Anti War Activists

"It was in 1970 during the Viet Nam War. We were refusing to pay taxes; we were working in CORE [Congress of Racial Equality]; we were working with the great brokers, Cesar Chavez and those. Wally fasted for twenty–three days once in front of one of the big chain stores to try to get them to stop using, either grapes, or something, whatever it was that they were doing. And yet, we began to feel, and I in particular, that our whole lives were tied up in war stuff, because we live on this war system."

"Of what does freedom of the human spirit consist, that quality on which I place so much stress?"

"My respect and admiration for Gandhi, though not uncritical, was deep."

"Here was I, still struggling with the meaning of my own life and standing, it seemed sometimes, on dead center. How, then, did I have the effrontery to question a whole way of life that had been evolved slowly and painfully through the ages by the accumulated wisdom of mankind? How could I presume to have so much of the truth that I would defy constituted authority? What made me so certain of myself in this regard? I was not certain. But it seemed to me that if I could see only one thing clearly, it was not necessary to see all things clearly in order to act on that one thing."

"My repudiation of violence is not based on any conventionally or conveniently religious motivation. I cannot say that it is against God's will, since I do not know that there is a god, nor would I be able in any case to assume that I was conversant with his will. But I do not consider, either, that men are gods, that they should determine when another man should die. I do not consider that I am capable of such judgments, either of my own volition or at the command of others. Such behavior in others I abhor, but may not be able to affect. I can control my own behavior. And I do not think that my participation in stupid or immoral acts can add to my stature as an individual-I think, rather, that it might detract, take me even further afield from the discovery of myself."

"Let me first excise the horns from my own head, since it was made, I think, for something besides butting."

"Clarence Jordan was very, very funny. I know that during those days before we came down there, somebody came around, like some of the Ku Klux Klanners came around and, once they came and—?cause blacks worked on the farm even before anybody moved there, and so they would eat lunch together, and one of these guys came and said, "Preacher, I don't wanna see the sun set on you havin' niggers here anymore." And Clarence reached out his hand and said, "Well, I'm so glad to know you, I'm so glad to know somebody who can keep the sun from setting." He was funny."

"because I believe that it is more important to do what is right than what is lawful or expedient, I have declined to pay the tax."

"how can one have respect for others without self-respect?"

"I think that what I was saying with my robe was that I was doing what I thought right. I was convinced enough to feel that it would be good if others were moved to do likewise. But I some time ago gave up the notion that it was my province to reform the world. But I think that if I have helped to start a fire, the first thing I must do is stop adding fuel to it. I could not very well help going to jail when seven strong men were determined I should go, but I did not wish them to think for a moment that I was on their side. You will do what you think you should, what you have been ordered to do, but I shall not help you do it, no, not even to the extent of getting dressed so that you may feel more comfortable in your mission. If a law is bad or unjust, is not every phase of its enforcement simply an extension of the law and to be as greatly resisted?"

"We were interested in how we lived every day, not just going out to a demonstration, not just voting, and not just writing letters."

"If I could choose a title for myself, I think I would be a 'want to be' practitioner of non-violence."

"I didn't ever miss school until I was sixteen years old and I went with my mother to visit her parents in Georgia. That's where I guess I did my very first action, because our train was late for changing in Cincinnati and we were rushed into a car. By the time we got settled, I recalled, I looked around and saw that we were in a Jim Crow car. Now I'd heard of these things, and I knew about that sort of thing...This was at a time when all people who had darker-colored skin, or part dark African ancestry, were seated in a particular place and could not go anywhere else-in streetcars and so forth. In the South particularly they had fountains that said, "whites," "colored," all that sort of thing. It was a very much division in talking about races, which I don't like. I think there's one race anyway, as far as I'm concerned. So I asked my mother if we couldn't change cars and she said, "Oh Nita, I'm just tired." And I think that was true. And I sat and fumed, and finally I got up and sat in every car in that train because I was so upset, and my recollection-this was a long time ago, of course-is that nobody bothered me except the porter, and he was afraid that something would happen to me, because he had the same color skin that I had. Then I went back and sat by my Mother and I felt better because I had expressed myself."

