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Academic Freedom:
Collaboration and Resistance
The 23rd T. B. Davie Memorial Lecture
Delivered in the University of Cape Town on July 23, 1982
by Howard Zinn
All of you assembled here understand, I am
sure, that an invitation to lecture in South Africa cannot be received
casually. You know -- and there is no point in my summoning up a spurious
courtesy to ignore this -- that the name South Africa immediately arouses
powerful emotions among all people concerned with human liberty.
I remember, 25 years ago, when I was finishing my PhD at
Columbia University, and I was offered my first full-time teaching job, a post
as chairman of the history department at a small college for black women in
Atlanta, Georgia. My father said, "Don't Go." I was going into the
deep South of the United States, the mysterious, threatening South of William
Faulkner's novels and Richard Wright's memoir of childhood. To my father, a
working man who had never finished primary school, survival required caution,
and that phrase "the South" brought immediate foreboding.
However, in August of 1956, my wife and I packed all our
possessions into a 1947 Chevrolet, leaving barely enough room for two small
children -- and drove South. Living for seven years inside a black community in
the racially segregated South of the late 1950s and early 1960s, we did indeed
find that which troubled my father: an atmosphere of fear and hate built on a
premise of racial inferiority. 
But we found other things too, omitted from
those crude general epithets used to describe and dismiss whole societies: we
found black people with high intelligence and indescribable courage, determined
to struggle for an equal share of the fruits of the earth, the light of the
sun, for living space, that freedom which the great philosophers, poets, and
prophets of world history had declared to be the right of all human beings. And
we found white people, not many, but enough to suggest the possibility of more,
brave men and women ready to support thaT struggle.
As I contemplated your invitation, that memory reinforced what I
had already come to believe very strongly -- something put into words by a
character in Lillian Herman's anti-Fascist play, Watch On The Rhine:
"Remember, everywhere in the world there are people who love children, and
who will fight to make a world in which they can live." I have lived in
many parts of the United States. I have been to Canada and Mexico and Cuba, to
Western Europe and Yugoslavia, to Japan and Laos and Vietnam, and wherever I
have been, whatever the nature of the government, that statement of faith in Watch
On The Rhine was corroborated. I have never before been to South Africa. I
am sure that South Africa embodies the most stark truths that have been uttered
about it. But I am equally sure that inside those truths are infinite
complexities and surprises. I wanted very much to come here to discover some of
these for myself.
Indeed, the terms of your invitation gave me an immediate good
feeling: that this lecture itself would be an occasion for protest aainst a
governmental edict which is such a violation of democracy, such an infringement
of liberty, that men and women of good will everywhere must condemn it. I feel
honored to be part of such an occasion. I admire you for your refusal to remain
silent.
It must be said that attacks on human rights, whilE more flagrant
and more frequent in some places than others, are to be found all over the
world. One reads with horror the story of Steve Biko, and knows that at the
same time in police stations everywhere, not only in right-wing dictatorships,
but also in countries that dare to call themselves socialist, and yes, in
countries that are considered liberal democracies like the United States,
people are taken into custody, beaten and killed. The reasons given by the
South African Security Police for the deaths of 45 Africans in detention
between 1963 and 1977 could come from the same handbook used by police
authorities almost everywhere: 'suicide by hanging...slipped in shower...fell
downstairs...fell against chair...leaped from 10th floor window during
interrogation...(and, as with Steve Biko) died in scuffle'.(1)
There are place-names in every country that immediately evoke
dread. In your country: Queensboro, 1921; Sharpeville, 1960; Soweto, 1976. In
my country, in the 1960s and 1970s; Kent State, Ohio; Jackson State,
Mississippi; Attica, New York -- white students shot and killed by National
Guardsmen for protesting the Vietnam War, black students shot and killed by
police for protesting segregation; black and white prisoners shot to death by
state troopers for taking over their prison in protest against intolerable
conditions.(2) All these victims were in the classic military position in which
Natives, historically, have fought Europeans: sticks, stones, and bare hands
against modern firearms.
So I have not come here to talk to you about the sins of South
Africa. I cannot forget that my country was a slave society for two-thirds of
its history -- from 1619 to 1865 -- that is 246 years. It is inly 117 years
since the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution was passed, abolishing
slavery, only 28 years since school segregation was declared unconstitutional
in 1954, only 17 years since Southern blacks could vote without fear because of
the Voting Rights Act of 1965. And it is zero years since blacks received equal
rights to work and wages, which is my way of saying that, while overall unemployment
in the United States today is 10% of the labor force, for young black people
the unemployment rate is 40-45%. With that past, with that present, no American
can lecture South Africans about 'your race problem'.
