Anti War Activists

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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 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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"In the presence of a government which had enlarged its power over the lives and the thoughts and opinions of citizens and which did not hesitate to use that power, the whole citizenry was intimidated. Editors, writers, commentators were intimidated. Men whose opinions did not conform to the reigning philosophy were driven from the air, from magazines and newspapers. While American citizens who were moved by a deep and unselfish devotion to the ideals of this Republic—however wrong-headed that may be in the light of the new modes of ‘freedom’—were forced into silence, the most blatant and disruptive revolutionary lovers of the systems of both fascism and Communism and that illegitimate offspring of both—Red fascism—were lording it over our minds."

"Mussolini and Hitler, of course, realized that a system like this, which undertakes to impose a vast complex of decrees upon a people while subjecting them to confiscatory taxes to support the immense activities of the State cannot be operated save by an absolute government that has the power to enforce compliance. Actually this system had spread over Europe. For nearly 70 years all the countries in Europe, with Germany in the lead, had been experimenting with the baleful idea of the security State, the State which attempts to provide its people with jobs and protection from all the hazards of life. After World War I, the dominance of this idea over the populations of every European state became complete and every state in Europe was riding, before World War II, hell-bent for bankruptcy under the impossible burden of meeting these obligations."

"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."

"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 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."

"Roosevelt, through a combination of events and influences, fell deeper and deeper into the toils of various revolutionary operators, not because he was interested in revolution but because he was interested in votes."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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, 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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"Like liberals, anarchists want freedom; like socialists, anarchists want equality. But we are not satisfied by liberalism alone or by socialism alone. Freedom without equality means that the poor and the weak are less free than the rich and strong, and equality without freedom means that we are all slaves together. Freedom and equality are not contradictory, but complementary."

"Freedom is not genuine if some people are too poor or too weak to enjoy it, and equality is not genuine if some people are ruled by others. The crucial contribution to political theory made by anarchists is this realization that freedom and equality are in the end the same thing."

"David [Icke] brought me to tears. I think it was the Wembley show, but [I'm] just not sure which one it was. He had everything spelled out right. His experience exactly matched my experience. His prescription exactly matched my prescription, and his vision exactly matched mine. His diagnosis of the culprits exactly matched mine. [...] It brought me to tears, because I couldn't believe that someone else could see through the mirage of... [...] I guess I should call it a matrix, you know, because some people are buried deeply inside the matrix, and some of us took the red pill and we see the world as it is, and we see the people who are calling the shots. The only thing is there's not enough of us who have taken the red pill yet... I guess."

"We also need an energy policy. War is not an acceptable energy policy. But certainly, if Canada can satisfy all of their space heating needs with solar energy, then so, too, can we. And I’d love to see the old buildings that have been abandoned in community after community across this country become teeming centers of employment so that people are actually able to manufacture the green technology that this country needs in order to relieve us of our dependence on oil. We don’t need to drill."

"I also call for the nationalization of the Federal Reserve and the establishment of a banking system, a nationalized banking system, that really responds to the needs of people and our country. Our country needs investment in infrastructure, in manufacturing and in greening our economy, and that could be accomplished through such a banking system that belongs to the American people."

"the issues that I’ve been talking about as I’ve gone around this country have been the tremendous impact that the Bush tax cuts have had on income inequality in our country. The sad fact of the matter is that we are experiencing the kind of income inequality not experienced since the Great Depression."

"I would also just like to say I agree that US corporations should not receive tax subsidies for moving jobs overseas, and that’s a piece of legislation that I actually introduced when I was in the Congress."

"I don’t believe that FOX News ought to be setting the agenda for the Congress."

"I’ve been talking about the need to repeal the PATRIOT Acts, so that we can safeguard our civil liberties, protect the Constitution and the Bill of Rights."

"I’ve put together a fourteen-point plan, which is available on our website runcynthiarun.org. And in those fourteen points is included a elimination of adjustable rate mortgages, predatory lending, and any of the discriminatory practices that helped to fuel the crisis that we’re experiencing. In addition to that, I also call for the elimination of derivatives trading, which is one of the major problems."

"I agree with Ralph Nader that we need to repeal NAFTA and all of those so-called free trade agreements, but they are — they don’t constitute fair trade. And with respect to Colombia, I can say that not only have I been to Colombia, I have seen the devastation of the militarization of our policy, particularly with Colombia, and the displacement particularly of the Afro-Colombian communities across that country."

