Anti-war Voices

Though many say that the tendency to question authority fades with age, there are several notable exceptions.

One is[1] Harold Pinter, the legendary British playwright, who was outspoken critic of war—the Iraq War in particular—and of the British role in it. His Nobel acceptance speech, called “Art, Truth and Politics” by Harold Pinter (Democracy Now!) (Part 1) and Part 2, is absolutely fantastic and worth listening to all the way through. The links contain video, audio and transcripts.

“The United States supported the brutal Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua for over forty years. The Nicaraguan people, led by the Sandinistas, overthrew this regime in 1979, a breathtaking popular revolution. […] The Sandinistas weren’t perfect. They possessed their fair share of arrogance, and their political philosophy contained a number of contradictory elements. But they were intelligent, rational and civilized. They set out to establish a stable, decent, pluralistic society. The death penalty was abolished. Hundreds of thousands of poverty-stricken peasants were brought back from the dead. Over 100,000 families were given title to land. 2,000 schools were built. A quite remarkable literacy campaign reduced illiteracy in the country to less than one-seventh. Free education was established and a free health service. Infant mortality was reduced by a third. Polio was eradicated. […] The United States denounced these achievements as Marxist-Leninist subversion. In the view of the US government, a dangerous example was being set. If Nicaragua was allowed to establish basic norms of social and economic justice, if it was allowed to raise the standards of healthcare and education and achieve social unity and national self-respect, neighboring countries would ask the same questions and do the same things.”

“Many thousands, if not millions, of people in the United States itself are demonstrably sickened, shamed and angered by their government’s actions, but as things stand, they are not a coherent political force—yet. But the anxiety, uncertainty and fear, which we can see growing daily in the United States, is unlikely to diminish.”

Another is Howard Zinn, a real historian who’s been fighting the good fight for decades. He’s the author of the People’s History the United States and has been lying low of late. However, a speech he gave on November 8th in Binghamton, called War and Social Justice was very, very good and also worth a listen.

“When the government does bad things, the most patriotic thing you can do is to criticize the government, because that’s the Declaration of Independence. That’s our basic democratic charter. The Declaration of Independence says governments are set up by the people to—they’re artificial creations. They’re set up to ensure certain rights, the equal right to life, liberty, pursuit of happiness. So when governments become destructive of those ends, the Declaration said, “it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish” the government. That’s our basic democratic charter. People have forgotten what it is. It’s OK to alter or abolish the government when the government violates its trust. And then you are being patriotic. I mean, the government violates its trust, the government is being unpatriotic.”

“And so, what is there to do? We need to educate ourselves and other people. We need to educate ourselves in history. History is very important. That’s why I went into a little history, because, you know, if you don’t know history, it’s as if you were born yesterday. If you were born yesterday, then any leader can tell you anything, you have no way of checking up on it. History is very important.”