Because injustice is universal, indEed among people of all
colors, and because the longing for justice is also universal, we may be able
to learn from one another, to keep in touch, to give support. I hope that my
visit here is such an exchange.
I do know that there is a standard warning issued to foreign
travelers everywhere, written in invisible ink on our passports: you must not
criticize your own government while abroad; to do so is unopatriotic. I must
say, however, that I have never considered my criticism of the United States government
as unpatriotic. If patriotism has any valid meaning, surely it means love and
respect for the people of your country, indeed for human beings everywhere, and
this may require honest criticism of your government, which is something quite
different than your country.
Similarly, I have never thought that, as a matter of etiquette,
people visiting another country should remain silent about injustices there.
Should freedom of speech have geographical boundaries? How odd that governments
find it proper to send armies across borders to kill, but think it improper
that people should cross borders to speak.
So, I will speak freely here today, as honestly as I can, as
candidly as I dare. I confess that I do not know much about South Africa. I
have read a few histories. I have read the novels and stories of Nadine
Gortimer. I have seen the plays of Athol Fugard. I have also read some
documents; one of them moved me deeply: the Freedom Charter that was adopted by
3000 delegates at the Congress of the People of Kliptown on June 26, 1955. That
was four years after after a one-day strike called by the African National
Congress and the Indian National Congress to protest discriminatory laws.
During that strike 18 people were killed by police and June 26 became a memorial
day.
That Freedom Charter I found a remarkable document, a powerful
statement for both political and economic democracy, as if the American
Declaration of Independence had been brougth up to date and made concrete. I am
quoting from:(3)
It shocked me to learn that this charter was later used by the
government as proof of communism in treason trials. It seems to me unwise for
the government to label as communist a statement so profoundly democratic, so
concerned with freedom of expression, with sexual and racial equality, with the
goal of plentiful food, land, and medical care for everyone. The democracy
asked in the Freedom Charter surely does not describe the Soviet Union. It is a
description of a society which does not yet exist anywhere on earth, but one
eminently desirable by any rational and humane person.
Another document I have read: the speech of Nelson Mandela to
the court in 1963 before he was sentenced to life in prison, for sabotage and
conspiracy to overthrow the government. He admitted to planning sabotage, as a
desperate measure, wanting to avoid rebellion, terrorism, and bloodshed,
preferring to use violence against property rather than against people, in
order to call the attention of the world to the situation of black people in
South Africa. He admitted to being influenced by Marxian thought, but also by
Gandhi, Nehru and others. He advocated some form of socialism, but also admired
western parliamentary democracy. He said:(4)
'I have fought against white domination and I
have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a
democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and
with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to
achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die'.
I cannot see how any decent person can help
but admire that aspiration, that spirit. Surely, a person of such sensibility,
such idealism, such courage, should not be in prison, but in the leadership of
a society reconstructing itself as a democracy.
So, a bit of reading is all I can claim about
South Africa. But I do know something about what that remarkable black
American, Dr. W.E.B. DuBois, called ‘the problem of the twentieth century, the
problem of the color line’. Living and teaching in a black community in the
deep South of the United States in a period of transition and turmoil was an
education. Also, having taught history and politics for more than 25 years,
first in a small Southern college, then in a large Northern university, I have
had to do some thinking about the question of academic freedom.
I am encouraged by the third paragraph in
your admirable Dedication, which says: ‘We believe further that academic
freedom is essential to the pursuit of truth and is best assured in a free
society which recognizes fundamental human rights’. To me, academic freedom has
always meant the right to insist that freedom be more than academic – that the
university, because of its special claim to be a place for the pursuit of
truth, be a place where we can challenge not only the ideas but the
institutions, the practices of society, measuring them against millenia-old
ideals of equality and justice.
My own background led me to such a
definition. I was brought up in a working class family, worked in a shipyard
for three years from the age of 18, then enlisted in the US Air Force and saw
combat duty as a bombardier in the second World War, all this before I became a
student of history and political science at New York University, then Columbia
University, later Harvard University.
From the start, I was skeptical of the
academy’s claim to objectivity. The world I had known was one of hard class
war, of holocaust and atrocity (I had participated in at least one totally
senseless bombing of a village of civilians), of injustice and unremitting
conflict. It was a world, as Albert Camus wrote, divided between pestilences
and victims, and it was our responsibility as human beings not to be on the
side of the pestilences.(5) In a world so divided, no institution can claim
neutrality, not even an institution as clever as a university, so righteous in
its claims to objectivity, and so wrong in that righteousness.
Even before I set foot in my first university
classroom, I suspected this, and yet in the years that followed, as a student,
then as a member of various faculties, my recurring naivete – assiduously
fostered by the academy – had to be again and again overturned by reality. The
reality is that I live in a country where 1 percent of the population owns 33%
of the wealth, where 100 giant corporations control half of the economy, where
cabinet members, presidential advisers, and top military men move back and
forth from government to high corporate posts like shuttles on a loom, weaving
a giant web of influence from which no institution can remain free.