"I did go to Howard University, and that was where I was arrested for the first time. I went with two of my friends who were undergrad coeds, downtown in Washington, DC, which was about as segregated as anyplace in the United States at that time. I went to Howard in 1941. This was in '43 though, at the beginning of the year, I think. And we went to a drugstore that had a lunch counter-asked for some hot chocolate. We were told, "We don't serve Negroes." We said, "Well, we'd like to see the manager." "The manager isn't in." And we said, "Well, we have plenty of time. We'll just sit here." And finally they brought the hot chocolate, but they gave us tickets, bills for 25 cents, when it clearly stated on the board that hot chocolate was ten cents a cup, so that's what we put down. And I always like to say that's probably all we had anyway. But, then we walked out and were met by-my recollection is-seven of DC's finest, that is, the police. And they put us in the paddy wagon and took us to jail. After we had this incident, a woman who became a very dear friend, Pauli Murray, was there. She was about ten years older than us coeds. She was in law school, and she knew about CORE that had started. And we formed the Howard's—I think it was called "Civil Rights Committee" and actually opened up a restaurant on the edge of campus in one week, less than a week. I never had such a quick victory, never since that time. It was just a sort of a greasy spoon restaurant, but it was a heady victory for us. We had a picket line; we had a sit–in; lots of people agreed with us, and he capitulated. (By "opened up") I mean we desegregated it."

"We never made much money, but we never spent much. As a matter of fact, we used to lend money to friends sometimes [chuckle] because we so hated this interest thing anyway, that if somebody needed to buy a car—I don't mean we had tons of money—maybe a friend would, we would lend him some money, obviously at no interest. And the other thing is I don't like having money hanging around; what's the use of having it doing nothing?"

"I remember very well, when I was, I think it was in junior high school, somebody called me "nigger." And I went home, crying, or anyway, very disconsolate. My mother said, "Why are you worrying about...you know who you are." So... I've always appreciated that."

"I would do whatever job to keep body and soul together, that was good work, or at least not bad work, let's put it that way; at least wasn't bad work. And that I would just live my life and do the things that I believe in."

"a group called Peacemakers was formed (in 1948). They saw nonviolence as a way of life, not just a tactic, or different campaigns, and one of the things that was a hallmark of Peacemakers was refusing to pay taxes for war, and so I say that that was a very pivotal year in my life, '48. Wally and I started living together; I became a tax refuser; we became tax refusers. You see, he spent thirty–three months in prison because he wouldn't go; how was he going to pay for somebody else to go and kill people? We just had no problem with that."

"We had a friend who lived in Philadelphia, and he was doing what they called "interracial housing." Now Wally would never let anybody say that; he said, "Interracial, you mean, a monkey and a human being," et cetera, they might be different races."

"I happened to be seeing my doctor the next day for a check-up so while he was down there I said, 'By the way, my wife and I have had a little disagreement, I am circumcised, aren't I?' He took a closer look and said, 'Not! I am Jewish, and definitely know the difference!'"

"Corbyn’s circle of advisers reflects and reinforces the moral absolutism of his political instincts. The anti-imperialist left is, in short, running the show. The name of Seumas Milne, a former Guardian journalist now Labour's head of strategy and communications, often emerges in this connection. His case illuminates precisely the ideological direction of Corbyn's Labour. Milne has a brilliant intellect and there is vanishingly little he does not know about anti-Semitism, its traps and tropes. (I know this because I owe a good deal of my own education on the subject to him, a former colleague.) Milne himself would never have fallen into his boss's grossest errors—of failing to notice, for example, that a London mural whose removal Corbyn protested in a recently-resurfaced 2012 Facebook posting contained shockingly obvious and explicit anti-Semitic stereotypes. But Milne is in lockstep with Corbyn in cleaving to the hard left's anti-imperialist line that whatever the faults of authoritarians such as Putin, Assad, and Maduro, they are at least enemies of American hegemony, and the crimes of the United States and Israel are infinitely worse."

"But [[Owen Jones|[Owen] Jones]]'s real bete noire is Milne, whom he charges with a simple "lack of professionalism". One insider says he was one of the few people in Corbyn’s office "that you could actually discuss socialist theory with", but in Jones's telling, it was "impossible to get him to sign off press releases, speeches or other public interventions", and "this apparent non-engagement would frequently bring the entire operation to a grinding halt". From one of the Corbyn project’s most devout advocates, this is remarkable stuff."

"He was oversympathetic to autocratic regimes and undersympathetic to countries with the rule of law and democracy [...] That is the worst aspect of the hard left."

"[On the 2011 London riots] Those people need to be organised and need to find a political expression . . . It is a huge opportunity to channel that anger."

