155 quotes found
"If those in charge of our society — politicians, corporate executives, and owners of press and television — can dominate our ideas, they will be secure in their power. They will not need soldiers patrolling the streets. We will control ourselves."
"It is the great challenge of our time: How to achieve justice, with struggle, but without war."
"If patriotism were defined, not as blind obedience to government, nor as submissive worship to flags and anthems, but rather as love of one's country, one's fellow citizens (all over the world), as loyalty to the principles of justice and democracy, then patriotism would require us to disobey our government, when it violated those principles."
"There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people for a purpose which is unattainable."
"The First Amendment and Fourteenth Amendment rights in the United States Constitution were being violated in Albany again and again — freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, the equal protection of the laws — I could count at least 30 such violations. Yet the president, sworn to uphold the Constitution, and all the agencies of the United States government at his disposal, were nowhere to be seen."
"At the great Washington March of 1963, the chairman of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, John Lewis, speaking to the same enormous crowd that heard Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream," was prepared to ask the right question: "Which side is the federal government on?" That sentence was eliminated from his speech by organizers of the March to avoid offending the Kennedy Administration. But Lewis and his fellow SNCC workers had experienced, again and again, the strange passivity of the national government in the face of Southern violence, strange, considering how often this same government had been willing to intervene outside the country, often with overwhelming force. John Lewis and SNCC had reason to be angry. John had been beaten bloody by a white mob in Montgomery as a Freedom Rider in the spring of 1961. The federal government had trusted the notoriously racist Alabama police to protect the Riders, but done nothing itself except to have FBI agents take notes. Instead of insisting that blacks and whites had a right to ride the buses together, the Kennedy Administration called for a "cooling-off period," a moratorium on Freedom Rides."
"The white population could not possibly be unaffected by those events — some whites more stubborn in their defense of segregation, but others beginning to think in different ways. And the black population was transformed, having risen up in mass action for the first time, feeling its power, knowing now that if the old order could be shaken it could be toppled."
"I am not an absolute pacifist, because I can't rule out the possibility that under some, carefully defined circumstances, some degree of violence may be justified, if it is focused directly at a great evil. Slave revolts are justified, and if John Brown had really succeeded in arousing such revolts throughout the South, it would have been much preferable to losing 600,000 lives in the Civil War, where the makers of the war — unlike slave rebels — would not have as their first priority the plight of the black slaves, as shown by the betrayal of black interests after the war. Again, the Zapatista uprising seems justified to me, but some armed struggles that start for a good cause get out of hand and the ensuing violence becomes indiscriminate. Each situation has to be evaluated separately, for all are different. In general, I believe in non-violent direct action, which involve organizing large numbers of people, whereas too often violent uprisings are the product of a small group. If enough people are organized, violence can be minimized in bringing about social change."
"To put it briefly: the evidence is quite overwhelming on this matter. The Japanese had sent an envoy (Ambassador Sato) to Moscow (still officially a neutral) to work out a negotiated surrender. An instruction from Foreign Minister Togo came in a telegram (intercepted by American intelligence, which had broken the Japanese code early in the war), saying: "Unconditional surrender is the only obstacle to peace... It is His Majesty's heart's desire to see the swift termination of the war." The Japanese had one condition for surrender which the U.S. refused to meet — recognizing the sanctity of the Emperor. It seemed the U.S. was determined to drop the bomb before the Japanese could surrender — for a variety of reasons, none of them humanitarian. After the war, the official report of the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, based on hundreds of interviews with Japanese decision-makers right after the war, concluded that the war would have ended in a few months by a Japanese surrender "even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.""
"Why should we accept that the "talent" of someone who writes jingles for an advertising agency advertising dog food and gets $100,000 a year is superior to the talent of an auto mechanic who makes $40,000 a year? Who is to say that Bill Gates works harder than the dishwasher in the restaurant he frequents, or that the CEO of a hospital who makes $400,000 a year works harder than the nurse or the orderly in that hospital who makes $30,000 a year? The president of Boston University makes $300,000 a year. Does he work harder than the man who cleans the offices of the university? Talent and hard work are qualitative factors which cannot be measured quantitatively."
"Scholars, who pride themselves on speaking their minds, often engage in a form of self-censorship which is called "realism." To be "realistic" in dealing with a problem is to work only among the alternatives which the most powerful in society put forth. It is as if we are all confined to a, b, c, or d in the multiple choice test, when we know there is another possible answer. American society, although it has more freedom of expression than most societies in the world, thus sets limits beyond which respectable people are not supposed to think or speak. So far, too much of the debate on Vietnam has observed these limits."
"One certain effect of war is to diminish freedom of expression. Patriotism becomes the order of the day, and those who question the war are seen as traitors, to be silenced and imprisoned."
"Not only did waging war against Hitler fail to save the Jews, it may be that the war itself brought on the Final Solution of genocide. This is not to remove the responsibility from Hitler and the Nazis, but there is much evidence that Germany's anti-Semitic actions, cruel as they were, would not have turned to mass murder were it not for the psychic distortions of war, acting on already distorted minds. Hitler's early aim was forced emigration, not extermination, but the frenzy of it created an atmosphere in which the policy turned to genocide."
"Whenever I become discouraged (which is on alternate Tuesdays, between three and four) I lift my spirits by remembering: The artists are on our side! I mean those poets and painters, singers and musicians, novelists and playwrights who speak to the world in a way that is impervious to assault because they wage the battle for justice in a sphere which is unreachable by the dullness of ordinary political discourse."
"We need to decide that we will not go to war, whatever reason is conjured up by the politicians or the media, because war in our time is always indiscriminate, a war against innocents, a war against children. War is terrorism, magnified a hundred times."
"The term "just war" contains an internal contradiction. War is inherently unjust, and the great challenge of our time is how to deal with evil, tyranny, and oppression without killing huge numbers of people."
"In all the solemn statements by self-important politicians and newspaper columnists about a coming war against Iraq, and even in the troubled comments by some who are opposed to the war, there is something missing. The talk is about strategy and tactics and geopolitics, and personalities. It is about air war and ground war, about alliances and weapons of mass destruction, and arms inspections, about oil and natural gas, about nation-building and “regime change.” What is missing is what an American war on Iraq will do to tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of ordinary human beings who are not concerned with geopolitics and military strategy, and who just want their children to live, to grow up. They are not concerned with “national security” but with personal security, with food and shelter and medical care and peace. I am speaking of those Iraqis and those Americans who will, with absolute certainty, die in such a war, or lose arms or legs, or be blinded. Or they will be stricken with some strange and agonizing sickness, which will lead to their bringing deformed children into the world (as happened to families in Vietnam, in Iraq, and also in the United States)."
"Only rarely has the human story, with names and images, come through as more than a one-day flash of truth, as one day when I read of a ten-year-old boy, named Noor Mohammed, lying on a hospital bed on the Pakistani border, his eyes gone, his hands blown off, a victim of American bombs. Surely, we must discuss the political issues. We note that an attack on Iraq would be a flagrant violation of international law. We note that the mere possession of dangerous weapons is not grounds for war—otherwise we would have to make war on dozens of countries. We point out that the country that possesses by far the most “weapons of mass destruction” is our country, which has used them more often and with more deadly results than any other nation on earth. We can point to our national history of expansion and aggression. We have powerful evidence of deception and hypocrisy at the highest levels of our government. But, as we contemplate an American attack on Iraq, should we not go beyond the agendas of the politicians and the experts? (John LeCarré has one of his characters say: “I despise experts more than anyone on earth.”) Should we not ask everyone to stop the high-blown talk for a moment and imagine what war will do to human beings whose faces will not be known to us, whose names will not appear except on some future war memorial?"
