Anti War Activists

"“I don’t know why we’re dancing around. The Congress is not getting us out of Iraq.” — On the Iraq War. Interview."

"“Because they are running for office and it’s politics as usual, business as usual. And they don’t want to rock the boat! They don’t want to rock the boat! And so they just dance around the issues and they’ll keep on doing so long as you in the media keep lifting them up. Does that answer your question Chris?” — On being asked why the media does not challenge Democrats on ending the Iraq War. Interview."

"“First off, what’s wrong with Iran acquiring nuclear devices. Truthfully, look at it. We’ve got ‘em. China’s got ‘em. India’s got ‘em. Anybody’s who’s afraid of us has got them." -- On Iran’s Nuclear Program. Interview."

"“The scourge of our present society, particularly in the African-American community, is the war on drugs. I’ll repeat again as a challenge to my colleagues on this stage, that if they really want to do something about the inner cities, if they really want to do something about what’s happening to the health of the African-American community, it’s time to end this war.”"

"“I’m the fellow that ended the draft. I’m the one that stopped the nuclear testing in the north Pacific. I’m the one that brought about the Alaska pipeline. I’m the one that released the Pentagon Papers and had to go to the Supreme Court because Richard Nixon was trying to throw me in jail. That’s what I did 28, 29, 30 years ago. That was leadership then. And I was excoriated by the media at that point. I was a loose cannon. Well, right today, I’ve had the good fortune to live this long, and people look back and say, “My God, were you a courageous leader.” Well, that’s the leadership you’ll get when I become president of the United States. Now, can the American people stand that kind of leadership? That remains to be seen.”Huffpost Debate"

"“The people must be brought into the operation of government, to make the laws that affect their lives, and thereby become the fourth check in our government’s system of checks and balances.” -- Mike Gravel on the 'National Initiative'. Video."

""George Bush communicated over a year ago that we would not leave there until he left office. What, do we not believe him? … How do you get out? You pass a law. Not a resolution, a law, making it a felony to be there." — On Gravel's plan to pull out of Iraq. Speech."

"The country is run by corporate America, particularly the military-industrial complex, the medical-industrial complex, and we do nothing about it. Look at this election and it’s all money. Follow the money, and you’ll find out what you’re going to get in the way of leadership"

"“But that’s before I had a chance to stand with them a couple of three times. It’s like the Senate. You go there and you say, ‘How the hell did I get here?’ You stay there six months, and you say, ‘How the hell did the rest of them get here?’” — On Gravel's intent to win the Presidency. Speech."

"“I gotta tell you, we should just plain get out - it’s their country, they're asking us to leave, and we insist on staying there! And why not get out?” — On the Iraq War. Speech."

"“I've advocated, people, follow the money if you want to find out what's going to happen after any one of these individuals are elected. Follow the money, because it's politics as usual is what you're seeing.”"

"“We don't need a minimum wage; we need a living wage. We don't have that in this country because of what they passed.”"

"The military-industrial complex not only controls our government lock, stock and barrel, but they control our culture."

"“You know what's worse than a soldier dying in vain? It's more soldiers dying in vain.” — On staying in Iraq. Speech."

"“Is it a surprise to anybody in this room that if you don’t have any money, you don’t get any justice? (Laughter.) Is that a surprise to you all? (Applause.) My gracious, the only way you’re going to get justice is to turn around and empower yourselves to become lawmakers so you can change the system, and there’s no thought of really changing the system today. It’s politics as usual. (Applause.)”"

"John Flynn and other America Firsters believed that government should regulate business by preventing monopolies and cartels from controlling large sectors of the economy. However, Flynn and his colleagues did not think that government itself should become a large economic power. This condition would restrict individual freedom, which was the essence of their definition of liberalism.... Flynn and his colleagues rejected Franklin D. Roosevelt’s brand of liberalism, in which government entered the economic community as a large employer and customer."

"This dangerous grant of powers to the politicians may be said—as I shall show—to be at the bottom of all our troubles-our entanglement in the brawls of other nations all over the globe, our own oppressive national debt, the swarms of political hirelings consuming our substance in every part of the country and—most serious of all—the slow but quickening creep of this great free nation into the toils of something called the Collectivist State, which is a pretty name for socialism. It may be well to remind the reader that Karl Marx, the father of modem socialism, put the income tax high up on his blueprint for destroying private enterprise and building the socialist State."

"I have watched John T. Flynn during these many years and the net answer in my mind is that he has always, with practically no exception, been a destructive rather than a constructive force. Therefore, Q.E.D., John T. Flynn should be barred hereafter from the columns of any presentable daily paper, monthly magazine or national quarterly, such as the Yale Review."

