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57309fd
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Surely, if it is the right of the people to "alter or abolish," it is their right to criticize, even severely, policies they believe destructive of the ends for which government has been established. This principle, in the Declaration of Independence, suggests that true patriotism lies in supporting the values the country is supposed to cherish: equality, life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness. When our government compromises, undermines, ..
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Howard Zinn |
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1e68c06
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We are not hated because we practice democracy, value freedom, or uphold human rights. We are hated because our government denies these things to people in Third World countries whose resources are coveted by our multinational corporations. That hatred we have sown has come back to haunt us in the form of terrorism.
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Howard Zinn |
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9d4fb20
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Perhaps the most important thing I learned was about democracy, that democracy is not our government, our constitution, our legal structure. Too often they are enemies of democracy.
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legal-system
subversion
law-school
government
justice
democracy
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Howard Zinn |
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3426993
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Education becomes most rich and alive when it confronts the reality of moral conflict in the world.
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moral-conflict
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Howard Zinn |
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2647621
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The argument that there are just wars often rests on the social system of the nation engaging in war. It is supposed that if a 'liberal' state is at war with a 'totalitarian' state, then the war is justified. The beneficent nature of a government was assumed to give rightness to the wars it wages. ...Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt were liberals, which gave credence to their words exalting the two world wars, just as the liberalism o..
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Howard Zinn |
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fbebaf8
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Before God and high heaven, is there a law for one man which is not a law for every other man?
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equality
history
faith
government
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Howard Zinn |
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16cebc9
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I had always insisted that a good education was a synthesis of book learning and involvement in social action, that each enriched the other. I wanted my students to know that the accumulation of knowledge, while fascinating in itself, is not sufficient as long as so many people in the world have no opportunity to experience that fascination.
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learning
education
educational-enrichment
educational-inequity
knowledge-acquisition
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Howard Zinn |
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7fc4882
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I see this as the central issue of our time: how to find a substitute for war in human ingenuity, imagination, courage, sacrifice, patience... War is not inevitable, however persistent it is, however long a history it has in human affairs. It does not come out of some instinctive human need. It is manufactured by political leaders, who then must make a tremendous effort--by enticement, by propaganda, by coercion--to mobilize a normally relu..
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war
political-propaganda
ingenuity
peace
creativity
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Howard Zinn |
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9db8cd1
|
But there is no such thing as a pure fact, innocent of interpretation. Behind every fact presented to the world - by a teacher, a writer, anyone - is a judgement. The judgement that has been made is that this fact is important, and that other facts, omitted, are not important.
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Howard Zinn |
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d0714c3
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Crosses and gallows - that deadly historic juxtaposition.
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Howard Zinn |
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d143be1
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The willingness to undertake such action cannot be based on certainties, but on those possibilities glimpsed in a reading of history different from the customary painful recounting of human cruelties. In such a reading we can find not only war but resistance to war, not only injustice but rebellion against injustice, not only selfishness but self-sacrifice, not only silence in the fact of tyranny but defiance, not only callousness but compa..
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injustice
history
spirit
hope
optimisim
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Howard Zinn |
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fc38a76
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The courtroom is one instance of the fact that while our society may be liberal and democratic in some large and vague sense, its moving parts, its smaller chambers--its classrooms, its workplaces, its corporate boardrooms, its jails, its military barracks--are flagrantly undemocratic, dominated by one commanding person or a tiny elite of power.
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injustice
courtroom
concentration-of-power
elite
domination
power
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Howard Zinn |
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e56649a
|
Give people what they need: food, medicine, clean air, pure water, trees and grass, pleasant homes to live in, some hours of work, more hours of leisure. Don't ask who deserves it. Every human being deserves it.
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zinn
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Howard Zinn |
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e5efe4f
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Being fired has some of the advantages of dying without its supreme disadvantages. People say extra-nice things about you, and you get to hear them.
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furlough
layoffs
funeral
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Howard Zinn |
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d4b743b
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I didn't want to spent a lot of close time with someone who believed that fun is a bourgeois indulgence.