"Americans have been taught that their nation is civilized and humane. But, too often, U.S. actions have been uncivilized and inhumane."
"David Ray Griffin has done admirable and painstaking research in reviewing the mysteries surrounding the 9/11 attacks. It is the most persuasive argument I have seen for further investigation [into] that historic and troubling event."
"I don't believe it's possible to be neutral. The world is already moving in certain directions, and to be neutral, to be passive in a situation like that, is to collaborate with whatever is going on. And I, as a teacher, do not want to be a collaborator with whatever is happening in the world. I want myself, as a teacher, and I want you, as students, to intercede with whatever is happening in the world."
"I would encourage people to look around them in their community and find an organization that is doing something that they believe in, even if that organization has only five people, or ten people, or twenty people, or a hundred people. And to look at history and understand that when change takes place it takes place as a result of large, large numbers of people doing little things unbeknownst to one another. And that history is very important for people to not get discouraged. Because if you look at history you see the way the labor movement was able to achieve things when it stuck to its guns, when it organized, when it resisted. Black people were able to change their condition when they fought back and when they organized. Same thing with the movement against the war in Vietnam, and the women's movement. History is instructive. And what it suggests to people is that even if they do little things, if they walk on the picket line, if they join a vigil, if they write a letter to their local newspaper. Anything they do, however small, becomes part of a much, much larger sort of flow of energy. And when enough people do enough things, however small they are, then change takes place."
"We in the United States are still quite a long way from democracy and certainly a long way from economic democracy. Because of the control of the economy by corporations and the tax structure, which is set up by an unrepresentative Congress and approved by a president, a tax structure which has so far channeled the wealth of the country towards the richest one percent of the population."
"Voting is easy and marginally useful, but it is a poor substitute for democracy, which requires direct action by concerned citizens."
"To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places — and there are so many — where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory."
"The law conceals many things. The law is the Bill of Rights. In fact, that is what we think of when we develop our reverence for the law. The law is something that protects us; the law is our right — the law is the Constitution. Bill of Rights Day, essay contests sponsored by the American Legion on our Bill of Rights, that is the law. And that is good. But there is another part of the law that doesn’t get ballyhooed — the legislation that has gone through month after month, year after year, from the beginning of the Republic, which allocates the resources of the country in such a way as to leave some people very rich and other people very poor, and still others scrambling like mad for what little is left. That is the law. If you go to law school you will see this. You can quantify it by counting the big, heavy law books that people carry around with them and see how many law books you count that say “Constitutional Rights” on them and how many that say “Property,” “Contracts,” “Torts,” “Corporation Law.” That is what the law is mostly about."
"There are other problems with the law. It’s a strange thing; we think that law brings order. Law doesn’t. How do we know that law does not bring order? Look around us. We live under the rules of law. Notice how much order we have? People say we have to worry about civil disobedience because it will lead to anarchy. Take a look at the present world in which the rule of law obtains. This is the closest to what is called anarchy in the popular mind — confusion, chaos, international banditry. The only order that is really worth anything does not come through the enforcement of law, it comes through the establishment of a society which is just and in which harmonious relationships are established and in which you need a minimum of regulation to create decent sets of arrangements among people. But the order based on law and on the force of law is the order of the totalitarian state, and it inevitably leads either to total injustice or to rebellion — eventually, in other words, to very great disorder."
"Khalil Bendib, with a few ingenious strokes of his pen, gets to the heart of the issues of our time. His cartoons are in the greatest tradition of American political humor, with that combination of wit and intelligence so needed in the struggle for justice."
"In this extraordinary volume, Elizabeth Martinez reveals what has thus far been hidden from our view, the rich and inspiring history of Chicana women, from the early days of the Spanish conquest to the contemporary struggles for immigrant rights. The book is a treasure trove of exciting information and striking images. It should become an indispensable part of everyone's library, and a special gift to future generations of the young, on whom we depend to change the world."
"I am supposing, or perhaps only hoping, that our future may be found in the past's fugitive moments of compassion rather than in its solid centuries of warfare."
"It is possible, reading standard histories, to forget half the population of the country. The explorers were men, the landholders and merchants men, the political leaders men, the military figures men. The very invisibility of women, the overlooking of women, is a sign of their submerged status."
"Behind the rebel battle yells and the legendary spirit of the Confederate army, there was much reluctance to fight. A sympathetic historian of the South, E. Merton Coulter, asked "Why did the Confederacy fail? The forces leading to the defeat were many but they may be summed up in this one fact"The People did not will hard enough and long enough to win."Not money or soldiers, but willpower and morale were decisive."
"To white Americans of the thirties, however, blacks North and South were invisible. Only the radicals made an attempt to break the racial barriers: Socialists, Trotskyists, Communists most of all."
"While some multimillionaires started in poverty, most did not. A study of the origins of 303 textile, railroad and steel executives of the 1870s showed that 90 percent came from middle- or upper-class families. The Horatio Alger stories of "rags to riches" were true for a few men, but mostly a myth, and a useful myth for control."
"One of the most influential books to appear in the early seventies was a book assembled by eleven women in the Boston Women's Health Book Collective called Our Bodies, Ourselves...They quoted the English suffragette Christabel Pankhurst: “Remember the dignity/of your womanhood./Do not appeal,/do not beg,/do not grovel./Take courage/join hands,/stand beside us./Fight with us…”"
"It was not until I joined the faculty of Spelman College, a college for black women in Atlanta, Georgia, that I began to read the African-American historians who never appeared on my reading lists in graduate school (W. E. B. Du Bois, Rayford Logan, Lawrence Reddick, Horace Mann Bond, John Hope Franklin). Nowhere in my history education had I learned about the massacres of black people that took place again and again, amid the silence of a national government pledged, by the Constitution, to protect equal rights for all."
"One percent of the nation owns a third of the wealth. The rest of the wealth is distributed in such a way as to turn those in the 99 percent against one another: small property owners against the propertyless, black against white, native-born against foreign-born, intellectuals and professionals against the uneducated and the unskilled. These groups have resented one another and warred against one another with such vehemence and violence as to obscure their common position as sharers of leftovers in a very wealthy country (w:Divide & rule)."
"Capitalism has always been a failure for the lower classes. It is now beginning to fail for the middle classes."
"It is very important for the Establishment - that uneasy club of business executives, generals, and politicos - to maintain the historic pretension of national unity, in which the government represents all the people, and the common enemy is overseas, not at home... It is important for them also to make sure this artificial unity of highly privileged and slightly privileged is the only unity - that the 99 percent remain split in countless ways, and turn against one another to vent their angers."
