Anti War Activists

"It's in those moments that you start to think about being white and male and over thirty and too smart for your own fuckin good. You start to get pretty down in the dumps sometimes. Besides, every group was into calling the other an imposter and fights were breaking out all over the place. The left was moving into Stalinism and the hippies were moving to the country (as usual). It was mighty lonely on the fence."

"Every group was broke cause the liberal bulge that used to support most radical causes was off on some other trip, playing around with anti-ABM campaigns and sending food to Biafra. Even though they wept and shed some blood in the streets of Chicago, they were gone for good - gone with their money. Our revolution was becoming too radical or crazy or violent or young. We were fuckin up their cocktail parties and it mattered not the blood we were shedding or the growing fascism in the country. New ways had to be found to get bread cause the days of the mailings and benefits were over. In fact, for the Yippies, they had never even begun."

"For a revolution, in order to be a true revolution, must be a world revolution. To achieve that world revolution, you the children of the Yankees must lend a hand. You must vomit forth your cynicism in the streets of your cities. You must mount an unrelenting attack on everything the bastards that rule your country hold dear. You must refuse to serve in their armies, you must reject the heroin offered in their universities, you must become clogs in their productive machines."

"Your universities teach you to be eternal cynics, a cynicism that can be only drowned in alcohol and diet pills and psychoanalysts and golf. Forget your cynicism. There is not one who has more respect for life than a revolutionist."

"It's July fifteenth, 2 a.m. on a farm somewhere in Ann Arbor, Michigan. It's a beautiful warm night, filled with a starry blue sky waiting for the astronauts to violate its silence. Lying on your back you can look up and repeat all the old hippy cliches to yourself about dropping out and heading for the country. Why not? After all, on a clear night in New York City up on my roof I can sometimes see two stars and Anita jokes about how they must be attached to a long electric wire that comes out of the Con Ed building across the street, for there are no clear nights in New York. There is an underground newspaper conference going on at the farm. It's a good place to start describing some of the changes that have gone down in the hop community over the past few years. For the underground press is the molder and chronicler of the amorphous body of long -haired freaks you see sticking their tongue out at you in the TV news at night or luring your daughter to a rock-and-roll dance in the park."

"LONG LIVE THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION!"

"The Beatles may be more popular than Jesus but heavy cats like Chairman Mao, Uncle Ho, and beautiful long-haired Che Guevara are more popular than The Beatles."

"God, I'd like to fuck Janis Joplin!!"

"Some day we too will fly off in some communal capsule, Blacks, Puerto Ricans, Hippies, liberated women, young workers on the line, and G.I.'s sitting in stockades because they don't want to go to Vietnam. There will be a whole mess of us laughing and getting stoned on our way to OUTERSPACE, and the first thing we're gonna do out there is to rip down that fuckin flag on the moon."

"One tries not to be cynical; after all, they are jumping around on the fuckin moon and no matter what you think of PIG NATION, you have to admit that it dies have a good special effects department."

"WOODSTOCK NATION is built on ELECTRICITY. It is our energy, music, politics, school, religion, play, battleground and our sensuality. I hesitate only in using the word Morality, for Morality means soul and ELECTRICITY lack soul but so too does the wood pen I scratch against the yellow pad. Morality rests in God's imagination and if we see ourselves as gods I guess we alone make those choices. Moral decisions never rest in our tools, be they electricity or pencils, flowers, or guns."

"I think this is a pile of shit, while John Sinclair rots in prison."

"In Woodstock Nation there are no writers—only poet-warriors."

"I think, if England had had a Lucy Stone League she might still be Dora Black."

"Women must not merely imitate men. Women have more to give than performing any job in society like neutered robots. Those who talk today of rousing the 'consciousness' of women contribute an idea of real importance. It was such a grievous mistake to leave out women. For whence can come love, compassion and understanding if not out of the relations of men and women and of them to their children?"

"Nothing whatever is to be gained by driving the timorous and weak by lies or compulsion into pain which they will resent and responsibility which they will evade. Everything is to be gained by training a woman in knowledge, courage, and physical strength, and leaving it then to her own instinct and her mind to tell her that to create new human beings is worth the discomfort and the suffering she must necessarily undergo. Those in whom the courage to create survives when choice is free and all the facts are known are those best fitted to bring children into the world, and breed in them eagerness and intrepidity. The others will only pass on fear and distaste for life from which individuals and the community suffer far too much already."