"why is it that we are not talking about poverty in this country? Why is it that we’re not talking about cutting the money that we give to the Pentagon? The Pentagon has already admitted that it lost 2.3 trillion of our dollars. Where is the accountability? And why is it that the values that are so easily expressed in public policy are the ones that say we have to cut social programs, we have to ask people who are losing their life’s investment in their homes in this subprime mortgage crisis, that they’re the ones who have to tighten their belts?"

"during the time of Martin Luther King Jr. transformation from a civil rights figure, trying to secure the rights of all people in this country, and then moving that into the economic realm to challenge the budget and policy priorities of the United States Congress in the Poor People’s Campaign, he was murdered, and that –— those efforts were cut short with the active participation of people in the media who literally hounded him for the last five years of his life. Is that what we expect to happen to people who voice their dissent in our country?"

"our values are, first and foremost, peace. The values that we have to express are ending the disparities, the glaring disparities based on race and class that exist in our country."

"What we must encourage is a relationship with countries around the world, where we engage in fair trade, not free trade; we pay a fair price for the resources and other things that we need; we respect human rights, labor rights, environmental rights; and we repeal these agreements that have been implemented so far."

"I’ve learned that there is a community of people who have found that life is possible outside of the two-party paradigm. They have searched for resolution of issues that are of grave concern to them, and they have not found it within the two-party-system. But that has sometimes meant that they would withdraw from electoral — the electoral process altogether. And so, we have a whole huge swath of the potential electorate who don’t even vote at all."

"I have to tell you that I supported Nancy Pelosi for most of my political tenure in the United States Congress, and it was quite a disappointment for her to take impeachment off the table."

"starting in 1968, many of them have said that the treatment of the Democratic Party of people, their children, basically, who were outside of the Democratic National Convention and who wanted only to express their opposition to the Vietnam War, that was a tipping point for them. Others have experienced — have said that 9/11 truth is a tipping point for them. The failure of the Democratic Party to support impeachment, which is really the ultimate form of accountability in our system, is a tipping point for them."

"I support single-payer healthcare system in this country"

"I reject the continuation of the occupation of Iraq and, of course, reject any surge into Afghanistan. There was silence over the most recent US raid over Syria, the incursions into Pakistan, the virtual blaming of Russia for a provocation that actually was initiated by Georgia, the push to include NATO membership for countries that are right up to the border of Russia and China. Then, of course, I would never have been for the bailout, put out my own fourteen points with respect to the bailout, would never have supported FISA, the illegal spying, the unwarranted spying on US citizens, and at the same time granting of immunity to telecoms that were complicit in that. There are many areas of disagreement with the Obama administration."

"I was with people who are trying to form a support committee to support the aspirations and the votes of people in Latin America who have really produced change by the power of the ballot, and looking at supporting Evo Morales in Bolivia and Hugo Chavez, of course, in Venezuela. But, of course, we’ve also got Daniel Ortega now in Nicaragua. So we’ve had a succession of successes, really, demonstrating that it is possible to vote one’s fears and to vote one’s dreams and hopes and aspirations and win."

"In 2000, when people went to the polls, when the voters went to the polls, they were met with confusing ballots, manipulation of the voter lists, electronic voting machines that didn’t work, inappropriately or ineffectively or poorly trained officials who weren’t familiar with the workings of those machines, and we know what the problems with those machines have been and are."

"the Green Party has four pillars on which all of its policy recommendations lie. And that is, they are social justice, ecological wisdom, peace and grassroots democracy. So that means that our foreign policy, our domestic policy, our public policy, in general, would focus on the well-being of the people, on the well-being of this planet."

"Gus Savage was a black member of Congress who was targeted by the pro-Israel lobby. And he had the foresight as an incumbent in the House of Representatives to put his experience on the Congressional Record."

"There is no more special interest that has any more influence than the pro Israel lobby. So then when I did outreach for example to the Muslim community in the United States I bopped into the pro Israeli lobby which of course does not want to have to contend with a politicized Muslim community which is as large as and is as wealthy as the pro Israeli lobby is in the United States. So, yes I first handedly and also frontally was assaulted by the presence of the pro Israeli lobby. Well, politically assaulted to such an extent that my father had to ask the question publically, 'what does stoned mountain Georgia have to do with Israel? What I was doing was servicing the needs of my constituents and I was not allowed to do that because I did not toe the line on US policy for Israel. .. every candidate for Congress at that time had a pledge. They were given a pledge to sign and I was new on the scene and the pledge had Jerusalem as the capital city, the military superiority of Israel .. If you do not sign the pledge, you do not get money .. You make a commitment that you would vote to support the military superiority of Israel that the economic assistant that Israel wants that you would vote to provide that."