"One of the first facts we must face when we discuss the United Nations is that its members are in no sense united. The United Nations is not an instrument for preserving the peace of the world. It is an instrument for protecting a few powerful nations, chiefly Russia and Great Britain, in a dangerous racket that has led to almost all the wars in the last 150 years."

"Indeed to my mind the great, decisive factor in the choice between socialism and capitalism is that the system of production by private enterprise in a severely restrained republican-government is the only one in which men can enjoy the inestimable blessing of freedom. Socialism is impossible under any condition, but if it can be made to work at all it must be under an all-powerful State with the vast powers necessary to enforce its decrees governing every sector of our lives."

"We must rid this nation of the United Nations, which provides the communist conspiracy with a headquarters here on our own shores, and which actually makes it impossible for the United States to form its own decisions about its conduct and policies in Europe and Asia."

"Sooner or later this country must face the problem of the Negro. It is simple enough in New York. It is not so simple in Mississippi, where the Negroes almost equal the whites in number, or in Georgia, where Negroes outnumber whites in probably half the counties of the state. White supremacy is a phrase encrusted with unpleasant connotations in the North."

"Why is the Communist so deeply stirred about the Negro? Is he trying to correct injustices suffered by the Negro in order to improve his lot here and make him love America more? We know that the Communist has one supreme interest and that is to excite and stimulate the hatreds of every class in the country."

"The old Socialists, with their luminous dreams, got power in Germany after World War I, and operated a society not greatly different from that now in effect in England—partially nationalized and partially planned. It ended in fascism and Hitler, for the line between fascism and Fabian socialism is very thin. Fabian socialism is the dream. Fascism is Fabian socialism plus the inevitable dictator."

"Another oily illusion fostered by the politicians is that the ‘government needs the money.’ You will do well to keep in mind that the ‘government’ is merely a collection of rules and regulations and authorizations. It is not a human, living thing you can see or touch with your fingers. In itself it is something you can describe as a tremendous authority—a group of powers. But this authority and these powers are all in the hands of men—politicians. The government is a vast army of politicians equipped by the Constitution with great and dangerous powers.• Among these powers the most dangerous is the power of these politicians to put their hands in your pocket or your bank account or your pay check and take away a very sizeable chunk of your dollars."

"Mr. Chase does not say so and perhaps would not agree, but what they add up to is British Fabian Socialism and American National Socialist Planning, which are precisely the same under different names. The most extensive care is observed to get away from the word ‘socialism.’ This is the advice George Bernard Shaw gave the English. He admitted the English could not nationalize everything. He believed it more likely that nationalization would become the rule and private enterprise the exception. And he urged that we stop talking nonsense about socialism and set to work to nationalizing various things and make an end of insisting on what it shall be called."

"This odd effect was due to the fact that a new Socialist enterprise entered the market. It took over Fabian socialism as its product, but it found a new and attractive brand name for its goods. It was called the Planned Economy."

"The Communist, in our domestic affairs, is a menace to the extent that he is the partner—and often a very effective partner—of the Fabian Socialist. The real enemy we must identify and fight at every cross-road and at all points is the American edition of the British Fabian Socialist, who is engaged in a sneak attack here as his comrades were in England, who denies that he is a Socialist and who operates behind a mask which he calls National Planning."

"There is another frightful blunder which the Socialists have committed. In taking over the railroads, the coal industry and others, they have bought the properties outright from the corporations and stockholders who owned them. They have paid for them with British bonds paying three per cent interest. With each new industry taken over, the government has added another mass of obligations to its already crushing national debt. Now the folly of this lies in the fact that, under the old order, the stockholders had no claim for profit if none were made by the industry. But all these stocks—pure risk investments—have been converted into government bonds—which are a fixed charge upon the government, whether the industry makes a profit or not. And as all these industries have been operating at a greater or lesser loss, the government has had to find in taxes the means of paying this debt."

"We can match every one of these blunders among our American planners. When they occur the critics point to the stupidity of the planners. But I think the fault lies rather in the fact that the mind of man, which is after all a very limited instrument, is utterly inadequate for comprehending the vast amount of data and all the innumerable conditions which would have to be grasped in order to make plans for a whole nation. It simply cannot be done. It is conceivable that it may be done in some half-bungling way in a society where an absolute dictator runs the show and has the means not only of enforcing complete compliance but of shutting off all criticism. It can never be done in a society of free men where criticism cannot be silenced and where compliance cannot be enforced."

