’t really. You don’t really solve problems with violence. We have to change our definitions of “heroism.” Heroism in American culture, so far, really—when people think of heroism, they think of military heroes. They think of the people whose statues are all over the country, you know, and they think of medals and battles. And yeah, these are military heroes. And that’s why Obama goes along with that definition of military—of “hero,” by referring to John McCain, you know, as a military hero, always feeling that he must do that. I never felt he must do that. John McCain, to my mind—and I know that this is a tough thing to accept and may make some of the people angry—John McCain was tortured and bore up under torture and was a victim of torture and imprisonment, and, you know, it takes fortitude to that. He’s not a military hero. Before he was imprisoned, he dropped bombs on innocent people. You know, he—yeah, he did what the other members of the Air Force did. They dropped bombs on peasant villages and killed a lot of innocent people. I don’t consider that heroism. So, we have to redefine. To me, the great heroes are the people who have spoken out against war. Those are the heroes, you know.

And so, well, I think—yeah, I think we have to change, change our mindset. We have to understand certain things that we haven’t maybe thought about enough. I think one of the things we haven’t thought about enough—because this is basic, and this is crucial—we haven’t realized, or at least not expressed it consciously, that the government’s interests are not the same as our interests. Really. And so, when they talk about the national interest, they’re creating what Kurt Vonnegut used to call a “granfalloon.” A granfalloon was, so, a meaningless abstraction and when you put together that don’t belong together, you see a “national security”—no—and “national interest.” No, there’s no one national interest. There’s the interest of the president of the United States, and then there’s the interest of the young person he sends to war. They’re different interests, you see? There is the interest of Exxon and Halliburton, and there’s the interest of the worker, the nurse’s aide, the teacher, the factory worker. Those are different interests. Once you recognize that you and the government have different interests, that’s a very important step forward in your thinking, because if you think you have a common interest with the government, well, then it means that if the government says you must do this and you must do that, and it’s a good idea to go to war here, well, the government is looking out for my interest. No, the government is not looking out for your interest. The government has its own interests, and they’re not the interests of the people. Not just true in the United States, it’s true everywhere in the world. Governments generally do not represent the interests of their people. See? That’s why governments keep getting overthrown, because people at a certain point realize, “Hey! No, the government is not serving my interest.”

That’s also why governments lie. Why do governments lie? You must know that governments lie—not just our government; governments, in general, lie. Why do they lie? They have to lie, because their interests are different than the interests of ordinary people. If they told the truth, they would be out of office. So you have to recognize, you know, that the difference, difference in interest.

And the—well, I have to say something about war, a little more than I have said, and what I say about them, because I’ve been emphasizing the importance of renouncing war and not being a war-making nation, and because it will not be enough to get us out of Iraq. One of these days, we’ll get out of Iraq. We have to get out of Iraq. We don’t belong there. And we’re going to have to get out of there. Sooner or later, we’re going to have to get out of there. But we don’t want to have to—we don’t want to get out of Iraq and then have to get out of somewhere else. We don’t have to get out of Iraq but keep troops in Afghanistan, as unfortunately, you know, Obama said, troops in Afghanistan. No, no more—not just Iraq. We have to get into a mindset about renouncing war, period, and which is a big step.

And my ideas about war, my thoughts about war, the sort of the conclusions that I’ve come to about war, they really come from two sources. One, from my study of history. Of course, not everybody who studies history comes to the same conclusions. But, you know, you have to listen to various people who study history and decide what makes more sense, right? I’ve looked at various histories. I’ve concluded that my history makes more sense. And I’ve always been an objective student of these things, yes. But my—yeah, my ideas about war come from two sources. One of them is studying history, the history of wars, the history of governments, the history of empires. That history helps a lot in straightening out your thinking.

And the other is my own experience in war. You know, I was in World War II. I was a Air Force bombardier. I dropped bombs on various cities in Europe. That doesn’t make me an expert. Lots of people were in wars, and they all come out with different opinions. Well, so all I can do is give you my opinion based on my thinking after having been in a war. I was an enthusiastic enlistee in the Air Force. I wanted to be in the war, war against fascism, the “good war,” right? But at the end of the war, as I looked around and surveyed the world and thought about what I had done and thought about—and learned about Hiroshima and Nagasaki and learned about Dresden and learned about Hamburg and learned things I didn’t even realize while I was bombing, because when you’re involved in a military operation, you don’t think. You just—you’re an automaton, really. You may be a well-educated and technically competent automaton, but that’s what you—you aren’t really—you’re not questioning, not questioning why. “Why are they sending me to bomb this little town? When the war is almost over, there’s no reason for dropping bombs on several thousand people.” No, you don’t think.

Well, I began to think after the war and began to think that—and I was thinking now about the good war, the best war, and I was thinking, “Oh.” And then I began to see, no, this good war is not simply good. This best of wars, no. And if that’s true of this war, imagine what is true of all the other obviously ugly wars about which you can’t even use the word “good.”