When I was at Spelman College in Atlanta, one
could easily conclude that here was an autonomous institution, free from
outside control, a private university with private funds, a lovely campus
fragrant with magnolias and honeysuckles, where a minority of white faculty
could live and work among black students and black colleagues, where the racial
separation laws that operated in the city outside the campus walls could be
forgotten, and where learning could go on, untrammeled and free. Indeed, as if
to emphasize the independence of this enclave from the harsh racial division of
the world outside, a stone wall and a barbed wire fence enclosed the campus.(6)
My family and I lived on campus, and it was
our eight-year-old son who one day pointed out that the strands of barbed wire
on top of the fence were angled in such a way as to make it harder for students
to get out of the campus than for intruders to get in. He was an expert on
barbed wire, and it was left to me to put together the evidence and draw the
political conclusions.
The college now had its first black
president, but was ultimately ruled by its Board of Trustees, almost all white,
and had been financed from its beginnings by the Rockefeller family; two
Rockefellers were still on the Board. Far from being independent of the outside
world, the college, I began to understand, was fulfilling the historical pact
between Northern and Southern capital which marked their reconciliation about
30 years after the Civil war.(7) Another party to that pact was Booker T.
Washington, the black leader, who offered the white South black labor, in
return for industrial training and some education, offering blacks a measure of
economic integration if they would quietly accept social and political segregation.
In this agreement, Northern
philanthropist-industrialists – finding economic allies among rich white
Southerners, would subsudize black education. Southern politicians would let
the black colleges do as they liked inside their protected enclaves, so long as
they turned out the black teachers, social workers, ministers, even a few
doctors and lawyers, to serve a segregated community of black men and women who
crossed the border twice – morning and evening – to do menial work in the white
part of town. And so long as the black students stayed inside the fence, and
did not interfere with the patterns of segregation in the city outside, the
pact was sealed. There was academic freedom inside the walls, and economic
enslavement outside, to the staisfaction of Northern millionaires and Southern
white politicians. There was the cooperation of a few black administrators, and
the compliance, for a long time, of young black students, promised careers and
a measure of American success, along with that long-withheld pride of accomplishment.
My wife and children and I, by chance, came
on the scene when the students at Spelman and other black colleges in the South
were getting ready to withdraw that compliance. It was 1956.
Two years earlier, the Supreme Court of the
United States had ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which
declares that no state can deny to any person ‘the equal protection of the laws’
means you cannot have segregation in state-supported schools. That Amendment
had been passed in 1868, so it had taken 86 years for the Supreme Court to come
to this conclusion. There were many reasons for the Court decision, but one of
them is rarely mentioned in American history textbooks: Africa. It was the time
of cold war. The United States was vying with the Soviet Union for standing
among the new colored nations of the world and, continually embarrassed by by those
who pointed to racial segregation, needed to say something dramatic on this
issue. The Supreme Court decision allowed the United States to speak out
grandiloquently. The government could then sit back while the praise rolled in
from all sides, and do nothing to enforce the decision.
Other people, however, black Americans, would
not let the words rest on the printed page. It was, indeed, their long
persistence that had led to the court decision. In late 1955, black people
began their first mass action in the deep South: the boycott of buses in
Motgomery, Alabama, to protest segregation. Maids, laundry workers and handymen
were walking three, four, five miles every morning, and again every evening,
for a year, until that day when the news came: they had won, and now could sit
wherever they chose on the buses in Montgomery. One of them, an elderly black woman,
walking back home in the midst of the boycott as the sun set, was asked, ‘Aren’t
you tired’? Her reply became famous: ‘Yes, my feets is tired. But my soul
rested’.(8)
In Atlanta, in 1957 and 1958, my students
began venturing off the campus. They had always gone into town to buy food and
clothes, but this time they were shopping for freedom. They kept asking for
books at the Atlanta public library, which was reserved for whites. The
librarians became embarrassed in refusing the requests of black students for
books like John Locke’s, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, and
John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty. They worried about the public unveiling
all this in an impending lawsuit against them. So, the Carnegie library of
Atlanta one day quietly opened its membership to blacks.
This was prologue. In the spring of 1960, all
over the South, black students walked off their campuses to sit-in at downtown
lunch counters and restaurants, and would not move until served. ‘We don’t
serve niggers’ was the standard statement of refusal. And the classic reply
became: ‘That’s not what I want. I want a sandwich’. Black laughter became a
weapon in the struggles that followed along with hymns of freedom and acts of
sheer courage.
And so, my students at Spelman did the same.