"How skillful to tax the middle class to pay for the relief of the poor, building resentment on top of humiliation! How adroit to bus poor black youngsters into poor white neighborhoods, in a violent exchange of impoverished schools, while the schools of the rich remain untouched and the wealth of the nation, doled out carefully where children need free milk, is drained for billion-dollar aircraft carriers. How ingenious to meet the demands of blacks and women for equality by giving them small special benefits, and setting them in competition with everyone else for jobs made scarce by an irrational, wasteful system. How wise to turn the fear and anger of the majority toward a class of criminals bred - by economic inequity - faster than they can be put away, deflecting attention from the huge thefts of national resources carried out within the law by men in executive offices."
"But with all the controls of power and punishment, enticements and concessions, diversions and decoys, operating throughout the history of the country, the Establishment has been unable to keep itself secure from revolt. Every time it looked as if it had succeeded, the very people it thought seduced or subdued, stirred and rose."
"Blacks, cajoled by Supreme Court decisions and congressional statutes, rebelled. Women, wooed and ignored, romanticized and mistreated, rebelled. Indians, thought dead, reappeared, defiant. Young people, despite lures of career and comfort, defected. Working people, thought soothed by reforms, regulated by law, kept within bounds by their own unions, went on strike. Government intellectuals, pledged to secrecy, began giving away secrets..."
"To recall this is to remind people of what the Establishment would like them to forget-the enormous capacity of apparently helpless people to resist, of apparently contented people to demand change. To uncover such history is to find a powerful human impulse to assert one's humanity. It is to hold out, even in times of deep pessimism, the possibility of surprise. True, to overestimate class consciousness, to exaggerate rebellion and its successes, would be misleading. It would not account for the fact that the world-not just the United States, but everywhere else-is still in the hands of the elites, that people's movements, although they show an infinite capacity for recurrence, have so far been either defeated or absorbed or perverted..."
"But most histories understate revolt, overemphasize statesmanship, and thus encourage impotency among citizens. When we look closely at resistance movements, or even at isolated forms of rebellion, we discover that class consciousness, or any other awareness of injustice, has multiple levels. It has many ways of expression, many ways of revealing itself-open, subtle, direct, distorted. In a system of intimidation and control, people do not show how much they know, how deeply they feel, until their practical sense informs them they can do so without being destroyed."
"History which keeps alive the memory of people's resistance suggests new definitions of power. By traditional definitions, whoever possesses military strength, wealth, command of official ideology, cultural control, has power. Measured by these standards, popular rebellion never looks strong enough to survive. However, the unexpected victories -even temporary ones - of insurgents show the vulnerability of the supposedly powerful."
"In a highly developed society, the Establishment cannot survive without the obedience and loyalty of millions of people who are given small rewards to keep the system going: the soldiers and police, teachers and ministers, administrators and social workers, technicians and production workers, doctors, lawyers, nurses, transport and communications workers, garbage men and firemen. These people-the employed, the somewhat privileged-are drawn into alliance with the elite. They become the guards of the system, buffers between the upper and lower classes. If they stop obeying, the system falls."
"That will happen... when all of us who are slightly privileged and slightly uneasy begin to see that we are like the guards in the prison uprising at Attica - expendable; that the Establishment, whatever rewards it gives us, will also, if necessary to maintain its control, kill us."
"Certain new facts... emerge so clearly as to lead to general withdrawal of loyalty from the system. The new conditions of technology, economics, and war, in the atomic age, make it less and less possible for the guards of the system-the intellectuals, the home owners, the taxpayers, the skilled workers, the professionals, the servants of government - to remain immune from the violence (physical and psychic) inflicted on the black, the poor, the criminal, the enemy overseas. The internationalization of the economy, the movement of refugees and illegal immigrants across borders, both make it more difficult for the people of the industrial countries to be oblivious to hunger and disease in the poor countries of the world."
"There is evidence of growing dissatisfaction among the guards. We have known for some time that the poor and ignored were the nonvoters, alienated from a political system they felt didn't care about them, and about which they could do little. Now alienation has spread upward into families above the poverty line."
"These are white workers, neither rich nor poor, but angry over economic insecurity, unhappy with their work, worried about their neighborhoods, hostile to government-combining elements of racism with elements of class consciousness, contempt for the lower classes along with distrust for the elite, and thus open to solutions from any direction, right or left."
"As we pass from one century to another, one millennium to one another, we would like to think that history itself is transformed as dramatically as the calendar. However, it rushes on, as it always did, with two forces racing toward the future, one splendidly uniformed, the other ragged but inspired. There is the past and its continuing horrors: violence, war, prejudices against those who are different, outrageous monopolization of the good earth's wealth by a few, political power in the hands of liars and murderers, the building of prisons instead of schools, the poisoning of the press and the entire culture by money. It is easy to become discouraged observing this, especially since this is what the press and television insist that we look at, and nothing more. But there is also (though much of this is kept from us, to keep us intimidated and without hope) the bubbling of change under the surface of obedience: the growing revulsion against endless wars (I think of the Russian women in the nineties, demanding their country end its military intervention in Chechnya, as did Americans during the Vietnam war); the insistence of women all over the world that they will no longer tolerate abuse and subordination… There is civil disobedience against the military machine, protest against police brutality directed especially at people of color. In the United States, we see the educational system, a burgeoning new literature, alternative radio stations, a wealth of documentary films outside the mainstream, even Hollywood itself and sometimes television-compelled to recognize the growing multiracial character of the nation. Yes, we have in this country, dominated by corporate wealth and military power and two antiquated political parties, what a fearful conservative characterized as "a permanent adversarial culture" challenging the present, demanding a new future. It is a race in which we can all choose to participate, or just to watch. But we should know that our choice will help determine the outcome. I think of the words of the poet Shelley, recited by women garment workers in New York to one another at the start of the twentieth century."
"If those in charge of our society — politicians, corporate executives, and owners of press and television — can dominate our ideas, they will be secure in their power."
"We grow up in a society where our choice of ideas is limited and where certain ideas dominate: We hear them from our parents, in the schools, in the churches, in the newspapers, and on radio and television. They have been in the air ever since we learned to walk and talk. They constitute an American ideology-that is, a dominant pattern of ideas. Most people accept them, and if we do, too, we are less likely to get into trouble."
"The dominance of these ideas is not the product of a conspiratorial group that has devilishly plotted to implant on society a particular point of view. Nor is it an accident, an innocent result of people thinking freely. There is a process of natural (or, rather unnatural) selection, in which certain orthodox ideas are encouraged, financed, and pushed forward by the most powerful mechanisms of our culture. These ideas are preferred because they are safe; they don't threaten established wealth or power."
"For instance: "Be realistic; this is the way things are; there's no point thinking about how things should be."; "People who teach or write or report the news should be objective; they should not try to advance their own opinions."; "There are unjust wars, but also just wars."; "Freedom of speech is desirable, but not when it threatens national security."; "Racial equality is desirable, but we've gone far enough in that direction."..."
"These ideas are not accepted by all Americans. But they are believed widely enough and strongly enough to dominate our thinking. And as long as they do, those who hold wealth and power in our society will remain secure in their control."
