Howard Zinn – Page 3 – Engaging Peace

Zinn Zingers: Right Then, Right Now

Posted on June 28, 2018June 29, 2018 by kathiemm

By Kathie MM

Believers in peace and human rights are reeling from national symptoms of fascism, racism, and violent responses to engineered fear and misdirected rage–and now on top of everything else, an opening in the Supreme Court.

But, there’s an antidote to despair in The Progressive’s 2005 article from Howard Zinn.

Here are a few excerpts, reminding us: we have overcome before–and can do so again.

“It would be naive to depend on the Supreme Court to defend the rights of poor people, women, people of color, dissenters of all kinds. Those rights only come alive when citizens organize, protest, demonstrate, strike, boycott, rebel, and violate the law in order to uphold justice….

The rights of working people, of women, of black people have not depended on decisions of the courts. Like the other branches of the political system, the courts have recognized these rights only after citizens have engaged in direct action powerful enough to win these rights for themselves….

Knowing the nature of the political and judicial system of this country, its inherent bias against the poor, against people of color, against dissidents, we cannot become dependent on the courts, or on our political leadership. Our culture–the media, the educational system–tries to crowd out of our political consciousness everything except who will be elected President and who will be on the Supreme Court, as if these are the most important decisions we make. They are not. They deflect us from the most important job citizens have, which is to bring democracy alive by organizing, protesting, engaging in acts of civil disobedience that shake up the system. That is why Cindy Sheehan’s dramatic stand in Crawford, Texas, leading to 1,600 anti-war vigils around the country, involving 100,000 people, is more crucial to the future of American democracy than [particular judicial hearings and appointments]…”

There’s gold in them there words. Keep the faith. Heed the call.

I Pray Daily to Awaken from the Nightmare of History (James Joyce) Part 2

Posted on June 25, 2018March 9, 2021 by kathiemm

by Stefan Schindler

During America’s conquest of Puerto Rico and the Philippines, Mark Twain declared: “America’s flag should be a skull and crossbones.”

More recently, Martin Luther King reminded us: “Wealth, poverty, racism, and war – these four always go together.” To these four we should also add the pervasive presence of political sophistry, now culminating in the tragic triumph of the Reagan counter-revolution against The Spirit of The Sixties.

Masters of mind control, the puppeteers at the apex of world power continue to steer the planet toward economic collapse, ecological apocalypse, and nuclear holocaust. Decades ago, Noam Chomsky published an essay on “The Responsibility of Intellectuals” to address these questions, thus echoing Bertrand Russell, George Orwell, and Aldous Huxley. In Orwell’s words: “History is more and more a race between education and catastrophe.”

The reason we are now collectively sliding back toward medieval barbarism – supported by evangelical voters of whom Jesus is ashamed – is simple. In Michael Parenti’s words: “The rich are never satisfied. They want it all. If you know that, and nothing else, you still know more than all those people who know everything else, but not that.”

Recalling Plato’s cave parable, Howard Zinn observed: “The truth is so often the opposite of what we are told that we can no longer turn our heads around far enough to see it.” Chomsky adds the Socratic twist: “The problem is not that people don’t know; it’s that they don’t know they don’t know.” And the problem is exacerbated by the moral and intellectual cowardice of most teachers in American public, private, and higher education, dazed and confused by their own historical illiteracy, and unable to comprehend George Santayana’s prescient warning that “those who don’t learn from history are condemned to repeat it.”

When perpetual kindness is met with constant and increasing cruelty, it’s time for some righteous ferocity. Even Jesus chased the money-changers out of the temple; and he likely did it with a bull-whip, since he knew that merely saying “please” was utterly futile. Yes, peace begins with us; and peace and justice sometimes require a ferocious roar, like the late-life speeches of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King.

To paraphrase Michael Parenti: It is better to swim against the current than to be swept over the cliff.

As Victor Wallis notes in his book Red-Green Revolution, the long overdue and most effective solution to our social and global crisis is the merger of resistance movements into a unified force, because this is what it will take to overcome the lunacy of those in power.

America desperately needs a news media no longer subservient to the dominant corporate elite; just as it desperately needs a civic discourse informed by informed citizens. Meanwhile, it is well to remember that individual innocence is no protection from collective responsibility.