"All my life I have tried to do too many different things. I wonder if this is not a perpetual dilemma for women. A man enters on a job or profession, needs to stick to it to earn his living, and is unlikely to have to change it on marriage. For a woman marriage presents not only practical problems, but she finds herself emotionally pulled all ways, and tends by tradition and impulse to put the needs of others before her own. What is more, opening her eyes on the world, she feels intensely responsible for setting it to rights."

"Marriage laws, the police, armies and navies are the mark of human incompetence. We have not yet found the right road to conquering ourselves and our environment."

"Art that means anything in the life of a community must bear some relation to current interpretations of the mystery of the universe. Our rigid separation of the humanities and the sciences has temporarily left our art stranded or stammering and incoherent. Both art and science ought to be blended in our early education of our children's emotions and powers of observation, and that harmony carried forward in later education."

"Strictly speaking, no person who believes that wars between classes and nations are inevitable is fit to be in charge of the destiny of children. To believe in the unity of the human race and get children to believe it in early youth would mean the creation of that unity and the end of war."

"It has taken us centuries of thought and mockery to shake the medieval system; thought and mockery here and now are required to prevent the mechanists from building another. Without falling into a mystical vitalism that reverences organic nature as sacred, we can at least try rather to serve than to subdue the prancing seas of life. With this in view I have taken as impulses, instincts, or needs certain driving forces in the human species as we know it at present, and argued for such social and economic changes as will give them new, free, and varied expression. To take even this first step towards a happy society is a herculean task. After it has been accomplished, generations to come will see what the creature will do next. We none of us know; and we should be thoroughly on our guard against all those who pretend that they do."

"We do not want our world to perish. But in our quest for knowledge, century by century, we have placed all our trust in a cold, impartial intellect which only brings us nearer to destruction. We have heeded no wisdom offering guidance. Only by learning to love one another can our world be saved. Only love can conquer all."

"We have never yet had a Labour Government that knew what taking power really means; they always act like second-class citizens."

"Humanity will ever seek but never attain perfection. Let us at least survive and go on trying."

"Feminists have emphasized for a long time the importance of each woman’s individual entity and the necessity of economic independence. Perhaps it was necessary. But now I think we need some emphasis on the instinctive side of life, sex and motherhood.... Life isn’t all earning your living. Unfortunately we fall in love and Feminism must take that into consideration."

"We want better reasons for having children than not knowing how to prevent them. Nor should we represent motherhood as something so common and easy that everyone can go through it without harm or suffering and rear her children competently and well."

"Natasha has just come up to the window from the courtyard and opened it wider so that the air may enter more freely into my room. I can see the bright green strip of grass beneath the wall, and the clear blue sky above the wall, and sunlight everywhere. Life is beautiful. Let the future generations cleanse it of all evil, oppression and violence, and enjoy it to the full."

"Esteban Volkov, Trotsky’s 93-year old grandson, has recently denounced the series as “a political assault, masked as historical drama” and “a justification of the murder of the ‘monster’ called Trotsky.” The Latin American edition of the Spanish newspaper El Pais has described the series as the “second assassination of Leon Trotsky” and rejected its portrayal of the revolutionary “as a sadist, a complete traitor, and as a puppet.”"

"Joseph Stalin's rise was the result of Trotsky and Vladimir Lenin's policies which undermined working class democracy in favour of the Party bureaucracy. Before he was in power, Trotsky even warned of the dangers of Lenin's strategy, warning in 1904 that "these methods lead, as we shall see below, to the Party organisation 'substituting' itself for the Party, the Central Committee substituting itself for the Party organisation, and finally the dictator substituting himself for the Central Committee". But while he was in power, he supported these methods, for example banning all other political parties, banning factions in the party in 1921, and purging and executing rivals. In the end he was outmanoeuvred, purged, and himself assassinated on Stalin's orders."

"Trotsky explained that a nationalised planned economy needs democracy as the human body needs oxygen."

"The glories of his revolutionary triumph pale before the nobility of his later defeats. The spirit of man was irrepressible in him. Colonel Robins, the American Red Cross representative in Petrograd, pronounced history's verdict: "A four-kind son-of-a-bitch, but the greatest Jew since Jesus Christ.""

"It was Trotsky who created the armies; chose the officers; determined the strategy; and inspired the soldiers. Every interference by the Soviet Government was a mistake; and the greatest mistake was the campaign against Poland, which Trotsky opposed. The achievement was not only one of organization. It was the impact of a fiery personality, the sparks from which flew round the world."