"In the year 1984 Forbes magazine, a leading periodical for high finance and big business, drew up a list of the wealthiest individuals in the United States. The top 400 people had assets totaling $60 billion. At the bottom of the population there were 60 million people who had no assets at all. Around the same time, the economist Lester Thurow estimated that 482 very wealthy individuals controlled (without necessarily owning) over $2,000 billion ($2 trillion). Consider the influence of such a very rich class-with its inevitable control of press, radio, television, and education-on the thinking of the nation."
"Dissident ideas can still exist in such a situation, but they will be drowned in criticism and made disreputable, because they are outside the acceptable choices. Or they may be allowed to survive in the corners of the culture emaciated, but alive-and presented as evidence of our democracy, our tolerance, and our pluralism."
"A sophisticated system of control that is confident of its power can permit a measure of dissidence. However, it watches its critics carefully, ready to overwhelm them, intimidate them, and even suppress them should they ever seriously threaten the system, or should the establishment, in a state of paranoia, think they do. If readers think I am exaggerating...they should read the volumes of reports on the FBI and the CIA published in 1975 by the Senate Select Committee on Government Operations."
"It is the great challenge of our time: How to achieve justice, with struggle, but without war. Ch. 5, p. 105"
"He was a very funny man and warm man. Told jokes all the time. Very self-deprecating. And very humble. When it came to his students and students who disagreed with him -- and a lot of students in our classes disagreed with him; it was the mid-'80s, Reagan and all that, a very conservative era -- he didn't sit there and shut them down. ... He would lecture for a little while, maybe a guest speaker, and then it was an open forum for students to talk and challenge him. He enjoyed being challenged. It kept him fresh and it kept him on his toes and it kept him connected to the next generation. He always wanted to connect to young people."
"...the anti-apartheid movement in the '80s... he was there. ... He wasn't a detached academic who sort of wrote about these things but didn't put his heart where his mouth was. He put everything there, because he cared very deeply that these things were wrong -- that apartheid was wrong. Obviously. That's easy to say in retrospect. But, that was the early '80s, and there were people who didn't really think it was so bad. That's the thing. A lot of times we look back and we remember how radical it was to confront apartheid. Now, everyone looks back and knows it was wrong. It was so radical to oppose the Iraq war. Most of the public doesn't think we should have gone in. That's why dissent is so important, because it creates an atmosphere in which people can explore alternative ways of thinking. That's something I took from Howard. That's what Howard taught. That's why he still matters."
"Historian Howard Zinn observed in a new edition of Soldiers in Revolt, the classic history of the GI Movement: "A point can be reached where men and women in uniform can no longer tolerate what they begin to see as an unjust war. It is encouraging to be reminded of the basic desire of human beings to live at peace with other human beings, once they have divested themselves of the deceptions, the nationalism, and the racism that is provoked by war.""
"You tell me what has changed. You tell me what a Black president means for the average Black American. Tell me how it is humanely permissible to hold undocumented immigrants in detention camps, outfit pregnant women with electronic bracelets to track their where-abouts, and uphold a war where indebted monies continue to be spent on the violent militarized occupation of foreign countries, instead of indigenous-originated programs to rebuild the broken infrastructure resulting from failed regimes. As the late historian and social activist Howard Zinn states, "If you want to end terrorism, you have to stop being terrorists.""
"Historian and activist Howard Zinn died in 2010, and the progressive world greatly misses his spirit and guidance. One wonders what he’d have to say about America today — one in which senators create legislation in secret and a president denigrates foes and allies alike via Twitter. What would he, a former Cub Scout, think about the president’s recent speech in which he exhorted Boy Scouts to boo a previous president? We can be pretty sure that he’d be dismayed and disgusted by an America where CEOs make 271 times the pay of an average worker... He’d certainly be no fan of a culture that made serious, though unsuccessful, attempts to ban his signature work, A People’s History of the United States."
"We live in a beautiful country," writes historian Howard Zinn. "But people who have no respect for human life, freedom, or justice have taken it over. It is now up to all of us to take it back."
"Howard Zinn said: "Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can quietly become a power no government can suppress, a power that can transform the world.""
"There are many Americans who would be mortified to be associated with their government's policies. The most scholarly, scathing, incisive, hilarious critiques of the hypocrisy and the contradictions in U.S. government policy come from American citizens. When the rest of the world wants to know what the U.S. government is up to, we turn to Noam Chomsky, Edward Said, Howard Zinn, Ed Herman, Amy Goodman, Michael Albert, Chalmers Johnson, William Blum, and Anthony Arnove to tell us what's really going on."
"In the Jewish Quarter [Judengasse] was I born and educated; until my fifteenth year, they tried to beat the Talmud into me. My teachers were inhuman beings [Unmenschen], my colleagues were bad company, inducing me to secret sin; my body was frail, my spirit raw."
"I was supposed to devote myself only to the Talmud. But the Talmud utterly repelled me, thought I was still a pious Jew-boy [Judenkind]. I wanted to satisfy my craving to be active, to do something: this craving looked for a sphere for itself because none was offered it. I did not want to be a good-for-nothing - and therefore I became a writer."
"My main problem was, naturally, religion: from it I moved later on to the principles of ethics. First to be examined was my positive religion [ie. Judaism]. It collapsed. So I wanted to base myself on naturaly religion: but my agony was so great, that this [foundation] also collapsed before my eyes. Nothing, nothing remained. I was the most miserable person in the world. I became an atheist."
"A writer? What education did I receive? None. Where did I study? Nowhere. What did I study? It does not matter. I nonetheless became a writer immediately, because I wrote more than I have ever read; hence I thought more than I had food for thought."
"The vocation of man, as that of any other creature, is to be active in all his being. But man cannot act as an individual. The essence of his life activity is cooperation with other individuals of his species. Outside this cooperation, outside of society, man does not achieve any specific human activity. But so long as this co-operation is arbitrarily ruled by accidentality, so long as it is not organized, man remains limited and constricted in his life-activity...."
"The focus of all life is its economy, the mode through which every living creature produces its material existence. I know no other criterion for the evaluation of social life except that of social economy. In society, just like anywhere else, the mode of production is the focus around which revolve all the modes of life: in the historical life of conscious beings, it is also the focus of all modes of consciousness."
"He who wishes to study the barometric level of spiritual freedom must examine the relationship of the state to its Jewish subjects."
"We Germans are the most universal, the most European people of Europe."
"The more difficult a man's life had been before the camp, the more furiously he lied. This lie had no practical purpose; it served simply to glorify freedom. How could a man be unhappy outside the camp?"
"National Socialism had created a new type of political criminals: criminals who had not committed a crime."
"We are restoring the Leninist norms of democracy. But Leninist norms are not the same as the bourgeois norms of democracy. You know yourself: when Gorky—affected by traumatic impressions, deprivation, hunger and housing difficulties in the first years after October—abandoned his revolutionary position, Lenin did not hesitate to close down his newspaper Novaia zhizn’."
"You believe that we have violated the principle of freedom in your case. Yes, this is so if one understands freedom in the bourgeois sense of the term. But we have a different conception of freedom. Our understanding of freedom is not identical to the one in the capitalist world—as the right to do anything without taking into account the interests of society. Only the imperialists and millionaires need this kind of freedom."
"Our Soviet writer must be guided in his world only by the need of the people, useful for the society."