"Resistance and the unity of the working class is what will progress our movement."

"Seumas Milne, the Stalinist Rip van Winkle who now edits the Guardians comment pages"

"Putin’s oligarchic nationalism may not have much global appeal, but Russia's role as a counterweight to western supremacism certainly does."

"During a Valdai club session I chaired, [[Vladimir Putin|[Vladimir] Putin]] told foreign journalists and academics that the unipolar world had been a "means of justifying dictatorship over people and countries" – but the emerging multipolar world was likely to be still more unstable. The only answer – and this was clearly intended as an opening to the west – was to rebuild international institutions, based on mutual respect and co-operation. The choice was new rules – or no rules, which would lead to "global anarchy". When I asked Putin whether Russia's actions in Ukraine had been a response to, and an example of, a "no-rules order", Putin denied it, insisting that the Kosovo precedent meant Crimea had every right to self-determination. But by conceding that Russian troops had intervened in Crimea "to block Ukrainian units", he effectively admitted crossing the line of legality – even if not remotely on the scale of the illegal invasions, bombing campaigns and covert interventions by the US and its allies over the past decade and a half. But there is little chance of the western camp responding to Putin's call for a new system of global rules. In fact, the US showed little respect for rules during the cold war either, intervening relentlessly wherever it could. But it did have respect for power. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, that restraint disappeared. It was only the failure of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq – and Russia's subsequent challenge to western expansion and intervention in Georgia, Syria and Ukraine – that provided some check to unbridled US power."

"Only China offers the eventual prospect of a global restraint on western unilateral power and that is still some way off."

"A particularly telling Milne moment came in 2006, when the Council of Europe’s parliamentary assembly voted to condemn "the massive human rights violations committed by totalitarian communist regimes". In the article he wrote in response, Milne admitted the USSR executed 799,455 people, then moved on. "For all its brutalities and failures, communism in the Soviet Union, eastern Europe and elsewhere delivered rapid industrialisation, mass education, job security and huge advances in social and gender equality," he insisted. Now, you can quibble with the facts. Focussing only on the USSR's executions ignores the millions it starved to death in Ukraine, or in the mass deportations from the Caucasus and Crimea, the way it used rape as a weapon, or that fact it invaded without provocation half a dozen countries. You can also question those "huge advances" considering the fact that life expectancy in the USSR peaked in 1962, then declined steadily as chronic alcoholism took hold."

"[Initially referring to Jeremy Corbyn] I don't think he is showing any professionalism in his leadership of the Labour party and you see from his appointment of his strategy and communications director Seumas Milne, whom I happen to know and like as it happens. But he's completely unsuited to such a job. He has little connection with mainstream politics or mainstream media in the country and yet he's in charge of communications for the Labour party. That doesn't sound very professional to me."

"Emboldened by the wave of change and growing support across the region, Hamas has also regained credibility as a resistance force, which had faded since 2009, and strengthened its hand against an increasingly discredited Palestinian Authority leadership in Ramallah."

"No major 20th-century political tradition is without blood on its hands, but battles over history are more about the future than the past. Part of the current enthusiasm in official western circles for dancing on the grave of communism is no doubt about relations with today's Russia and China. But it also reflects a determination to prove there is no alternative to the new global capitalist order - and that any attempt to find one is bound to lead to suffering and bloodshed."

"It has become almost received wisdom to bracket Stalin and Hitler as twin monsters of the past century - Mao and Pol Pot are sometimes thrown in as an afterthought - and commonplace to equate communism and fascism as the two greatest evils of an unprecedentedly sanguinary era. In some versions, communism is even held to be the more vile and bloodier wickedness. The impact of this cold war victors' version of the past has been to relativise the unique crimes of Nazism, bury those of colonialism and feed the idea that any attempt at radical social change will always lead to suffering, killing and failure."

"Communism, which came to control a third of the planet in a generation, was the most important political movement of the past century. It carried out what other socialists had only talked about, abolishing capitalism and creating publicly owned, planned economies. Its crimes and failures are now so well rehearsed that they are in danger of obliterating any understanding of its achievements - both of which have lessons for the future of progressive politics and the search for a social alternative to globalised capitalism."