"Trotsky carried to excess the weakness of the intellectual in politics. He was ruthless in stating principles; he was soft and indifferent in questions of personality."

"Any scrap of Trotsky's writing is worth having. He can always provide the biting comment, the brilliant pen-portrait."

"When Victor Adler objected to Berchtold, foreign minister of Austria-Hungary, that war would provoke revolution in Russia, even if not in the Habsburg monarchy, he replied: "And who will lead this revolution? Perhaps Mr. Bronstein [Trotsky] sitting over there at the Cafe Central?""

"The part which Stalin played in the Nazis' seizure of power in Germany was considerable. As Leon Trotsky said in 1936: 'Without Stalin there would have been no Hitler, there would have been no Gestapo!' (Bulletin of the Opposition (BO), Nos. 52-53, October 1936) Another statement he made in November 1938 reveals Trotsky's shrewdness and his knowledge of the point at issue. 'Stalin finally untied Hitler's hands, as well as those of his enemies, and thereby pushed Europe towards war.' He said this at a time when Chamberlain was rejoicing that there would be no war, Mussolini was regarding himself as a peacemaker and Hitler still had no intention of issuing a directive to attack Poland, even less France. At the moment when Europe was heaving a sigh of relief in the belief that there would be no war, Trotsky already knew both that war would quickly come and who would be to blame for it."

"In the early 1920s, the Communists believed, a priori, that Germany and other European countries were ripe for internal revolution, and indeed Germany was not far from going Communist in these years. But later on, these hopes died, and Stalin, particularly after the ouster of the fanatic Trotsky, who always wanted immediate revolutions everywhere, settled down to calm concentration on “socialism in one country.”"

"We entered Trotsky's study. He stood up and greeted us warmly. He is a small man, and his once famous black beard is now white. But his eyes blaze and sparkle with the cold, steady blue of the Swiss lakes—or of sharp steel. He prefers to speak French, but can speak excellent English. I might add that a very shining revolver lay on his desk between us. [...] I'd come prepared so I shot questions at him. I asked him about Mayor Hague, about Roosevelt, about Democracy, about the future of Europe, about Russia about his plans. He was tired, but he was dynamic. Something hypnotic leaps at you from this small, and really very amazing man. Now I couldn't be a Communist, not ever, but I believe Leon Trotsky could hypnotize anybody to his way during an hour's conversation. You would leave feeling that he was right about everything, and only recover when you had time to think it all over."

"Trotsky, except for his piercing eyes, looked like a retired Brooklyn waiter. His English was Brooklynese; his Yiddish was excellent. His greeting to us was cordial and thoroughly bourgeois. (He was flattered by my request that he autograph his books and returned the compliment by asking for my autograph.) He offered us cigars and cigarettes. For Jeannie there was cocoa; for us, beer or coffee. The room was neat and filled with mementoes, photographs that looked like stills from a Sergei Eisenstein film. There was no indication that, to use a phrase out of every gangster film, a contract had been given out on him. No indication save one: A pearl-handled revolver lay on the paper- and book-covered desk."

"Raya Dunayevskaya says Natalia Trotsky went further than Trotsky"

"[Trotsky] was an intellectual who never asked himself such a simple question as: ‘What reason do I have to believe that the economic condition of workers under socialism will be better than under capitalism?’"

"The fog of lies and misinformation that surrounds such subjects as the Ukraine famine, the Spanish civil war, Russian policy in Poland, and so forth, is not due entirely to conscious dishonesty, but any writer or journalist who is fully sympathetic for the U.S.S.R. — sympathetic, that is, in the way the Russians themselves would want him to be — does have to acquiesce in deliberate falsification on important issues. I have before me what must be a very rare pamphlet, written by Maxim Litvinoff in 1918 and outlining the recent events in the Russian Revolution. It makes no mention of Stalin, but gives high praise to Trotsky, and also to Zinoviev, Kamenev, and others. What could be the attitude of even the most intellectually scrupulous Communist towards such a pamphlet? At best, the obscurantist attitude of saying that it is an undesirable document and better suppressed. And if for some reason it were decided to issue a garbled version of the pamphlet, denigrating Trotsky and inserting references to Stalin, no Communist who remained faithful to his party could protest. Forgeries almost as gross as this have been committed in recent years. But the significant thing is not that they happen, but that, even when they are known about, they provoke no reaction from the left-wing intelligentsia as a whole. The argument that to tell the truth would be ‘inopportune’ or would ‘play into the hands of’ somebody or other is felt to be unanswerable, and few people are bothered by the prospect of the lies which they condone getting out of the newspapers and into the history books."