"I have not read your novel but I have carefully read the reviews of your manuscript, responses to it, which contain many excerpts from your novel. Look how many quotes from them I have written down."
"Everyone who has read your book are unanimous in their judgment. They all think it is politically harmful for us. There is no point in giving it for an evaluation to the writers Fedin, Leonov, Ehrenburg, etc. The reviewers could have made a mistake in their aesthetic judgment but they were unanimous in their political judgment, and I have no doubt that their political judgment is absolutely correct."
"It is impossible to publish your book, and it will not be published in the next 200 years."
"No, we have not destroyed it. Let it sit. We cannot change its fate."
"We should not underestimate the harm it would bring should it be published."
"Why should we add your book to the atomic weapons arrayed against us by our enemies. Publication of your book would help our enemies."
"We would only multiply the number of victims. Our duty is to strengthen the state and defend the people, why, then, should we publish your book."
"Your book contains direct analogies between us and the Hitlerite fascists. You book incorrectly describes our people, communists. Could we have won the war with the kind of people you describe? In your book you say positive things about religion, God, Catholicism. Your book defends Trotsky. You book is full of doubts about the legitimacy of our Soviet system."
"You know what enormous harm we have been dealt by the publication of Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago. Everybody who has read your book, everybody who has seen the reviews are convinced that the potential harm from your “Life and Fate” would be far more dangerous than that of Doctor Zhivago."
"More than 50 years after the great novel “Life and Fate” was confiscated, the Federal Security Service transferred the complete archives and original manuscript of the novel by Vasily Grossman, making it available for study. Now, researchers can study several drafts as well as previously unpublished chapters. Vasily Grossman wrote his famous novel "Life and Fate" over a decade - from 1950 to 1960. But like many Soviet authors, he never saw it published in his lifetime. The work, considered by many scholars to be the greatest Russian novel about World War II, was considered anti-Soviet for its unfiltered view of Stalin, his henchmen, and regime. In 1961, the KGB searched Grossman’s Moscow apartment and seized not only the typewritten copies of the novel, but the original manuscript, and with it all his sketches and previous drafts. Grossman was very depressed by the finality of this act—the complete censorship and confiscation of his work."
"In autumn 2011 on BBC Radio 4 BBC produced a 13-episode radio play based on the novel "Life and Fate" which became a bestseller in the U.K. In Russia in 2012, the novel was filmed as a television series that aired nationally. Its premiere was successful of the audience: according to research firm TNS Russia, bringing in about 20 percent of Moscow viewers 18 and over."
"There are novels I have re-read after 30 or 40 years that have shocked me with ideas which evidently made such a strong impression they ceased to be someone else’s thoughts and became my own... But only one book had such a decisive impact that I can date to it a profound alteration in my worldview and even behaviour. I read Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate in 2003... It took me three weeks to read it and three weeks to recover from the experience, during which time I could barely breathe. Grossman was a Soviet Jewish journalist who covered the battle of Stalingrad and the liberation of the Treblinka extermination camp. After the war he wrote this epic novel. Life and Fate is a Soviet War and Peace, in which every aspect of society radiates out from the central characters... Grossman saw the individual as a novelist does. “Human groupings have one main purpose,” he wrote, “to assert everyone’s right to be different, to be special, to think, feel and live in his or her own way … The only true and lasting meaning of the struggle for life lies in the individual, in his modest peculiarities and his right to these peculiarities.” The tolerance of difference is his message, not an assault on society or the state."
"People are placed in invidious situations, like Shtrum, cornered by Stalin. Few are heroes. But these acts of kindness recur throughout the novel, not in any context other than the spur of the moment. Kindness alleviates some of the horrors of war. Like many of my generation, I’d been shaped by ideas; by a number of -isms, socialism and feminism above all. I saw the world in terms of various us and them groupings. After reading Life and Fate they seemed to matter less. Grossman wasn’t advocating Christian saintliness, and was far from perfect in his own life. But if, even in the horror of war, you can alleviate suffering through some extraordinary action (volunteering to go to the gas chamber to hold the hand of a child so he won’t have to die alone), how easy might it be to behave with less anger, cynicism, irritation or sneery dismissiveness? And that’s what I have tried to do. Life and Fate is a daunting undertaking, but for those who finish it the experience is profound. Few novels that set out to change the world succeed; this one merely changed me."
"[T]he increase of social wealth is not accompanied by a diminishing number of capitalist magnates, but by an increasing number of capitalists of all degrees."
"Democracy is in principle the suppression of class government, though it is not yet the actual suppression of classes."
"Democracy is the high school of compromise."
"The parties which assumed the names of liberals were, or became in due course, simple guardians of capitalism."
"The aim of all socialist measures, even of those which appear outwardly as coercive measures, is the development and the securing of a free personality. Their more exact examination always shows that the coercion included will raise the sum total of liberty in society, and will give more freedom over a more extended area than it takes away."
"We may think as we like theoretically, about man’s freedom of action, we must practically start from it as the foundation of the moral law, for only under this condition is social morality possible."
"If democracy is not to excel centralised absolutism in the breeding of bureaucracies, it must be built up on an elaborately organised self-government with a corresponding economic, personal responsibility of all the units of administration as well as of the adult citizens of the state. Nothing is more injurious to its healthy development than enforced uniformity and a too abundant amount of protectionism or subventionism."
"The fact of the modern national States or empires not having originated organically does not prevent their being organs of that great entity which we call civilised humanity, and which is much too extensive to be included in any single State. And, indeed, these organs are at present necessary and of great importance for human development. On this point Socialists can scarcely differ now. And it is not even to be regretted, from the Socialist point of view, that they are not characterised purely by their common descent. The purely ethnological national principle is reactionary in its results. Whatever else one may think about the race-problem, it is certain that the thought of a national division of mankind according to race is anything rather than a human ideal. The national quality is developing on the contrary more and more into a sociological function. But understood as such it is a progressive principle, and in this sense Socialism can and must be national. This is no contradiction of the cosmopolitan consciousness, but only its necessary completion, The world-citizenship, this glorious attainment of civilisation, would, if the relationship to national tasks and rational duties were missing, become a flabby characterless parasitism. Even when we sing "Ubi bene, ibi patria," we still acknowledge a "patria," and, therefore, in accordance with the motto, "No rights without duties"; also duties towards her."
"The most audacious assault on the premises and agenda of Marxism was undertaken by Eduard Bernstein, a leading light of German social democracy and the founder of socialist “Revisionism.” Bernstein had spent many years in England, where he came in contact with the Fabians. In the late 1890s he appealed to Social Democrats to adjust their theory as well as their program to the fact that capitalism was not about to collapse and labor was not sinking into destitution. He continued to believe in socialism but, like Jaurès, thought it would come about as the result of peaceful political and social progress within capitalism. He foresaw something like a convergence of capitalism and socialism, with the latter emerging from the former. The German Social Democratic Party, Europe’s largest and most influential, rejected Bernstein’s Revisionist theories and continued to adhere to the revolutionary Erfurt Program. In practice, however, it did exactly what Bernstein advocated, that is, emphasize trade unionism and electoral politics. (It formally abandoned Marxism only in 1959.)"
