Socialists From The United States

"To my thinking the honorable thing now is to show solidarity with Hezbollah as the US and Israel target it for liquidation. Indeed, looking back my chief regret is that I wasn’t even more forceful in publicly defending Hezbollah against terrorist intimidation and attack."

"There are a large number of claims circulating about rampant anti-Semitism on college campuses. When you go actually go through the records, talk to the schools, speak to the deans and so forth, all of these claims turn out to be fraudulent. There’s just no record of this so-called rampant anti-Semitism on college campuses. The most striking example is Columbia University where [...] pro-Israel outsiders were disrupting the classrooms of these professors [falsely accued of anti-Semitism], secretly video-taping their lectures and being turned, as the Columbia Report put it, into informers for the pro-Israel lobby. The real story was the harassment of professors who were critical of Israeli policy."

"That said, sometimes I feel that Israel has come out of the boils of the hell, a satanic state."

"What were the offers being made on each side of the Camp David and in the Taba talks? And the standard interpretation, which comes — which is — you can call it the Dennis Ross interpretation, which, I think, unfortunately Dr. Ben-Ami echoes, is that Israel made huge concessions at Camp David and Taba; Palestinians refused to make any concessions, because of what Dr. Ben-Ami repeatedly calls Arafat's unyielding positions; and that Arafat missed a huge opportunity. Now, it is correct to say that if you frame things in terms of what Israel was legally entitled to under international law, then Israel made precisely and exactly zero concessions. All the concessions were made by the Palestinians."

"Since the mid-1970s, there's been an international consensus for resolving the Israel-Palestine conflict. Most of your listeners will be familiar with it. It's called a two-state settlement, and a two-state settlement is pretty straightforward, uncomplicated. Israel has to fully withdraw from the West Bank and Gaza and Jerusalem, in accordance with the fundamental principle of international law, cited three times by Mr. Ben-Ami in the book, his book, that it's inadmissible to acquire territory by war. The West Bank, Gaza and Jerusalem, having been acquired by war, it's inadmissible for Israel to keep them. They have to be returned. On the Palestinian side and also the side of the neighboring Arab states, they have to recognize Israel's right to live in peace and security with its neighbors. That was the quid pro quo: recognition of Israel, Palestinian right to self-determination in the West Bank and Gaza with its capital in Jerusalem. That's the international consensus. It's not complicated. It's also not controversial."

"Frankly, part of me says…"you know what, we deserve the problem on our hands because some things Bin Laden says are true". One of the things he said on that last tape was that "until we live in security, you’re not going to live in security", and there is a certain amount of rightness in that."

""If everyone who claims to be a survivor actually is one," my mother used to exclaim, "who did Hitler kill then?" (p. 81)"

"Articulating the key Holocaust dogmas, much of the literature on Hitler's Final solution is worthless as scholarship. Indeed, the field of Holocaust studies is replete with nonsense, if not sheer fraud. (p. 55)"

"I think very highly of Professor Finkelstein. I regard him as a very able, very erudite and original scholar who has made an important contribution to the study of Zionism, to the study of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and, in particular, to the study of American attitudes towards Israel and towards the Middle East."

"[A] simplistic lumper who refuses to make the most elementary analytical distinctions, believing that the concept of new antisemitism hasn't anything to do with fighting bigotry – and everything to do with stifling criticism of Israel; a polemicist with an ugly and sectarian mode of argument and a prose style that is a parody of a once-flourishing antisemitic literature; a lover of the ad hominem attack which leaves the substance of the question unaddressed, preferring to parade before the readers his collection of ... "antisemitism mongers" who should "crawl back into their sewers"; a tendentious joker trading in the indirect expressions of hostility or obscenity; a conspiracy theorist who reduces the history of Holocaust memory to the machinations of the Zionist propaganda machine, and contemporary forms of antisemitism to a public relations exercise; a crude reductionist who prefers a caricatural simplification of the historical process to a careful reconstruction of the dynamics of either collective memory or protean hatreds; a man who normalises antisemitism by telling his audiences that most Jews believe in their group's superiority, talk too much about the Holocaust, are over-represented in the media and use that over-representation for Jewish ends, are tapped into the networks of power and privilege, and who should stop complaining about antisemitism."

"We are waging a nuclear war in Iraq right now. That country is contaminated. It will be contaminated for practically eternity now."

"George, it has been seven months today since your reckless and wanton foreign policies killed my son, my big boy, my hero, my best-friend: Casey."

