9/11: An Inside Job?

“I’m open to coordinated activity in secret places…but I don’t believe in secrecy.” 

Civil Disobedience: Howard Zinn Video, Hannah Arendt’s words

www.howardzinn.org/

celeb endorsement of the day:

Bruce Springsteen raves about Howard Zinn

In the new issue of Rolling Stone, under the heading “Inspiration,” Bruce Springsteen says: “Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States had an enormous impact on me. It set me down in a place that I recognized and felt I had a claim to. It made me feel that I was a player in this moment in history, as we all are, and that this moment in history was mine, somehow, to do with whatever I could. It gave me a sense of myself in the context of this huge American experience and empowered me to feel that in my small way. I had something to say, I could do something. It made me feel a part of history, and gave me life as a participant.”

“Civil disobedience arises when a significant number of citizens have become convinced either that the normal channels of change no longer function, and grievances will not be heard or acted upon, or that, on the contrary, the government is about to change and has embarked upon and persists in modes of action whose legality and constitutionality are open to grave doubt”

“The extreme form of power is All against One, the extreme form of violence is One against All. And this latter is never possible without instruments.”

“Power corresponds to the human ability not just to act but to act in concert. Power is never the property of the individual; it belongs to a group and remains in existence only so long as the group keeps together…Power needs no justification, being inherent in the very existence of political communities; what it does need is legitimacy. The common treatment of these words as synonyms is no less misleading and confusing than the current equation of obedience and support. Power springs up whenever people get together and act in concert, but it derives its legitimacy from the initial getting together rather than from any action that then may follow. Legitimacy, when challenged, bases itself on an appeal to the past, while justification relates to an end that lies in the future. Violence can be justifiable, but never will be legitimate. Its justification loses in plausibility the farther its intended end recedes into the future.

Strength unequivocally designates something in the singular, an individual entity; it is the property inherent in an object or person and belongs to its character, which may prove itself in relation to other things or persons, but is essentially independent of them…

Force, which we often use in daily speech as a synonym for violence, especially if violence serves as a means of coercion, should be reserved, in terminological language, for the ‘forces of nature’ or the ‘force of circumstances’, that is, to indicate the energy released by physical or social movements…

Violence, finally, as I have said, is distinguished by its instrumental character. Phenomenologically, it is close to strength, since the implements of violence, like all other tools, are designed and used for that purpose of multiplying natural strength until, in the last stage of their development, they can substitute for it.

It is not superfluous to add that these distinctions, though by no means arbitrary, hardly ever correspond to watertight compartments in the real world, from which nevertheless they are drawn.

–hannah arendt, Crises of the Republic, 1969

MLK Jr. on Non-Violent Resistence, Love & Malcolm X

Martin Luther King Jr. responding to some questions about Malcolm X and responds to the questioning of the non-violent resistance.

No Small Dreams

By Michael Eric Dyson, special to Britannica.com, 17 January 2000

As a literary figure, Martin Luther King, Jr., stands as possibly the greatest American rhetorician of the 20th century. As a citizen, his singular contributions to the legacy of American democracy helped this nation realize its political and moral aspirations to an arguably greater extent than any other figure. And while much of the literature about King portrays him as a dreamer intent on rhapsodically transforming America through eloquent speech and writing, in reality he was much more. He was a visionary activist whose disturbing words and courageous deeds cost him his life. It is unfortunate that we have largely frozen King in his “I Have a Dream” stage while neglecting the radical evolution of his later years. Perhaps by revisiting the impressive body of literature King left behind we can come to a deeper understanding of his thoughts and his abiding legacy.

One of the more misunderstood and underappreciated features of King’s mature thought is his skepticism about the earlier methods of social change that he advocated. For the first several years of his career, King was quite optimistic about the possibility that racial inequality could be solved through black struggle and white good will. In The Preacher King, Richard Lischer captures the civil rights leader’s early views in a revealing quotation by King:

“Maybe God has called us here to this hour. Not merely to free ourselves but to free all of our white brothers and save the soul of this nation–We will not ever allow this struggle to become so polarized that it becomes a struggle between black men and white men. We must see the tension in this nation between injustice and justice, between the forces of light and the forces of darkness.”

But during the last three years of his life, King questioned his own understanding of race relations. As King told journalist David Halberstam, “For years I labored with the idea of reforming the existing institutions of the society, a little change here, a little change there. Now I feel quite differently. I think you’ve got to have a reconstruction of the entire society, a revolution of values.” King also told Halberstam something that he argued in his last book, Trumpet of Conscience: that “most Americans are unconscious racists.” For King, this recognition was not a source of bitterness but a reason to revise his strategy. If one believed that whites basically desired to do the right thing, then a little moral persuasion was sufficient. But if one believed that whites had to be made to behave in the right way, one had to employ substantially more than moral reasoning.

Macolm X read by Mos Def

Mos Def introduced by Howard Zinn…

Malcolm X, in Detroit, Michigan, 1963–2 years before his assassination.

West, Cornell. Race Matters . New York: Vintage, 1994: 149-51

THE CONTEMPORARY FOCUS on Malcolm X, especially among black youth, can be understood as both the open articulation of black rage (as in film videos and on tapes targeted at whites, Jews, Koreans, black women, black men, and others) and as a desperate attempt to channel this rage into something more than a marketable commodity for the culture industry. The young black generation are up against forces of death, destruction, and disease unprecedented in the everyday life of black urban people. The raw reality of drugs and guns, despair and decrepitude, generates a raw rage that, among past black spokespersons, only Malcolm X’s speech approximates. Yet the issue of psychic conversion, cultural hybridity, black supremacy, authoritarian organization, borders and boundaries in sexuality, and other matters all loom large at present-the same issues Malcolm X left dangling at the end of his short life spent articulating black rage and affirming black humanity.

If we are to build on the best of Malcolm X, we must preserve and expand his notion of psychic conversion that cements networks and groups in which black community, humanity, love, care, and concern can take root and grow (the work of bell hooks is the best example). These spaces-beyond the best of black music and black religion-reject Manichean ideologies and authoritarian arrangements in the name of moral visions, subtle analyses of wealth and power, and concrete strategies of principled coalitions and democratic alliances. These visions, analyses, and strategies never lose sight of black rage, yet they focus this rage where it belongs: on any form of racism, sexism, homophobia, or economic in justice that impedes the opportunities of “everyday people” (to use the memorable phrase of Sly and the Family Stone and Arrested Development) to live lives of dignity and decency. For example, poverty can be as much a target of rage as degraded identity.