"Every time they say that what's happening in the country is... Stalin's fault. It's the moral of every speech: Stalin's guilty, it was Stalin, Stalin, Stalin, everyone against him. But Stalin died 35 years ago! 35 years! What does that have to do with today's troubles?"
"First, Stalin is disowned, now, little by little, it gets to prosecute socialism, the October Revolution, and in no time they will also want to prosecute Lenin and Marx."
"Iosif Vissarionovich was a really cautious man. Really cautious. A man who could see far."
"Without Stalin's politics, we would never have achieved anything, we would all have died."
"One former member of [the antiparty] group Molotov] became an ambassador. True, the country Outer Mongolia] may not be large, but it is an ambassadorship. I do not want to mention names, but you have some former Secretaries of State. I do not know where they are today, but they are not ambassadors. A second member of the group [Kaganovich] is now head of the state asbestos trust. Is that punishment, to head up a big monopoly? … It is better to confess to one's errors than to persist in them."
"Who does not know Tocqueville cannot understand liberalism. A case of unanswerable power could, I think, be made out for the view that he and Lord Acton were the essential liberals of the nineteenth century."
"[L]iberalism has been, in the last four centuries, the outstanding doctrine of Western Civilisation."
"The German-Soviet pact was...a shameless exhibition, on Stalin's part, of complete indifference to the fate of the working-class outside the Soviet Union: and the attack on Finland, like the absorption of the Baltic Republics, was an example of strategic imperialism."
"You have no right whatever to speak on behalf of the Government. Foreign affairs are in the capable hands of Ernest Bevin. His task is quite sufficiently difficult without the irresponsible statements of the kind you are making ... I can assure you there is widespread resentment in the Party at your activities and a period of silence on your part would be welcome."
"I come now to the question of diplomatic personnel... It is said that I am admitting to the service Eton and Harrow. I am not one of those who decry Eton and Harrow. I was very glad of them in the Battle of Britain—by God, I was!—those fellows paid the price in the Royal Air Force on those fatal days. If the Universities are to be criticized, well, put up a vote of censure on Harold Laski, because it is the product of the Universities I have got to accept."
"If Laski was not, in any ordinary sense of the word, a politician, he was also no thinker. He had an unbounded verve and versatility in the acquisition of knowledge. But, where he skimmed everything, he never plunged deep. The extent of his reading was colossal, even if one assures that he did not more than turn the pages of some of the works which he mentions."
"When I first called on Professor Harold Laski, he expressed the opinion that I ought to take some comfort in the vindication anarchism had received by the Bolsheviki. I agreed, adding that not only their régime, but their stepbrothers as well, the Socialists in power in other countries, had demonstrated the failure of the Marxian State better than any anarchist argument. [...] In America I had never met such lack of response to any appeal. Laski thought I would find even the most radical elements reluctant to oppose the Bolsheviki. They were too enthusiastic about the Revolution to draw lines of demarcation. In time I might interest the labour ranks. He would do his best to aid me; he would invite his friends for the next Sunday afternoon to hear my story. Once more hope sprang from what seemed a hopeless and futile quest."
"He was still in his late twenties and looked like a schoolboy. His lectures on the history of political ideas were brilliant, eloquent, and delivered without a note; he often referred to current controversies, even when the subject was Hobbes's theory of sovereignty."
"His lectures taught more, much more than political science. They taught a faith that ideas mattered, that knowledge was important and its pursuit exciting.... His seminars taught tolerance, the willingness to listen although one disagreed, the values of ideas being confronted. And it was all immense fun, an exciting game that had meaning, and it was also a sieve of ideas, a gymnastics of the mind carried on with vigour and directed unobtrusively with superb craftsmanship. I think I know now why he gave himself so freely. Partly it was because he was human and warm and that he was so interested in people. But mainly it was because he loved students, and he loved students because they were young. Because he had a glowing faith that youth was generous and alive, eager and enthusiastic and fresh. That by helping young people he was helping the future and bringing nearer that brave world in which he so passionately believed."
"[S]omeone who is a Socialist by allegiance and a Liberal by temperament."
"Anti-Semitism has become a major issue for the American people, and for all democratic mankind. In the pattern of imperialist reaction, anti-Semitism today looms ever larger, not only alongside of anti-Communism, anti-Sovietism, anti-unionism, anti-alienism, and anti-Negroism, but in a kind of special relationship to these other elements: Negroes, aliens, union men, the Soviets, and Communists are all in some degree tarred by reaction as Jewish or as the dupes of the Jews. Every reactionary movement today is itself anti-Semitic, or is allied with anti-Semites; on the other hand, the more consistent a progressive movement is, the more it makes the fight against anti-Semitism a prominent part of its program of action. No anti-Semite can be in any sense progressive now; no progressive can for any reason compromise with anti-Semitism."
"As Marxists, we stress the need of bringing the mask for privilege and the mask for frustration into their proper relationship. In this way the ruling class can be shown to be exploiting those it frustrates by diverting their resentment onto a scapegoat who is innocent of frustrating them and whose sacrificial slaughter, therefore, cannot release them from their frustration."
"It helps one keep one's balance to remember that there are other important problems clamoring for action...just the other week one of my Negro neighbors had her brother come home, discharged from the Army for medical reasons. He told his sister something which helps me maintain a proper perspective and relative sense of values. Her brother had been stationed in Alabama. In this Army camp there was a group of war prisoners, Germans. On Saturday nights these German war prisoners, properly protected, of course, by guards, would be escorted to the Alabama town for an American Saturday night "in town." But the Negro troops stationed there were not allowed, either escorted or under their own power, to go to town in Alabama on a Saturday night. Since hearing this story I have been thinking that surely there is nothing that can be done to one man at Sing Sing, either in two years or a year and a half or in any time that you may commute the sentence to, that can be quite as vicious, quite as brutalizing, quite as demoralizing as that which almost a half million Negro soldiers face in the armed forces or that which so many millions face in civilian life that is not yet entirely civilized."
"An active conscience is a formidable thing."
"Words must be backed by deeds."
"the entire commercial press of our nation is not the "free" press it loudly claims to be that it is, rather, the principal means yet devised by the owners of the giant newspaper industry for dominating the public mind."
"From the founding of our nation there has been a continual, many-angled struggle between these who would sacrifice the public need to their private wills and fortunes, and those who have fought to extend the boundaries of the public interest."
"The finance-capitalists who dominate American life are not Jews (Morgan, Rockefeller, DuPonts, Ford, etc.), and the number of Jewish proletarians has vastly increased. Yet, despite these facts, anti-Semitism has taken root in this country, and is now being organized on a greater scale than ever before. This organized anti-Semitism, furthermore, is more and more openly being used as a siphon to divert what are essentially anti-capitalist feelings among the people into channels that will serve only to fasten the hold of capitalism upon them, and capitalism, at that, in its most rabid, its fascist, form. The way to wipe out anti-Semitism coincides in large part, therefore, with the way to eliminate economic exploitation. And the way to wipe out the organized anti-Semitism that the American fascist forces are now fostering coincides with the way to check and crush fascism. Only socialism, through the dictatorship of the proletariat, can eliminate the roots of anti-Semitism. And only the people's front, based on the trade unions and uniting the oppressed middle classes of city and country, can crush the fascists' attempt to organize anti-Semitism along lines of violence and vigilanteism. It is, therefore, very encouraging to note that practically all of the contributors to this symposium agree on these propositions: that anti-Semitism has economic roots, and can be uprooted only by some form of socialism; and that anti-Semitism now is a phase of fascism and must be fought as such, through unity with all progressive forces. It is noteworthy that all agree that the time has come to fight anti-Semitism, and considerable scorn is directed against those who preach passivity as a way of mollifying the anti-Semites."
