The Zinn Reader: Writings on Disobedience and Democracy

  Tom Wicker began to see that and more. A Time to Die is a meteor, following the unfinished trajectory of his thought, while illuminating D-yard in Attica, September 1971. With the Attica survivors now on trial in Buffalo, facing multiple life sentences (no amnesty, no pardons, no deals; they never held public office), Wicker's book is also a friend's powerful, passionate response to a call for help.

  8

  The Biggest Secret

  In 1975, after Vietnam and Watergate, with public opinion surveys showing a general distrust by Americans of their government, including the once-admired FBI, the House and Senate set up committees to investigate the FBI and the CIA. Both agencies had broken the laws they were sworn to uphold, and valuable information about this came out of the Congressional investigations. But the revelations went just far enough, and in just the right way—moderate press coverage, little television coverage, thick books of reports with limited readership—to give the impression of an honest society correcting itself. I expressed my skepticism in a column I wrote for the Boston Globe (December 2, 1975), entitled "After the FBI and CIA Secrets Come Out, Very Little Will Change."

  Secrets are coming out of the Senate committee probing the FBI and CIA. But the biggest secrets, I suspect will remain untouched.

  Yes, we learn that the FBI tapped wires illegally, kept lists of people to be put in concentration camps, wrote fake letters to destroy personal lives and used dirty tricks to disrupt organizations it didn't like. The CIA opened mail illegally, plotted the murder of foreign leaders and conspired to overthrow a democratically elected government in Chile.

  It is the habit of governments everywhere, including ours, when caught lying, stealing or murdering, to murmur a few words of confession, find a scapegoat to punish and go right on doing its dirty work in more subtle ways.

  Recall: Families were burned to death in Vietnam, babies were shot in their mothers' arms, Cambodia was bombed secretly and Laos openly, the land and culture of 40 million people in Southeast Asia were laid waste. And then what? Instead of trying Mr. Nixon and Kissinger for mass murder by terror bombing, we scolded their flunkies for breakingand-entering and gave them a little time in jail. Instead of trying the generals for the massacre at My Lai, we tried Calley and put him under house arrest.

  What will happen now with these revelations on the CIA and FBI? The usual. A few changes in personnel, a few new laws. But the same exclusive club of corporate billionaires, with their teams of lawyers, accountants, politicians and intellectual advisers hoping to become Secretary of State, will remain in power.

  For profound changes to come about in this country, we will have to start revealing to the American public, and especially to the school kids of the coming generation, the really big secrets, which no congressional committee will touch.

  First, that there is little difference between Them (the enemy— Communism) and Us (the West, American, "democracy") when it comes to a reckless disregard for human lives in pursuit of something called "national interest." That "national interest," it usually turns out, is the interest, over there, of the Kremlin bureaucracy, and here, the interest of the oil companies, the banks, the military-industrial-political complex. When we were told in grade school that the difference between Them and Us is "they believe in any means to gain their ends and we don't"—we were lied to.

  People are beginning to catch on. The Spy Who Came in From the Cold was the first best-selling novel to boldly make that point: "Our side" would use ex-Nazis, would sacrifice the lives of its own people, to score points in a game whose concern was not humanity but power.

  The current movie, Three Days of the Condor, is even more explicit. The CIA is portrayed as a group of sophisticated men using dazzling scientific techniques to ruthlessly exterminate anyone, including their own employees, who stood in the way of control of oil in the Middle East and Venezuela.

  Even the fantasies of movie scripts can't match the reality. There is evidence now that the FBI was involved in the planned murder of two black leaders in Chicago on December 4, 1969. A gang of police, armed with shotguns, pistols, rifles and submachine guns, and a plan of the house furnished by an FBI informant, attacked an apartment occupied by Black Panthers, at four in the morning, and executed Fred Hampton as he lay asleep in his bed.

  The biggest secret of all is beginning to emerge: That "the enemy" of this government is anyone, here or abroad, who won't put up with control of the world by Chase Manhattan, Exxon, General Motors, I.T & T. It is chilling but suddenly believable that a government willing to kill Vietnamese peasants and put Asian protesters in tiger cages will also assassinate native Americans and put citizens here in concentration camps.

  That's a heavy secret for us to carry in our heads. But we need to know it, if we are going to figure out how to defend our lives and our liberties from those who have occupied America.

  9

  Where to Look for a Communist

  Now that the Soviet Union has fallen apart and the other countries of the "Eastern bloc" have gone through radical changes in leadership, the word "communist" does not seem very threatening. But for forty-five years after the end of World War II, fear of a "Communist threat" distorted American public life, in a thousand ways. In the fall of 1988, a two-day conference was held at Harvard University to examine "Anti-Communism" and its effects. I was invited to give a talk to open the meetings. The editors of Newsday asked me to write a column for them based on the talk, and it appeared on January 22, 1989, under the title "Scare Words Leave Scars On Everyone." Another version was printed that month in Z Magazine.

  In 1948, a series of pamphlets were distributed by the House Committee on Un-American Activities, entitled "100 Things You Should Know About Communism." When I came across this in my files (they have files on me, I have files on them), I was impressed that this committee knew 100 things about communism. The pamphlets had questions and answers:

  Question 1: "What is communism?" (The idea is to start with something easy.) Answer: "A system by which one small group seeks to rule the world."