"When one considers the elaborate forgeries that have been committed in order to show that Trotsky did not play a valuable part in the Russian civil war, it is difficult to feel that the people responsible are merely lying. More probably they feel that their own version was what happened in the sight of God, and that one is justified in rearranging the records accordingly."

"[Trotsky] knew Yiddish, and if at a later date, in his autobiography, he pretends to know nothing about Jews and Judaism, then this is nothing but a plain lie. He who had visited at Cafe Arkaden [in Vienna] for years on end must have mastered both these matters to perfection. The language in greatest use at that Cafe was - besides 'Viennese-German' - Yiddish."

"All essential items in Trotsky's programme were in perfect agreement with the policies of Stalin. Trotsky advocated the industrialization of Russia. It was this that Stalin's Five-Year Plans aimed at. Trotsky advocated the collectivization of agriculture. Stalin established the Kolkhoz and liquidated the Kulaks. Trotsky favoured the organization of a big army. Stalin organized such an army. Neither was Trotsky when still in power a friend of democracy. He was, on the contrary, a fanatical supporter of dictatorial oppression of all "saboteurs." It is true, he did not anticipate that the dictator could consider him, Trotsky, author of Marxian tracts and veteran of the glorious extermination of the Romanovs, as the most wicked saboteur. Like all other advocates of dictatorship, he assumed that he himself or one of his intimate friends would be the dictator... The truth is that Trotsky found only one fault with Stalin: that he, Stalin, was the dictator and not himself, Trotsky. In their feud they both were right. Stalin was right in maintaining that his regime was the embodiment of socialist principles. Trotsky was right in asserting that Stalin's regime had made Russia a hell."

"Socialist authors promise not only wealth for all, but also happiness in love for everybody, the full physical and spiritual development of each individual, the unfolding of great artistic and scientific talents in all men, etc. Only recently Trotsky stated in one of his writings that in the socialist society "the average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx. And above this ridge new peaks will rise.” The socialist paradise will be the kingdom of perfection, populated by completely happy supermen. All socialist literature is full of such nonsense. But it is just this nonsense that wins it the most supporters."

"Reference to the conditions that have developed in Russia and Hungary under Soviet rule proves nothing. What we have there is nothing but a picture of the destruction of an existing order of social production, for which a closed peasant household economy has been substituted. All branches of production depending on social division of labor are in a state of entire dissolution. What is happening under the rule of Lenin and Trotsky is merely destruction and annihilation. Whether, as the liberals hold, socialism must inevitably draw these consequences in its train, or whether, as the socialists retort, this is only a result of the fact that the Soviet Republic is attacked from without, is a question of no interest to us in this context. All that has to be established is the fact that the Soviet socialist commonwealth has not even begun to discuss the problem of economic calculation, nor has it any cause to do so. For where things are still produced for the market in Soviet Russia in spite of governmental prohibitions, they are valued in terms of money, for there exists to that extent private ownership of the means of production, and goods are sold against money. Even the government cannot deny the necessity, which it confirms by increasing the amount of money in circulation, of retaining a monetary system for at least the transition period."

"Here's to the day when the complete works of Leon Trotsky are published and widely distributed in the Soviet Union. On that day the USSR will have achieved democracy!"

"After 1905 thousands of Bundists and other revolutionaries (from socialist-Zionists to Bolsheviks) made their way to New York and infused the existing Jewish labor movement with new energy and ideas...Even die-hard opponents of independent Jewish political movements, such as Leon Trotsky, could not resist the pull of New York's Jewish labor movement. In early 1917 one could often see Trotsky holding forth among immigrant Jews in Café Monopole on Ninth Street or read his articles in the daily Forverts and monthly Di tsukunft"

"When Trotsky, in the first weeks of his regime, threatened opponents with an ingenious gadget that shortens a person "only by the length of a head," one may have dismissed the remark as a bad joke from a temperamental orator trying to cut the figure of a Robespierre. A few months passed and the tasteless joke became harsh reality, the difference being that, in "liberated" Russia, now instead of the chop of the bourgeois guillotine, "socialist" bullets whistle from Latvian rifles."