"It is because the forces of national unity in this country, under the great social discipline of a just war, have grown so strong that they are in a position, together with the other United Nations, to administer the final crushing blows to Germany and Japan that the anti-Semites are resorting to the methods of desperation to disrupt this unity. We become really stronger; they become desperate and ferocious, but essentially weaker. Fascism itself has proved to be ferocious but unstable...let us not mistake their panic-stricken thrashings for real strength."
"To lead for the common good is to undermine the effectiveness of anti-Semitic propaganda."
"The main principle of a democracy is that the rights of any one group, be it minority or majority, are connected with the rights of all groups."
"Sometimes we Jews are afraid to act openly either in behalf of others or in the specific resistance to anti-Semitism. Some of us are still ridden by the psychology of fear. We have a habit of "dignified" and "long-suffering" retreat. But there is more dignity and less suffering in moving forward to victory. We must decide which we fear more: the victory, of Hitler and the anti-Semites, or the struggle against fascism and anti-Semitism. Is there really a choice, when Hitlerism offers us literal extermination? It is hard to win an ally, or develop an alliance, when we are ourselves retreating. Those who themselves fight with full courage help others decide to join them in the battle. But what is this talk of retreat or advance? The real alternative is survival or annihilation. Nothing less."
"Εducation is a war industry. Teachers, especially those involved in higher education, produce a direct war material. Our product is not the cannon, or the shell, or the dive bomber, or the dreadnaught. Ours is the even more basic material-the target. Without the target, the soldier on land, sea, or air, no war could get to the shooting stage."
"the capitalist press boiling everything in the timely caldrons of hysteria"
"the war makers have tried for more than a year to persuade the American people and the American college student to become enthusiastic targets in the war, and, having failed, must now resort to extraordinary methods of intimidation and terror."
"Such students and such teachers are obviously to be regarded as a menace to reaction and its domestic and foreign policy. They have no great enthusiasm for the war. Too many of them have the habit of thinking independently, of acting in concert, of valuing democracy as a way of living rather than as a way of talking. They are organized. Any fascist, any open-shop saboteur of democracy, any labor spy could write a plan of attack for reaction, given this situation. Red-bait. Attack the union as Red-dominated. Use a few "liberals" to lend respectability to the smear. Gag the students by preventing them from hearing speakers of their own choice. Fire some of the most active teachers and trade unionists. Scare the rest. If they don't scare that easily, pin a criminal charge on one of them; if the others still don't scare, at least the charge will shake off the fence onto the side of reaction some who still stubbornly said the issue was academic freedom. These are the tactics, these are the slogans, this is the reasoning laid bare-of growing American fascism trying to coordinate its free school system."
"I studied the students' problems; I did not try to suggest solutions; I tried only to have them develop courage and confidence in the fact that our people, who have solved so many problems, can solve this one, too."
"I have seen the union transform individuals, your Honor, young men, middle-aged men, who had been very good teachers, very good scholars, who apparently had abilities that were never to be realized within the academic walls. Not everybody could become the head of a department and exhibit his administrative ability. Here in the union they became executives; they became committee members; they began to learn how to work together, and in a college it is important because scholarship in our community sets a price upon individuality, not so much upon cooperation with others. They began to learn how to work together, how to argue things out, how to settle differences, rise above individualities and beyond pettiness. I was not the only one that noticed character change, character development and growth; that, of course, had its effect upon every relationship these men went into, whether it was in the classroom, at a department meeting, or outside in public life."
"Our schools are being attacked. I hope that changed tempers and changed atmospheres, changes which, perhaps, we had little to do with, will have some bearing. There was a time when the President of our country rebuked the Dies committee for what he called its "sordid procedure." There was a time when the President of the Board of Higher Education rebuked the Dies committee for its attacks on the College. I hope the times are becoming favorable for similar truthful and courageous observations of opinion on the functioning of the Rapp-Coudert committee"
"I wish your Honor or deputies of your Honor could have gone into the college halls and gotten some of the men, some of the men who are not in any way connected with this particular situation, gotten them to describe the atmosphere now. It is what it was in 1928, where, in the faculty dining room, intelligent men did not discuss intelligent things, because they did not dare, your Honor. They discussed road maps, roads, the weather, because there was no confidence that if they discussed more serious things, whether they should be Democrats or Republicans for instance, that it might not redound to their academic disadvantage. In more recent years, the faculty, as a whole, has faced its own problems more courageously. It has given freer rein to its ability, to its intellectual curiosity, expressed its conviction. Now a pall, an intellectual pall, is settling upon the college. People do not want to be seen speaking to other people, although they are personal friends, for fear that somebody will say, "Well, so and so doesn't talk to the right people about the right things." That is not an atmosphere in which a college can flourish. My sympathy goes out to the students who have to sit before teachers who will be afraid to answer questions that will be put to them-because the students will put questions and the teachers will be afraid to answer them, not often because they do not know the answers, but because they do. Is that an atmosphere in which a college-the largest municipally supported college in the world-can such a college flourish in such an atmosphere?"
"Some men buckle under these pressures; some men and women will do anything-perhaps not understanding the consequences, not sufficiently understanding them-to realize what it is that is forcing them in this direction. They will do anything for security. They will do anything for a permanent position when they are hanging on by the skin of their teeth year after year, teaching three courses in the evening session, and so on."
"Writing in 1982 about his time in prison in the 1940s, Morris described his determination, “as a way of fighting the system, to make the most of my time there, because if there is anything I hate it is to waste time — our most precious possession...I had valued democracy, democratic rights, before I was imprisoned. I was one of those who took almost literally Lenin’s hyperbolic cry that ‘Socialist democracy is a thousand times more democratic than bourgeois democracy.’ I believed it as a True Believer. So not a thousand; let it be a hundred, or ten times. That it could turn out in practice to be less democratic than bourgeois democracy in countries calling themselves socialist... was an experience that came late and sadly. If my vision of socialism now stresses democratic rights, forms and institutions as the essence of socialism, my prison experience laid a basis for a perception that was slowly, slowly, to mature.""
"Morris U. Schappes embodied an amazing combination of stubbornness and open-mindedness, historical consciousness, and future vision. His dedication to this magazine was fierce and sacrificial, and he cultivated tremendous enthusiasm and loyalty among its readers by dint of his honesty, his analytical powers, and his consistent dedication to progressive ideals."
"In his column, “The Editor’s Diary,” Morris developed a very intimate journalistic voice in which he reported on books, plays, films and events in the progressive Jewish movement and engaged in several noteworthy controversies, including a spirited historical defense of American Jewish responses to the Holocaust and several fascinating commentaries about solidarity and tensions between American Jews and African Americans."