  Question 76: "Where can a Communist be found in everyday life?" (This question interested me because there had been times when I was in need of a Communist and didn't know where to find one.) Answer: "Look for him in your school, your labor union, your church, or your civic club."

  Question 86: "Is the YMCA a Communist target?" (This really worried me. I had always wondered why there was so much chlorine in the YMCA pool.) Answer: "Yes, so is the YWCA."

  In 1950, Rep. Harold Velde of Illinois, a former FBI man, later chairman of HUAC, spoke in Congress to oppose mobile library service in rural areas because, he said, "Educating Americans through the means of the library service could bring about a change of their political attitude quicker than any other method. The basis of communism and socialistic influence is education of the people."

  Let's skip to 1987, the year of the Contragate investigation, to Robert McFarlane, who conspired with John Poindexter, William Casey, Oliver North, Richard Secord, and almost certainly George Bush to violate the laws and the Constitution to give weapons to terrorists in Central America. McFarlane later said he knew the policy of getting arms to the contras would not work (not that it was wrong, but it would not work.) He said: "Where I went wrong was not having the guts to stand up and tell the president that. To tell you the truth, probably the reason I didn't is because if I'd done that, Bill Casey, Jeane Kirkpatrick and Cap Weinberger would have said I was some kind of Commie, you know."

  Our bizarre preoccupation with communism, which mystifies most people in other countries, has lasted a long time. Ronald Reagan, in his first presidential campaign, said, "Let us not delude ourselves. The Soviet Union underlies all the unrest that is going on. If they weren't engaged in this game of dominoes, there wouldn't be any hot spots in the world,"

  These are absurdities. But they represent something terribly serious. Because there are certain words calculated to stop thinking, end rational discourse, arouse hatre
d—words that are murderous. In our time, we have seen words used that way. The words "nigger" and "Jew" have led to lynchings, to mass murder. The word "Communist" has been used to justify the support of dictatorships (in Chile, the Philippines, Iran), the attempted invasion of other countries (Cuba), the bombing of peasant villages (in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, El Salvador), the destruction of the economy of a small, poor country (Nicaragua). The word also has been used to justify taxing the hardearned salaries of the American people to finance billions of dollars worth of stupid weapons.

  Is it an exaggeration to call such words "murderous"? A dispatch from Seattle, Washington, June 10, 1986, said: "A self-proclaimed soldier against communism faces a death sentence after a verdict today by a jury that found him guilty of murdering four members of the Charles Goldmark family. Rice has said he killed the Goldmark family because he thought they were part of an international conspiracy among Communists, Jews and the Federal Reserve Board."

  Defense lawyers said this belief was evidence of the killer's mental illness. But the only thing that would cause me to think he was mentally ill was his accusation against the Federal Reserve Board. Otherwise, he belongs in the White House, certainly during the Nixon years, when "communism" was a reason for killing peasants in Southeast Asia, and when the president queried H.R. Haldeman (source: the Watergate tapes) on how many members of the Chicago Eight were Jews.

  The word "Communist" used as an epithet, as an inducer of fear and trembling, is calculated to stop rational discussion of communism itself. We do need a sober critique of the Soviet Union, whose policies have given socialism a bad name. For me, reading Karl Marx, Eugene Debs, Helen Keller (how many of her admirers know she was a socialist?), and Emma Goldman, socialism had a good name. Any true socialist must feel anger and indignation at what has been done to human beings in the USSR. But there is a difference between such indignation and a hysterical, indiscriminate hatred that causes us to threaten to obliterate a nation of 280 million people—the very people we say are suffering under communism. There is a difference between a reasoned criticism of socialism and the use of deadly weapons by us, or by our mercenaries, to prevent change in countries that desperately need change.

  In Vietnam, inflammatory words led to unspeakable atrocities. Charles Hutto, a GI, told the Army's Criminal Investigation Division: "I remember the unit's combat assault on My Lai Four.... The night before the mission we had a briefing by Capt. [Ernest] Medina.... He said everything in the village was Communist.... We shot men, women, and children."

  Hutto, who now lives in Monroe, Louisiana, with his wife and two children, says, "I was nineteen years old and I'd always been told to do what the grown-ups told me to do. But now I'll tell my sons, if the government calls, to use their own judgment.... Now I don't even think there should be a thing called war...because it messes up a person's mind."

  The change in Hutto's thinking is instructive. This country is not the same after the Vietnam War as it was before. Millions of Americans have learned to think twice when someone yells "Communist." That's why, as all the public opinion surveys show, they are not ready to launch an invasion of Nicaragua.

  This country is not the same after the lessons of the civil rights movement. That movement, at its grass roots—at the level of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and Rosa Parks and Ella Baker and Martin Luther King, Jr., and the black people of Montgomery and Selma—was not deflected from its work by the charges of communism. Harry Truman called the 1960s sit-ins inspired by Communists. When asked for proof, Truman said he had none. "But I know that usually when trouble hits the country the Kremlin is behind it." The FBI tried to link Martin Luther King to communism. The movement was not deterred.