"I didn't say that my son died for Israel. I've never said that. I saw somebody wrote that and it wasn't my words. Those aren't even words that I would say."

"I'm finished crying for Casey. I'm crying for all the other mothers."

"Cindy Sheehan has become the Rosa Parks of the anti-war movement. She's tired, fed up and she's not going to take it anymore, and so now we stand with her."

"I think Mrs. Sheehan bears some responsibility for this and also for the responsibility of other American families who have lost sons and daughters in Iraq, who feel that this kind of behavior borders on treasonous."

"As well as being a vulgar producer of her own spectacle, and an embarrassment to her family, Cindy Sheehan is at best a shifty fantasist."

"As a child of the Cold War, my experience with Cuba and its lovely people, has done more than almost anything, except Casey’s murder, to highlight the treachery and viciousness of the U.S. Empire that killed Casey and has oppressed, or killed millions more over the years."

"I still get my fair share of hate messages. But the messages from people who outright apologize to me for “hating” me and who tell me they have since changed their minds outnumber those."

"What can a president say, “Sorry your loved one was killed so the U.S. could make sure that we had complete control over all of (fill in the blank name of country)’s natural resources and so that Boeing, Halliburton, and Raytheon could have massive profits?” Better that the barbarism of wars for profit ends."

"War is barbaric. Trump has proven himself to be a loose cannon who doesn’t seem to have very many social graces. But Bush was no better. I wish the conversation was about the barbarism of war... Where is the movement to oppose U.S. wars, instead of liberal handwringing over botched messages of condolence?"

"Many U.S. troops occupy countries that are no threat to the U.S. and many innocent civilians have been killed. I don’t find that heroic at all. But most “grunts” are from poor, working-class.... So they believe the recruiters and join the military. I see most of the U.S. military as victims, not heroes. Of course, no one statement covers everything adequately."

"As far as I know from personal experience and talking to other vets, particularly since 9/11, recruiters promise all kinds of benefits and promise young people that they won’t have to go to war at all. That’s what Casey’s recruiter told him in 2000. “Tell your mom, even if there is a war, you won’t see combat, because you are such a high-value recruit.” Casey was killed in combat a few days after arriving in Iraq."

"Presidents are humans, too… it is really awkward to be with parents who have buried a child. There isn’t really anything anyone can say that isn’t somewhat hurtful. However, since I publicly opposed the wars and U.S. empire, I have heard, “He knew what he was signing up for,” many times. It’s simply not true, like I said before."

"I don't speak for anyone but Cindy."

"I am tired of the warmakers making war with our children. I am tired of our tired troops being sent over to do the dirty work for mob bosses who are going to squeeze the life out of Iraq and not leave until every asset and every natural resource has been raped from the country. I am tired of seeing Iraqis burying their loved ones and hearing the reverberating screams of mothers all over our country who are being destroyed for the benefit of a very few."

"Anyone who knows me, knows that I am not afraid of anything."

"First of all, I was having fun. I was with a group of good-humored, cheerful, happy people. We were singing old protest songs and old Sunday school songs and clapping. I felt I had to be cheerful to set the tone. We didn't want any trouble or to do anything non-peaceful. Secondly, when I got arrested and the officers lifted me out I was afraid that America would see my underwear and that tickled me."

"The people who are slamming me have no idea about what it feels like to unjustly have a child killed in an insane war."

"They can't ignore us, and they can't put us down. Thank God for the Internet, or we wouldn't know anything, and we would already be a fascist state."

"3) If George is not ready to send the twins, then he should bring our troops home immediately. We will demand a speedy withdrawal."

"2) We would like for him to explain this "noble cause" to us and ask him why Jenna and Barbara are not in harm's way, if the cause is so noble."

"1) We want our loved ones' sacrifices to be honored by bringing our nation's sons and daughters home from the travesty that is Iraq IMMEDIATELY, since this war is based on horrendous lies and deceptions. Just because our children are dead, why would we want any more families to suffer the same pain and devastation that we are."

"How many more of our loved ones need to die in this senseless war?"

"This is George Bush’s accountability moment."

"Iraq was not involved in 9-11, Iraq was not a terrorist state. But now that we have decimated the country, the borders are open, freedom fighters from other countries are going in, and they [the U.S. government] have created more terrorism by going to an Islamic country..."

