If you look at the laws passed in the United States from the very beginning of the American republic down to the present day, you’ll find that most of the legislation passed is class legislation that favors the elite, that favors the rich.
If you study the actual workings of the justice system over the course of our history, it becomes clear that it favors the rich over the poor, the white over the black, the orthodox over the radical.
People who keep scorecards don’t really know what’s happening in the world.
They have to work very hard to get people to go to war. They have to work very hard to get people to participate in the greed of a capitalist society.
World War Two. The good war. The best.
It’s in times of war that freedom of speech is most endangered, and is most repressed. And we’ve seen this: the sedition act was passed in the period of near-war with France in 1798. People were sent to jail for criticizing the government during The Civil War, or were sent to jail for criticizing the entrance into World War One. And, so on, down to the present day.
Take for instance the arguments of E. O. Wilson, who is a very distinguished biologist at Harvard University who wrote a book entitled On Human Nature. His expertise is in insects, but he jumps from insects to human beings and he talks about human beings as being “innately aggressive.” I go over his book very carefully and show that even though he says that human beings are innately aggressive at one point in his book, and in another point in his book he indicates that human beings have to be taught to be brutal and to kill. That human beings that behave peacefully in one situation may behave aggressively in another situation. In other words whether we, as human beings, are violent and murderous really depends on the situation we’re in. And, if that is so, then it is not simply an inevitable fact of human nature. It means that aggression is one of our potentialities.
If the world is destroyed, it will be a white-collar crime, done in a business-like way, by large numbers of individuals involved in a chain of actions, each one having a touch of innocence.
Howard Zinn
– From Dow Shall Not Kill
I’ve come across Uncommon Sense – a book of quotes from the speeches and writings of Howard Zinn [amazon] – it is a fabulous “toilet tank book”, something you can read in those short pauses to contemplate.
If you ever find yourself believing that America is or was ever great, you can cure it with a dose of Howard Zinn. It won’t take much, but sometimes it aches going down. If you don’t have any Zinn handy, you can substitute Chomsky.