  In the '50s the House Un-American Activities Committee had been powerful. By the '60s, the American public was having doubts about it. In 1970, discredited and ludicrous, HUAC was abolished. Its interrogations now seemed laughable, as in this 1958 exchange between the committee and Joseph Papp, director of the New York Shakespeare Festival. Papp was asked: "Do you have the opportunity to inject into your plays any propaganda which would influence others to be sympathetic with the Communist philosophy?"

  Papp replied, "Sir, the plays we do are Shakespeare's plays. Shakespeare said, 'To thine own self be true...'"

  Richard Arens, staff director for the committee, said, "There is no suggestion here by this chairman or anyone else that Shakespeare was a Communist. That is ludicrous and absurd. That is the Commie line."

  The use of scare words is profoundly undemocratic. It stifles debate; it creates an atmosphere in which people are afraid to speak their minds honestly, afraid to examine all ideas. This has been true in the Soviet Union as well, where words such as counter-revolutionary, bourgeois and Trotskyite have been used to stifle discussion, weed out heretics, send people to Siberia. Perhaps now Mikhail Gorbachev understands that the Soviet Union must get beyond its murderous words because it has serious problems it must solve.

  For us, in the United States, there is too much to do for us to bankrupt ourselves for fear of communism. There are people without a place to live this winter, and others who can't pay their rent, and elderly people in nursing homes who can't go down to the dining room because there's no money to pay someone to push their wheelchair. But there's money for the B1 bombers and the Stealth fighter and the Trident submarines. With hungry children all over the world, we need to stop spending $300 billion a year for military junk, and use the money for human needs.

  To do all this, we need bold solutions, and therefore we need an open debate not limited by fear that names will be called: Communist, socialist, anarchist, even liberal. We should not be afraid to talk about redistributing wealth and a world community, or to renounce the nationalism that insists on being Number One.

  Bertolt Brecht, the German playwright, was never allowed to read his statement when called before the HUAC. Here is part of it: "We are living in a dangerous world. Our state of civilization is such that mankind already is capable of becoming enormously wealthy but as a whole is still poverty-ridden. Great wars have been suffered. Greater ones are imminent, we're told. Do you not think that in such a predicament every new idea should be examined carefully and freely?"

  10

  Plato:

  Fallen Idol

  In a course I taught for many years at Boston University, called "Law and Justice in America," I had fun with Plato, one of the gods of Western intellectual thought. I.F. Stone was long one of my heroes for his refusal to be bullied by authority, political or intellectual. So when I saw that he, retired from his remarkable I.F. Stone's Weekly, had written a book on Plato and Socrates, I was happy to review it for Z Magazine, where it appeared in April 1988 under the title Perils of Plato. The piece was then reprinted in a collection of my essays, Failure to Quit (Common Courage Press).

  Ionce heard I.F. Stone, queried about his extraordinary investigative reporting, say: "I'm having so much fun, I should be arrested." After reading his new book The Trial of Socrates, I am willing to testify against him. He is clearly having too much fun.

  He is also (though classical scholarship seems far removed from journalism) carrying on the work he did in his famous Weekly. He has lowered himself (secretly, guilty of trespass) into the mineshaft, with his lamp, his pick and shovel, dug deep into the documents kept by the authorities, and emerged at the end of a long day with some brilliant nuggets, which he offers to the world, and which damn the authorities.

  He shows us that the usefulness of history does not depend on its newness. Events of two thousand years ago can be as illuminating as those of yesterday; the ideas of people in ancient Athens are as familiar as those we read in the daily newspaper.

  Stone, who once annoyed presidents and FBI directors, is now irritating professional philosophers. He has moved into their territory, into the house they considered a private dwelling, indeed, into the best room, the one with Plato's Complete Works, in the original Greek. Lacking J. E
dgar Hoover's resources, the philosophers are unable to let out a contract on I.E Stone except to book reviewers.

  One of these, in the New York Times, said that Stone is "determinedly unsympathetic" (to Socrates, to Plato), full of "misconceptions," and perhaps even "anti-intellectual prejudice."

  For a long time Plato has been one of the untouchables of modern culture, his reputation that of an awesome mind, a brilliant writer of dialogue; his work the greatest of the Great Books. You don't criticize Plato without a risk of being called anti-intellectual.

  I can't get excited, I confess, about the scholarly disputations in The Trial of Socrates. Like: should you trust Plutarch's or Diodorus Siculus' claim that the philosopher Anaxagorus was also the object of a political trial in Athens, when neither Thucydides nor Xenophon nor Plato mentioned it? Let I.F. Stone have his fun.

  What is important is that Stone challenges the intellectual authorities of modern Western culture as brazenly as he has done with the political authorities.

  It is easy for liberals and radicals to expose the Best and the Brightest as political advisers, like those Phi Beta Kissingers who gave Machiavellian advice to the warmakers of Vietnam. It seems harder to escape the thrall of the intellectual advisers, the Great Names and the Great Books. And even when we manage to do that, we may substitute our own, the Great Names and Great Books of the Left, thus replacing one cultural hegemony with another.