Why will you take by force what you may have quietly by love? Why will you destroy us who supply you with food? What can you get by war?
The country therefore was not “born free” but born slave and free, servant and master, tenant and landlord, poor and rich.
Capital punishment could not be justified in any society calling itself civilized.
There is not a country in world history in which racism has been more important, for so long a time, as the United States.
In 1992, teachers all over the country, by the thousands, were beginning to teach the Columbus story in new ways, to recognize that to Native Americans, Columbus and his men were not heroes, but marauders. The point being not just to revise our view of past events, but to be provoked to think about today.
The colonies, it seems, were societies of contending classes – a fact obscured by the emphasis, in traditional histories, on the external struggle against England, the unity of colonists in the Revolution. The country therefore was not “born free” but born slave and free, servant and master, tenant and landlord, poor and rich.
In two years, through murder, mutilation, or suicide, half of the 250,000 Indians on Haiti were dead.
The owners of factories are more concerned than other classes and interests in the intelligence of their laborers. When the latter are well-educated and the former are disposed to deal justly, controversies and strikes can never occur, nor can the minds of the masses be prejudiced by demagogues and controlled by temporary and factious considerations.
I wonder now how the foreign policies of the United States would look if we wiped out the national boundaries of the world, at least in our minds, and thought of all children everywhere as our own. Then we could never drop an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, or napalm on Vietnam, or wage war anywhere, because wars, especially in our time, are always wars against children, indeed our children.
The ecological crisis in the world had become so obviously serious that Pope John Paul II felt the need to rebuke the wealthy classes of the industrialized nations for creating that crisis: “Today, the dramatic threat of ecological breakdown is teaching us the extent to which greed and selfishness, both individual and collective, are contrary to the order of creation.
It was the new politics of ambiguity – speaking for the lower and middle classes to get their support in times of rapid growth and potential turmoil. The two-party system came into its own in this time. To give people a choice between two different parties and allow them, in a period of rebellion, to choose the slightly more democratic one was an ingenious mode of control.
I lay back on my bunk and thought about people I love, and how lucky I was to be white and not poor and just passing briefly through a system which is a permanent hell for so many.
We need to expose the motives of our political leaders, point out their connections to corporate power, show how huge profits are being made out of death and suffering.
The principle is not that a human being cannot justly own another, but that he cannot own him unless he is loyal to the United States.
Only one fear was greater than the fear of black rebellion in the new American colonies.
The president, the secretary of state, and the secretary of defense were lying to the American public – there was no evidence of any attack, and the American destroyers were not on “routine patrol” but on spying missions.
The reward for participating in a movement for social justice is not the prospect of future victory. It is the exhilaration of standing together with other people, taking risks together, enjoying small triumphs and enduring disheartening setbacks – together.
Revolutionary America may have been a middle-class society, happier and more prosperous than any other in its time, but it contained a large and growing number of fairly poor people, and many of them did much of the actual fighting and suffering between 1775 and 1783: A very old story.
If we are arrested every day, if we are exploited every day, if we are trampled over every day, don’t ever let anyone pull you so low as to hate them. We must use the weapon of love. We must have compassion and understanding for those who hate us. We must realize so many people are taught to hate us that they are not totally responsible for their hate. But we stand in life at midnight, we are always on the threshold of a new dawn.
True, fascism was not to be tolerated by decent people. But neither was racism or colonialism or slave labor camps – one or another of which was a characteristic of all of the Allied powers.