"It is this record of unabashed national egotism and arrogance that drives anti-Americanism among swaths of the world's population, for whom there is little democracy in the current distribution of global wealth and power. If it turns out that Tuesday's attacks were the work of Osama bin Laden's supporters, the sense that the Americans are once again reaping a dragons' teeth harvest they themselves sowed will be overwhelming."

"But any glimmer of recognition of why people might have been driven to carry out such atrocities, sacrificing their own lives in the process - or why the United States is hated with such bitterness, not only in Arab and Muslim countries, but across the developing world - seems almost entirely absent."

"But for every "terror network" that is rooted out, another will emerge - until the injustices and inequalities that produce them are addressed."

"The media and politicians in this country and all over the Western world would have you believe that the cause of this suffering and this carnage is the rockets of Hamas that are fired into Israel. That is to turn reality on its head. The Palestinian people have the right, as any occupied people under law and under all political and legal conventions - the right to resist. Israel, as an illegal occupying power, has one obligation, and that is to withdraw. Even now, despite the horrific casualties, Hamas is not broken and will not be broken, because of the spirit of resistance of the Palestinian people."

"What has transformed the contest has been the dramatic rise of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, former Socialist minister and candidate of the Front de Gauche (Left Front), who has gone from 6% to 15% in a few months to become the pivotal "third man" in the election. He has done so with an unashamedly populist campaign, targeting marginalised working class voters prey to the National Front, inspiring the young and non-voters and using the kind of street language alien to the magic circles of the French political establishment he abandoned."

"There is a view among pro-Palestinian people often that the Zionist movement has a grip on the media, in a way that I think sometimes exaggerates the mechanisms through which that influence is exerted."

"Zionist movement activists [are] incredibly hard-working and dedicated, and they bombard the media, day in and day out, with their obsessive campaigns."

"A particular form of socialism grew up in the post-war period in the conditions of the Cold War [...] East Berlin was absolutely at the front line of the cold war. That’s what the Berlin Wall was. It was a front line between two social and military systems and two military alliances, and a very tense one at that. It wasn’t just some kind of arbitrary division to hold people in, it was also a front line in a global conflict. And that conditioned a lot of the things that happened."

"The US and their allies claim to be fighting a war on terror whenever they drop bombs and kill people. Here they have taken out some of the people who have done more to fight ISIS than anyone else that we know. They have been asked to get out of Iraq, are they going to get out of it? Are they going to recognise the democratic decision? They claim to have brought democracy to Iraq; are they going to respect it now?"

"Meanwhile, the EU and our friends are immune from criticism and when you have armed contracts with totalitarian regimes, who carry out terrible atrocities, you look the other way. I will take seriously the concern expressed in here for US-paid journalists imprisoned in Vietnam when you deal with the millions of starving and dying children in Yemen and demand they be free from Saudi-UAE aggression and free from the fear of the weapons of the US, Canadian, UK, French, German, Swedish Spanish and Belgian countries blowing them to pieces."

"El-Sisi is a brutal dictator. Do the French have any problems selling him weapons? No. Do the French have any problems selling weapons to the Saudis who are committing genocide in Yemen? No. Does the EU do anything about it? No. This European Union has sanctions, which are a form of terrorism, against Venezuela, Syria, Iran. You do business with murderers. What’s going on with you?"

"Many people are asking, what is democracy? Democracy is where the people have a say in how their society is organised. There isn’t much of it around. In Member States, it’s been watered down dramatically by the weakening of local government – one of the best vehicles that the people had for connecting with those that were ruling them."

"We must question, as the Pope has done, the wisdom of sending arms to Ukraine. We must stop executing the war on Yemen. We must stop the use of sanctions as a weapon of war in Syria, Afghanistan, Iran, Venezuela, Yemen and elsewhere. These medieval weapons are killing women and children, the sick, the old and the vulnerable the most. We must end Fortress Europe and extend the compassion we rightly have for the Ukrainian women and children to all refugees and internally displaced people. Selective humanity is not humanity at all."

"If we care about human rights we will suspend relations with the criminal apartheid state of Israel until they stop the genocide of the Palestinian people and until Palestine is free."

"We know who is increasing the tensions in the Persian Gulf. It isn’t Iran; the Saudis, with the nice backing of Israel and, of course, the US. Why don’t we call it as it is and stop playing footsie with words? They have a problem with the powerful nature of Iran, with the independence of Iran, and Europe does need to put its arm around Iran and be more welcoming. Iran is not feeling the love from Europe. You have the potential to do more and welcome them more into the international community."