"My vision is clear and far. I could almost believe in God. But" - and his voice changed and the light went out of his face - "what is this condition in which I find myself? This joy of living? This exultation of life? This inspiration, I may well call it? It comes when there is nothing wrong with one's digestion, when the stomach is in trim and and his appetite has an edge, and all goes well."

"He wrote an essay called "What Life Means to Me" which takes its place with Kropotkin's "Appeal to the Young" and Oscar Wilde's "The Soul of Man Under Socialism," and its closing sentence rings with his faith in the rise of the common man. "The stairway of time is ever echoing with the wooden shoe going up, the polished boot descending.""

""Take me this way: a stray guest, a bird of passage, splashing with salt-rimed wings through a brief moment of your life--a rude and blundering bird, used to large airs and great spaces, unaccustomed to the amenities of confined existence." So he wrote in a letter to me dated Oakland, December 21, 1899, in the twenty-fourth year of his life. A bird of passage, splashing with salt-rimed wings not only through my life but through life itself, and not for a brief moment but for eternity. For who shall say when that of wonder and beauty which was Jack London will pass from the earth? Who that ever knew him can forget him, and how will life ever forget one who was so indissolubly a part of her? He was youth, adventure, romance. He was a poet and a social revolutionist. He had a genius for friendship. He loved greatly and was greatly beloved...He is the outgrowth of the struggle and the suffering of the Old Order, and he is the strength and the virtue of all its terrible and criminal vices. He came out of the Abyss in which millions of his generation and the generation preceding him throughout time have been hopelessly lost. He rose out of the Abyss, and he escaped from the Abyss to become as large as the race and to be identified with the forces that shape the future of mankind...Later, Jack became the most mellow of thinkers, as passionately promulgating his new ideas as he had then assailed them. He now believed in romantic love, he had helped in the agitation for woman suffrage and was jubilant over its success in California. He was now an absolute internationalist and anti-militarist...He had come far --he had come out on the other side of everything he had before adhered to, as all who knew him were convinced that he would...He lived not only in the wide spaces of the earth, under her tropic suns and in her white frozen silences, with her children of happiness and with her miserable ones, but he lived in the thought always of life and death, and in the timeless and boundaryless struggle of international socialism."

"London’s undoubted socialism is undermined by the most appalling racism."

"Two days before he died I read him a story by Jack London -- the book is lying now on the table in his room -- Love of Life. This is a powerful story...Ilyich (Lenin) was carried away by this story. Next day he asked me to read another London story. However, with Jack London the powerful is mixed with the exceedingly weak. The second story was altogether different -- one that preached [a] bourgeois moral: the captain of a ship promises the owner that he will sell the cargo of grain at a good price; he sacrifices his life in order to keep his word. Ilyich laughed and waved his hand."

"How different was the real Jack London from the mechanical, bell-button socialist of the Kempton-Wace Letters! Here was youth, exuberance, throbbing life. Here was the good comrade, all concern and affection. He exerted himself to make our visit a glorious holiday. We argued about our political differences, of course, but there was in Jack nothing of the rancour I had so often found in the socialists I had debated with. But, then, Jack London was the artist first, the creative spirit to whom freedom is the breath of life. As the artist he did not fail to see the beauties of anarchism, even if he did insist that society would have to pass through socialism before reaching the higher stage of anarchism. In any case it was not Jack London's politics that mattered to me. It was his humanity, his understanding of and his feeling with the complexities of the human heart."

"The fortunate man is the one who cannot take more than a couple of drinks without becoming intoxicated. The unfortunate wight is the one who can take many glasses without betraying a sign; who must take numerous glasses in order to get the kick."

"Men do not knowingly drink for the effect alcohol produces on the body. What they drink for is the brain-effect; and if it must come through the body, so much the worse for the body."

"I was five years old the first time I got drunk."

"There are, broadly speaking, two types of drinkers. There is the man whom we all know, stupid, unimaginative, whose brain is bitten numbly by numb maggots; who walks generously with wide-spread, tentative legs, falls frequently in the gutter, and who sees, in the extremity of his ecstasy, blue mice and pink elephants.... The other type of drinker has imagination, vision. Even when most pleasantly jingled he walks straight and naturally, never staggers nor falls, and knows just where he is and what he is doing. It is not his body but his brain that is drunken."

"I am. I was. I am not. I never am."

"Let beauty be your end. Why should you mint beauty into gold? Anyway, you can’t."

"Then one can't make a living out of poetry?" "Certainly not. What fool expects to? Out of rhyming, yes."

"Too much is written by the men who can't write about the men who do write."