“I Pray Daily to Awaken from the Nightmare of History” (James Joyce), Part 1

Posted on June 23, 2018June 23, 2018 by kathiemm

By Stefan Schindler

Terry Eagleton’s British article on the public danger of “The Death of the Intellectual” (Red Pepper Magazine; October 13, 2008) is lucid, astute, and right on target. It applies even more to America than Britain.

The demise of the public intellectual as a partner in civic discourse is symptomatic of social decay, and points directly to the fact that the primary function of American education and the mainstream news media is to ignorate, not educate, liberate, stimulate. How else did we end up with Reagan through Cheney-Bush to Trump and company?

Eagleton mentions Noam Chomsky as a courageous and virtuous paradigm of the public intellectual; that is to say, of the philosopher as concerned citizen, writing with the fervor of Thomas Paine. Another such example for the last half-century was Howard Zinn, whose courage of conscience echoed that of Emerson and William James.

Howard Zinn May 2009. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license. Author: User B-Fest of Athens indymedia

I was honored to co-present The Peace Abbey Courage of Conscience Award to both Zinn and Chomsky, and to nominate Michael Parenti for the same – public intellectuals in the like-minded company of John Dewey, Richard Rorty, John Pilger, Victor Wallis, Lewis Lapham, Abby Martin, Amy Goodman, Naomi Klein, and of course Terry Eagleton – all names utterly unfamiliar to most Americans.

Meanwhile, the corporate negation of net neutrality follows close upon the heels of the corporate takeover of American colleges and universities, now bloated with high-paid bureaucrats, slave-waging adjuncts, and debt-ridden students in hock to the banks who are the prime culprits in America’s economic apartheid and neoconservative slide toward unrepentant fascism. And, of course, the primary function of the American military is, as it long has been, to make the world safe for the depredations of the Fortune 500.

Michael Parenti. 2008. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic, 2.0 Generic & 1.0 Generic license. Author: Willa Madden.

Hence Parenti’s observation: “Third-world nations are not under-developed. They’re over-exploited.”

.

Confronting Economic Apartheid and Political Ignorance with a Common Religion of Kindness

Posted on May 11, 2018May 11, 2018 by kathiemm

by Stefan Schindler

Everyone has a philosophy – a “worldview,” a system of values and beliefs influencing actions – whether they know it or not (through conscious, critical reflection).

Bertrand Russell’s early twentieth-century call for philosophy in schools is mirrored in Alfred North Whitehead’s The Aims of Education. I refer readers to my web-posted essay “The Tao of Teaching: Romance and Process.”

Philosophy in schools (including for children) and in public spaces (Francis Bacon’s “marketplace of ideas”) is much in need of augmentation and enhancement, and this especially true in the USA.

Philosophy can, or should, enhance critical thinking skills and ethical reflection – from early youth through old age. However, what is often missing from the call for philosophy in schools is a necessary conjoining of philosophy with what Michael Parenti calls “real history” (as opposed to the jingoistic mush of social conditioning). To paraphrase Santayana: Those who don’t learn from history are condemned to repeat it (as the USA is intent on doing, over and over, at great cost to the nation and the world, including the biosphere).

Democracy and justice depend on informed citizens, and the USA has perhaps the most historically illiterate citizens in the modern world. Hence the disastrous results of America’s political process ever since the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy. People cannot think philosophically about – apply critical thinking skills to – what they don’t know. As increasingly evidenced in America, economic apartheid and historical-political ignorance go together. Hence the tragedy of increasing poverty, fear, prejudice, and scapegoating, and the equally tragic ease of political manipulation, in which citizens vote against their own best interest.

Recalling Plato’s parable of the cave, Howard Zinn observed: “The truth is so often the opposite of what we are told that we can no longer turn our heads around far enough to see it.” Hence Noam Chomsky notes: “The problem is not that people don’t know; it’s that they don’t know they don’t know.” To which I add: Individual innocence is no protection against collective responsibility. And thus, to conclude: Insofar as the purpose of life is learning and service, and insofar as Buddha’s political philosophy advocates democratic socialism (what the Dalai Lama calls “a common religion of kindness”), society should serve schools, not the other way around.