"We are entering a new period in the history of the American melting pot. Immigration has stopped, for one thing, and assimilation has begun. A bigger factor, however, is the great social change going on in America, a process that inevitably lines up the poor against the money-bags, the trade unionists against the exploiters, the men who battle for human rights against those who fight for property rights. Race lines vanish in such a conflict; the class issue cuts through everything. Even the Negro question is affected and will finally be settled as this fight goes on; and this question is surely the touchstone of all racial problems in America."
"This bourgeois form of art for art's sake is no longerworthy of one's comment or attack. It has only one useful purpose that I can still see: it numbs the minds of the exploiters. Let them continue to support it and be stultified."
"If Hitler consolidates his power we will see a world reaction infinitely worse than that which followed the events of 1848. Every sign of the faintest liberalism amongst the middle class intellectuals will be drowned in blood. The workers will be massacred, terrorized, forced into a medieval serfdom. It is war-time. We must close ranks or be annihilated. Hitlerism will spread over Europe and sweep America. Unless we unite. Unless there is a united front of all the workingclass parties and liberal groups. The Socialists and liberals may form such a front, leaving out the Communists. They may piously ignore the massacre of Communists, deeming themselves more respectable and hence safer. But this is a form of suicide, for Mr. Villard will find himself consigned to the hangman by an American Hitler as swiftly as any Communist. Every anti-fascist is needed in this united front. There must be no base factional quarrels. Leaders who stand in the way of a united front should be swept aside by the rank and file. We are faced with the death of the whole workingclass movement. We cannot waste time. We cannot quibble. How can anyone underestimate this thing? But I feel an apathy in America, a failure to react to the events in Germany that is appalling. Forward to the united front! There need be no hypocrisy or ignoring of basic differences. Each party and each group can retain its individuality. But at once! Let us unite to fling back Hitlerism and crush it forever!"
"Without an understanding of the economic basis of war, no one can be its determined or effective opponent. Sentimental appeals will not hold back a nation inflamed by patriotic lies. Only the man who understands clearly that he is being asked to die for J. P. Morgan's investments abroad, or the markets of the oil and machinery trusts, will be immune to the customary lies about small nations, enemy atrocities, or democracy. That is why it is so necessary to spread a knowledge of Marxian economies; that is why it is so necessary to maintain a clear-cut Marxian platform in politics, based on the realities of the class war. Prepare for the next war! Prepare by studying Marx and Lenin, by studying the Russian Revolution. Prepare to fight Wall Street, instead of dying to protect its wealth. Inoculate yourself against the liberals who will want to lead you into another capitalist war for whatever holy and subtle reason. Prepare against the Walter Lippmanns, the Rabbi Stephen Wises, the Woodrow Wilsons, Spargoes, Bohns, Scheidemanns, Eberts, Kropotkins, Albert Thomases, Arthur Hendersons, of the next war. They are in your midst now; ask them what they will do, SPECIFICALLY, when the nation is mobilized. Prepare."
"War may have depended at times in the feudal past on the whim of emperors and kings. Today it is a respectable part of Big Business. It is as premeditated as a selling campaign by a large corporation. It is the last resort of national salesmanship."
"The idea of money is so dominant in this country that anyone not part of money is made to feel ashamed."
"I have chosen the Communist discipline. Because Communism projects into the future, and not into the past, as does Fascismo, which is only a defense corps trying to save the rottenness of the past."
"There will be another World War soon. Everything we think and do in the next decade will fall within that shadow, as Walt Whitman's generation fell under the Civil War. There is no escape; there is no alternative for the writer as for other men, but struggle or suicide. One will be forced into an attitude. I prefer life. It is life that has created the Communist movement, with a philosophy so tragic and honest that it can face the thought of the next world war, prepare for it, and go on building. No prayers, or pieties, or hocus-pocus of Fascist rhetoric but the habit of facing every day the hardest facts of life; building with them, seeing beyond them, using them for a great new objective. That is the way to write well, and it is Communism."
"The dark ages had returned; modern thought was again burning in the flames of a new inquisition, the Jews again afflicted with the yellow badge of shame."
"Hitler is a demagogue who has falsified history. He succeeds because his followers are too ignorant to know that he lies. The great mass of Jews in the world today are not millionaire bankers, but paupers and workers. I have told in my book a tale of Jewish poverty in one ghetto, that of New York. The same story can be told of a hundred other ghettoes scattered over all the world. For centuries the Jew has lived in this universal ghetto. Yiddish literature is saturated with the ghetto melancholy and poverty. And Jewish bankers are fascists everywhere. Hitler has received their support, both with money and ideas. Some of his most important secret conferences were held in the home of a Jewish banker. They gave large sums to his party before he came to power. Hitler's whole program is to save the banking and profiteering capitalist system. The attack on the Jews is merely a piece of demagogy, to throw the hungry German masses off the trail of their real enemy. No, every Jew is not a millionaire. The majority of Jews belongs to the working-class and to the bankrupt lower middle class. It is natural that in the present hour so many of them are to be found in the Socialist, Communist and trade union ranks. Jewish bankers are fascists; Jewish workers are radicals; the historic class division is true among the Jews as with any other race."
"It has become necessary now in America to fight against this great fascist lie. Recently, groups of anti-Semitic demagogues have appeared in this country. They are like Hitler, telling the hungry American people that capitalism is Jewish, and that an attack on the Jews is the best way of restoring prosperity. What folly! What criminal deception and bloody fraud! And there are signs that this oldest of swindles will grow in America. The defense of the Jewish race against these fascist liars and butchers has become one of the most necessary tasks for every liberal and radical. This is not only a problem for Jews to meet; it has become the problem of the workers and farmers whose hunger the fascists try to appease with the empty husk of anti-Semitism."
"Mike Gold's initiation into the radical movement occurred in 1914 when he blundered into an unemployment demonstration in Union Square, listened to the "rebel girl" Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, and bought a copy of The Masses. Between 1915, when he contributed his first poem to Eastman's magazine, and 1921, when he joined the editorial staff of The Liberator, Gold lived the wandering and exciting life of the Bohemian-anarchist artist. He wrote three one-act plays for the Provincetown Players and spent a summer with the happy and hard-drinking group at the Cape. In New York, after attending rehearsals at the Provincetown Playhouse, he would join Eugene O'Neill and anarchist friends at a saloon on the corner of Fourth Street and Sixth Avenue, the "Hell Hole," and listen to O'Neill recite "The Hound of Heaven." Dorothy Day, a "rebel girl" of the Village and, later, the much-admired and selfless editor of the Catholic Worker, remembers at this time that she and Gold were reading Tolstoy together. "He used to make fun of my religious spirit," she wrote later, "but he himself was in sympathy with the Christianity expressed by Tolstoi, a religion without churches or a priesthood. Mike had a religious upbringing in his home on the East Side and liked to sing Yiddish folksongs and Hebrew hymns.""
"Gold is important to recover because he is one of dozens, hundreds of writers whose legacy and output was silenced by the Red Scare and Cold War. Gold’s project was to create a working-class literature written for, by, and about working-class people, and Gold understood that a working-class literature would also have to be a radical literature, and a racial literature. And he understood that such a project required conflict with a literary establishment. It would mean a literary class war."