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fun
priests
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Howard Zinn |
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02c0195
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Those upper classes, to rule, needed to make concessions to the middle class, without damage to their own wealth or power, at the expense of slaves, Indians, and poor whites. This bought loyalty. And to bind that loyalty with something more powerful even than material advantage, the ruling group found, in the 1760s and 1770s, a wonderfully useful device. That device was the language of liberty and equality, which could unite just enough whi..
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Howard Zinn |
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c8bc2f0
|
The inferior position of blacks, the exclusion of Indians from the new society, the establishment of supremacy for the rich and powerful in the new nation--all this was already settled in the colonies by the time of the Revolution. With the English out of the way, it could now be put on paper, solidified, regularized, made legitimate by the Constitution of the United States.
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Howard Zinn |
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d21bcd1
|
To emphasize the heroism of Columbus and his successors as navigators and discoverers, and to deemphasize their genocide, is not a technical necessity but an ideological choice. It serves--unwittingly--to justify what was done. My point is not that we must, in telling history, accuse, judge, condemn Columbus in absentia. It is too late for that; it would be a useless scholarly exercise in morality. But the easy acceptance of atrocities as a..
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Howard Zinn |
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08ba670
|
When economic interest is seen behind the political clauses of the Constitution, then the document becomes not simply the work of wise men trying to establish a decent and orderly society, but the work of certain groups trying to maintain their privileges, while giving just enough rights and liberties to enough of the people to ensure popular support.
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Howard Zinn |
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3f9b9f4
|
To emphasize the heroism of Columbus and his successors as navigators and discoverers, and to deemphasize their genocide, is not a technical necessity but an ideological choice. It serves--unwittingly--to justify what was done.
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Howard Zinn |
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6e29c07
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You call this progress, because you have motor cars and telephones and flying machines and a thousand potions to make you smell better? And people sleeping on the streets?
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zinn
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Howard Zinn |
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04e0cca
|
Our democracy is but a name. We vote? What does that mean? It means that we choose between two bodies of real, though not avowed, autocrats. We choose between Tweedledum and Tweedledee. . . .
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Howard Zinn |
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f1c79ed
|
the atmosphere of war brutalizes everyone involved, begets a fanaticism in which the original moral factor is buried at the bottom of a heap of atrocities committed by all sides.
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war
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Howard Zinn |
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bbe0f22
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A black man, Benjamin Banneker, who taught himself mathematics and astronomy, predicted accurately a solar eclipse, and was appointed to plan the new city of Washington, wrote to Thomas Jefferson: I suppose it is a truth too well attested to you, to need a proof here, that we are a race of beings, who have long labored under the abuse and censure of the world; that we have long been looked upon with an eye of contempt; and that we have long..
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Howard Zinn |
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65d9734
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One reason these atrocities are still with us is that we have learned to bury them in a mass of other facts, as radioactive wastes are buried in containers in the earth. We have learned to give them exactly the same proportion of attention that teachers and writers often give them in the most respectable of classrooms and textbooks. This learned sense of moral proportion, coming from the apparent objectivity of the scholar, is accepted more..
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Howard Zinn |
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1800ca8
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You can't be neutral on a moving train," I would tell them. Some were baffled by the metaphor, especially if they took it literally and tried to dissect its meaning. Others immediately saw what I meant: that events are already moving in certain deadly directions, and to be neutral means to accept that."
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Howard Zinn |
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e28ccd6
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Tecumseh, a Shawnee chief and noted orator, tried to unite the Indians against the white invasion: The way, and the only way, to check and to stop this evil, is for all the Redmen to unite in claiming a common and equal right in the land, as it was at first and should be yet; for it was never divided, but belongs to all for the use of each. That no part has a right to sell, even to each other, much less to strangers--those who want all and ..
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Howard Zinn |
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302f9f4
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A jury is always a more orthodox body than any defendant brought before it; for blacks it is usually a whiter group, for poor people, a more prosperous group... Another lesson about the justice system: the way the judge charges the jury inevitably pushes them one way or the other, limits their independent judgment.
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judicial-power
jury
jury-instructions
impartiality
orthodoxy
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Howard Zinn |
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76146c2
|
Slavery existed in the African states, and it was sometimes used by Europeans to justify their own slave trade. But, as Davidson points out, the "slaves" of Africa were more like the serfs of Europe--in other words, like most of the population of Europe."