"Norman Thomas, in particular, has won a unique place for himself in the good opinion of the American people because of his courage, his complete honesty and his great power on the platform as a champion not merely of the Socialist philosophy but of many fine human causes. At one time it had built a considerable propaganda ma-chine. It had the People's House in New York with its large Socialist library and the Rand School which was the center of its educational activity. But it was an honest movement run by honest men who offered socialism to the people and called it by its true name. But Americans made it plain they did not want that. In England the old Fabians, as we have seen, never offered socialism as such. They peddled one product at a time, always omitting the Socialist label."

"But the ringleaders in that organization are the men who must be identified as infinitely more dangerous to the civilization of this country than the small group of Red birds of passage against whom they were fulminating. For it is they who are plotting to wipeout the traditional political and economic civilization of this country and to supplant it with a system of organized social life on the Fabian model. They wrap themselves in a mantle they call anti-communism. But they are pro-Socialist. They are not willing, of course, publicly to concede that. They are Planners. That is, they are Socialist Planners—and unless they are identified, recognized for what they are and are stopped they will destroy this country."

"Fascism has departed from Germany, but a hybrid system of socialism and capitalism in chains has come to England, which is called social democracy but is on its way to Fascism with all the controls without which such a system cannot exist. And in America the price of the war is that fatal deformity of our own economic and political system which Roosevelt effected under the impact of the war necessities."

"These two baleful mistakes gave Franklin Roosevelt a power which he used ruthlessly. He used it to break down the power of the states and to move that power to Washington and to break down the power of Congress and concentrate it in the hands of the executive. The end of these two betrayals—the smashing of our economic system and the twisting of our political system—can only be the Planned Economic State, which, either in the form of Communism or Fascism, dominates the entire continent of Europe today. The capitalist system cannot live under these conditions. Free representative government cannot survive a Planned Economy. Such an economy can be managed only by a dictatorial government capable of enforcing the directives it issues. The only result of our present system—unless we reverse the drift—must be the gradual extension of the fascist sector and the gradual disappearance of the system of free enterprise under a free representative government."

"We have, as a consequence, been making war on the Communists. This has had one very serious by-product. It has dramatized the American Communist Party and its dupes as the chief internal enemy of our economic system and our form of government. And it is widely feared that a crisis here would present our native Communists with their great opportunity."

"I insist that if every Communist in America were rounded up and liquidated, the great menace to our form of social organization would be still among us. I do not mean to underestimate the danger from the Communists. They are interested at the moment in serving the purposes of the great enemy of the whole western world—Russia. They are a traitorous bloc in our midst and they have frightening potentialities for harm in our foreign relations."

"That was a perfect description of Europe in the years immediately preceding and following the First World War. And out of these vexations and dislocations came Communism in one place, fascism in others and social-democracies, so-called, in others, which were really societies one-fourth socialist, three-fourths capitalist, administered by socialist ministries winding the chains of bureaucratic planning around the strong limbs of private enterprise."

"All the government planning involved government spending. And that involved heavy taxation and debt. Taxes and debt were supposed to be an evil and were certainly unpopular. But now came the new theory that governments could borrow al-most indefinitely, that government borrowing was a good thing, that government debt was not a burden, did not have to be paid and was, literally, an unmixed blessing."

"Fascism will come at the hands of perfectly authentic Americans, as violently against Hitler and Mussolini as the next one, but who are convinced that the present economic system is washed up and that the present political system in America has outlived its usefulness and who wish to commit this country to the rule of the bureaucratic state; interfering in the affairs of the states and cities; taking part in the management of industry and finance and agriculture; assuming the role of great national banker and investor, borrowing billions every year and spending them on all sorts of projects through which such a government can paralyze opposition and command public support; marshaling great armies and navies at crushing costs to support the industry of war and preparation for war which will become our greatest industry; and adding to all this the most romantic adventures in global planning, regeneration, and domination all to be done under the authority of a powerfully centralized government in which the executive will hold in effect all the powers with Congress reduced to the role of a debating society. There is your fascist. And the sooner America realizes this dreadful fact the sooner it will arm itself to make an end of American fascism masquerading under the guise of the champion of democracy."

"If we will look over the scene in America we will see clearly enough that, despite many differences in the character, customs, laws, traditions, resources of the peoples of Italy, Germany, and America, we have been drifting along identical courses and under the influence of the same essential forces. We have been moving away from free enterprise and from the essential features of constitutional government… We have, without knowing it, been turning first to one and then another of those devices for escaping our economic difficulties to which Italy and Germany turned before us."