So, yeah, and I began to realize certain things, that war corrupts everybody, corrupts everybody who engages in it. You start off, they’re the bad guys. You make an interesting psychological jump. The jump is this: since they’re the bad guys, you must be the good guys. No, they may very well be the bad guys. They may be fascists and dictators and bad, really bad guys. That doesn’t mean you’re good, you know? And when I began to look at it that way, I realized that wars are fought by evils on both sides. You know, one is a little more evil than the other. But even though you start in a war with sort of good intentions—we’re going to defeat fascism, we’re going to do this—you end up being corrupted, you end up being violent, you end up killing a lot of innocent people, because you’ve decided from the beginning that you’re right, and then you don’t have to ask questions anymore. That’s an interesting psychological thing that you—trick that you play. Well, you start out—you make a decision at the very beginning. The decision is: they’re wrong, I’m right. Once you have made that decision, you don’t have to think anymore. Then anything you do goes. Anything you do is OK, because you made the decision early on that they’re bad, you’re good. Then you can kill several hundred thousand people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Then you can kill 100,000 people in Dresden. It doesn’t matter. You’re not thinking about it. Yeah, war corrupts everybody who engages in it.

So what else can I say about war? Lots of things. But I took out my watch presumably because I care. And I don’t. But I—you know, people will present you with humanitarian awards. Oh, this is for a good cause. The thing about war is the outcome is unpredictable. The immediate thing you do is predictable. The immediate thing you do is horrible, because war is horrible. And if somebody promises you that, “Well, this is horrible, like we have to bomb these hundreds of thousands of people in Japan. This is horrible, but it’s leading to a good thing,” truth is, you never know what this is leading to. You never know the outcome. You never know what the future is. You know that the present is evil, and you’re asked to commit this evil for some possible future good. Doesn’t make sense, especially since if you look at the history of wars, you find out that those so-called future goods don’t materialize. You know, the future good of World War II was, “Oh, now we’re rid of fascism. Now we’re going to have a good world, a peaceful world. Now the UN Charter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. 50 million people died in World War II, but now it’s going to be OK.” Well, you’ve lived these years since World War II. Has it been OK? Can you say that those 50 million lives were—yeah, it had to be done because—because of what? No, the wars—violence in general is a quick fix. It may give you a feeling that you’ve accomplished something, but it’s unpredictable in its ends. And because it’s corrupting, the ends are usually bad.

So, OK, I won’t say anything more about war. And, you know, of course, it wastes people. It wastes wealth. It’s an enormous, enormous waste.

And so, what is there to do? We need to educate ourselves and other people. We need to educate ourselves in history. History is very important. That’s why I went into a little history, because, you know, if you don’t know history, it’s as if you were born yesterday. If you were born yesterday, then any leader can tell you anything, you have no way of checking up on it. History is very important. I don’t mean formal history, what you learn in a classroom. No, history, if you’re learning, go to the library. Go—yeah, go to the library and read, read, learn, learn history. Yeah, so we have an educational job to do with history.

We have an educational job to do about our relationship to government, you know, and to realize that disobedience is essential to democracy, you see. And it’s important to understand democracy is not the three branches of government. It’s not what they told us in junior high school. “Oh, this is democracy. We have three branches of government, kiddos, the legislative, the executive, judicial. We have checks and balances that balance one another out. If somebody does something bad, it will be checked by”—wow! What a neat system! Nothing can go wrong. Well, now, those structures are not democracy. Democracy is the people. Democracy is social movements. That’s what democracy is. And what history tells us is that when injustices have been remedied, they have not been remedied by the three branches of government. They’ve been remedied by great social movements, which then push and force and pressure and threaten the three branches of government until they finally do something. Really, that’s democracy.

And no, we mustn’t be pessimistic. We mustn’t be cynical. We mustn’t think we’re powerless. We’re not powerless. That’s where history comes in. If you look at history, you see people felt powerless and felt powerless and felt powerless, until they organized, and they got together, and they persisted, and they didn’t give up, and they built social movements. Whether it was the anti-slavery movement or the black movement of the 1960s or the antiwar movement in Vietnam or the women’s movement, they started small and apparently helpless; they became powerful enough to have an effect on the nation and on national policy. We’re not powerless. We just have to be persistent and patient, not patient in the passive sense, but patient in the active sense of having a kind of faith that if all of us do little things—well, if all of us do little things, at some point there will be a critical mass created. Those little things will add up. That’s what has happened historically. People were disconsolate, and people thought they couldn’t end, but they kept doing, doing, doing, and then something important happened.

And I’ll leave you with just one more thought, that if you do that, if you join some group, if you join whatever the group is, a group that’s working on, you know, gender equality or racism or immigrant rights or the environment or the war, whatever group you join or whatever little action you take, you know, it will make you feel better. It will make you feel better. And I’m not saying we should do all these things just to make ourselves feel better, but it’s good to know that life becomes more interesting and rewarding when you become involved with other people in some great social cause. Thank you.


AMY GOODMAN: Legendary historian Howard Zinn, speaking at Binghamton University, Upstate New York, just after the election, on November 8th. Howard Zinn is author of, among many other books, A People’s History of the United States.