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Howard Zinn |
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5c6e5a6
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Three years before the terrible events of September 11, 2001, a former lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Air Force, Robert Bowman, who had flown 101 combat missions in Vietnam, and then had become a Catholic bishop, commented on the terrorist bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. In an article in the National Catholic Reporter he wrote about the roots of terrorism: We are not hated because we practice democracy, value freedom, ..
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Howard Zinn |
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349072f
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If you permit unprincipled and ambitious men to monopolize the soil, they will become masters of the country in the certain order of cause and effect. . . .
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Howard Zinn |
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33b682c
|
The country therefore was not "born free" but born slave and free, servant and master, tenant and landlord, poor and rich."
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Howard Zinn |
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f6003e4
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Ruling elites seem to have learned through the generations--consciously or not--that war makes them more secure against internal trouble.
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Howard Zinn |
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d525a2f
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It was an old lesson learned by governments: that war solves problems of control.
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Howard Zinn |
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d7917f3
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It is not that the historian can avoid emphasis of some facts and not of others. This is as natural to him as to the mapmaker, who, in order to produce a usable drawing for practical purposes, must first flatten and distort the shape of the earth, then choose out of the bewildering mass of geographic information those things needed for the purpose of this or that particular map. My argument cannot be against selection, simplification, empha..
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propaganda
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Howard Zinn |
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280385e
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La distinction traditionnelle entre guerres "justes" et guerres "injustes" est desormais obsolete. La cruaute des moyens depasse aujourd'hui tout objectif imaginable. Aucune frontiere nationale, aucune ideologie, aucun "mode de vie" ne peut justifier la disparition de millions de vies que la guerre moderne, nucleaire ou conventionnelle, entraine inevitablement. Les pretextes classiques sont soit trop confus soit trop changeants pour que l'o..
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Howard Zinn |
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35282e4
|
in 1851, an aged black woman, who had been born a slave in New York, tall, thin, wearing a gray dress and white turban, listened to some male ministers who had been dominating the discussion. This was Sojourner Truth. She rose to her feet and joined the indignation of her race to the indignation of her sex: That man over there says that woman needs to be helped into carriages and lifted over ditches. . . . Nobody ever helps me into carriage..
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Howard Zinn |
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cdb9c52
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To hell with your courts, I know what justice is.
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Howard Zinn |
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d8fcad2
|
Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can quietly become a power no government can suppress, a power than can transform the world.
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unionization
labor
civil-rights
resist
resistance
protest
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Howard Zinn |
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9d23b74
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Police, I learned over the years, are like soldiers, normally good-natured people, but part of a culture of obedience to orders and capable of brutal acts against anyone designated as "the enemy"--in this case, the antiwar movement."
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Howard Zinn |
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aa4ef6e
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Combien de gens exercent-ils le travail de leur choix ? Certains scientifiques, artistes, quelques travailleurs tres qualifies ou certaines professions liberales ont peut-etre cette satisfaction, mais la plupart des gens ne sont pas libres de choisir leur activite. C'est la necessite economique qui les y oblige. C'est pourquoi on peut parler de "travail aliene". En outre, la plupart des travailleurs produisent des biens et des services dest..
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Howard Zinn |
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45709e1
|
The pretense continued over the generations, helped by all-embracing symbols, physical or verbal: the flag, patriotism, democracy, national interest, national defense, national security. The slogans were dug into the earth of American culture like a circle of covered wagons on the western plain, from inside of which the white, slightly privileged American could shoot to kill the enemy outside--Indians or blacks or foreigners or other whites..
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Howard Zinn |
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072e517
|
Columbus, desperate to pay back dividends to those who had invested, had to make good his promise to fill the ships with gold. In the province of Cicao on Haiti, where he and his men imagined huge gold fields to exist, they ordered all persons fourteen years or older to collect a certain quantity of gold every three months. When they brought it, they were given copper tokens to hang around their necks. Indians found without a copper token h..
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Howard Zinn |
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1a11d38
|
Society in every state is a blessing, but Government even in its best state is but a necessary evil. . . .
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Howard Zinn |