"It is born in crisis, lives on crisis, and cannot survive the era of crisis. By the very law of its nature it must create for itself, if it is to continue, fresh crisis from year to year. Mussolini came to power in the postwar crisis and became himself a crisis in Italian life. . . . Hitler's story is the same. And our future is all charted out upon the same turbulent road of permanent crisis."

"However, a great deal may be done without constitutional amendment. Here is another point at which we will do well to choose our words with caution. The words dictatorship and totalitarianism are used very loosely as perfectly synonymous. This is not so. The totalitarian government is one which possesses in itself the total sovereignty of the nation. In our government that total sovereignty resides in the people. Only parts of it are delegated through the Constitution to the federal government. A very great part of it— indeed the greatest part—is reserved to the states. And very vital portions of the sovereignty are delegated neither to federal government nor to states but are held wholly by the people."

"We have now managed to acquire bases all over the world—islands as distant as the Australian Archipelago which President Roosevelt seized in 1938 without so much as a by-your-leave from Congress. There is no part of the world where trouble can break out where we do not have bases of some sort in which, if we wish to use the pretension, we cannot claim our interests are menaced. Thus menaced there must remain when the war is over a continuing argument in the hands of the imperialists for a vast naval establishment and a huge army ready to attack anywhere or to resist an attack from all the enemies we shall be obliged to have. Because always the most powerful argument for a huge army maintained for economic reasons is that we have enemies. We must have enemies. They will become an economic necessity for us."

"In 1933, suddenly, with little or no consideration in the great disorder and fever of the collapse, Congress passed the National Recovery Act. That act authorized the President to bring about a complete and comprehensive organization of industry and to make rules and regulations governing every phase of its activities. Under practically every category of industry and finance the entire nation was organized into what the Italians would call ‘corporatives’; what we called code authorities. These code authorities, under the authority of the President, were empowered to make rules, to regulate production, prices, distribution, competition in all its phases. These regulations had the force of law and under them men could be hauled into court on civil and criminal liabilities. Some men were actually jailed for violating them. It is, I think, a fair statement that the President, under the NRA, exercised the right to make laws over at least half, if not more, of the domain within which Congress ordinarily legislates. The Supreme Court, in a unanimous decision, declared this law unconstitutional and based its opinion entirely on the proposition that Congress had delegated its legislative power to the President, who in turn had delegated it to the code authorities."

"This was a plan (NRA and AAA) to take the whole industrial and agricultural life of the country under the wing of the government, organize it into vast farm and industrial cartels, as they were called in Germany, corporatives as they were called in Italy, and operate business and the farms under plans made and carried out under the super-vision of the government. This is the complete negation of liberalism. It is, in fact, the essence of fascism. Fascism goes only one step further and insists, logically, that this cannot be done by a democratic government; that it can be done successfully only under a totalitarian regime."

"It is not necessary here to go into the details of the National Recovery Administration (NRA). It was based, not consciously but in fact, almost wholly on the principle of the guild or corporative system which Mussolini was in process of perfecting at that very time... It suspended the anti-trust laws which the President had vowed to enforce."

"When fascism comes it will not be in the form of an anti-American movement or pro-Hitler bund, practicing disloyalty. Nor will it come in the form of a crusade against war. It will appear rather in the luminous robes of flaming patriotism; it will take some genuinely indigenous shape and color, and it will spread only because its leaders, who are not yet visible, will know how to locate the great springs of public opinion and desire and the streams of thought that flow from them and will know how to attract to their banners leaders who can command the support of the controlling minorities in American public life. The danger lies not so much in the would-be Führers who may arise, but in the presence in our midst of certain deeply running currents of hope and appetite and opinion. The war upon fascism must be begun there."

"The enemy aggressor is always pursuing a course of larceny, murder, rapine, and barbarism. We are always moving forward with high mission, a destiny imposed by the Deity to regenerate our victims while incidentally capturing their markets, to civilize savage and senile and paranoidal peoples while blundering accidentally into their oil wells or metal mines."

"Hitler said: ‘We shall banish want. We shall banish fear. The essence of National Socialism is human welfare. There must be cheap Volkswagen for workers to ride in, broad Reich Autobahns for the Volkswagen. National Socialism is the Revolution of the Common Man. Rooted in a fuller life for every German from childhood to old age, National Socialism means a new day of abundance at home and a Better World Order abroad.’"

"The so-called Christian virtues of humility, love, charity, personal freedom, the strong prohibitions against violence, murder, stealing, lying, cruelty—all these are washed away by war. The greatest hero is the one who kills the most people. Glamorous exploits in successful lying and mass stealing and heroic vengeance are rewarded with decorations and public acclaim."