By the hundreds, they broke the ancient pact, went into town, sat in, refused
to move, were arrested and went to jail. Some of us on the faculty joined them
in their sit-ins and their demonstrations. When our students came back from
jail they were different; they would never be the same again. Neither would
Spelman college. Neither would the South. Once their academic freedom had been
just that – academic. Now it would have at least a measure of reality, because
they had crossed the barrier of the academy and joined the struggle in the
world outside.
When I moved north, and began teaching at
Boston University in 1964, I learned that the pact to limit academic freedom,
to keep it behind barbed wire whether actually or symbolically, was not
confined to the Southern colleges. I knew that, from the beginning of the
United States, there was a partnership between business and government on
behalf of a wealthy elite, and that the power of this elite depended on a compliant
population, trained in the primary and secondary schools to become the
underpaid workforce of an immensely rich country. (9) What I began to see was
the role of the universities: to train the middle managers – the professionals,
businessmen, administrators – who would become a useful buffer between upper
and lower classes.
In short, the pact I had learned about in the
South was only part of a larger, long-standing agreement in American higher
education, in which the students collaborate to maintain the social structure
as it is. In return they are given jobs in the middle and upper levels of that
structure, as engineers, doctors, lawyers, professors, businessmen, scientists,
selling their skills to those who run the society, for a price which gives
comfort and security.
Sometimes the service given by the University
is direct, immediate. When police went on strike in Boston in 1919, they were
replaced by students from Harvard University. In wartime, college students who
have been trained in the Reserve Officers Training Corps, are sent off to the
front, and patriotism pervades the campus. In the great Widener Library at
Harvard there is a mural of a Harvard student off to fight in the first World
War, with the inscription: ‘Happy is he who in one embrace clasps death and
victory’.
When the bugles of war sound, the so-called
independent and humane centers of learning in every country open wide the
school doors to march their students down from the hilltops of higher learning
into the valleys of death.
When the United States sent more than a
half-million troops into Vietnam, and carried out massive aerial bombardments
of towns, villages, and countryside, dropping more bombs than had been dropped
in all theaters of World War II, the front line troops came out of the primary
and secondary schools, where children are raised in an atmosphere of salutes to
the flag, pledges of allegiance, and reverence for military heroes. The
colleges and universities played their part. Michigan State University trained
police officers for the Saigon government, which the United States had
installed in power in 1954. Campus units of the ROTC expanded to train junior
officiers to serve in Vietnam. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology and
other prestigious universities housed research units that were involved in the
development of weapons for the war. From the faculties of Harvard and other
leading institutions came the presidential advisers, the consultants and
planners for the war.(10) Vietnam became the modern version of a historic
African experience – wars of so-called civilized nations against so-called primitive
people – in this case, the civilization of napalm against the primitive idea of
self-determination.
The pact that I have been describing in
American education – submission to the state in return for the promise of success
– was broken in the 1960s, by students on campuses all over the United States.
In the great universities, in the small community colleges, students decided,
en masse, that the war against the people of Vietnam was an abomination, that
the government of the United States was not to be obeyed in the carrying out of
crimes. And so, they demonstrated, occupied buildings, marched, picketed, held
giant rallies and teach-ins, burned their draft cards, refused to be inducted
into the military, and found themselves soon part of a national movement of
protest against the war.
They were joined by priests and nuns, by
middle-class Americans, by artists and writers, by millions of people all over
the country, and ultimately by the soldiers in the field, who wore black
armbands of protest, refused to go out on patrol, and put out newspapers on army
bases denouncing the war.(11) A situation was created where the government
finally decided it did not have the support at home to carry on a war against the
determined revolutionists and nationalists of Vietnam.(12)
At Boston University, there were all-night
teach-ins pointing out the facts of the war. Faculty and students lay down on
stairways and corridors to bar the way of men from the Dow Chemical Company,
manufacturers of napalm, who were recruiting students for their business. There
were blockades of buildings where recruiting officers for the US Marines had
been invited by the university administration to sign up students.
It was a magnificent movement, remarkably
non-violent, refusing to do harm to any person, but determined to stop the war,
to break the law and if need be, to go to jail. And tens of thousands went to
jail: on one day alone in Washington, DC, 14000 anti-war protesters were
arrested. It was an era when many of us got a small taste of what prison is
like. I did not think I could talk about politics and history in the classroom,
deal with war and peace, discuss the question of obligation to the state versus
obligation to one’s brothers and sisters throughout the world, unless I demonstrated
by my actions that these were not academic questions to be decided by scholarly
disputation, but real ones to be decided in social struggle.
Can we in the universities fulfill our
obligation to society, to the principles of justice and equality, unless we
renounce those pacts with the devil? Can we accept a measure of wealth,
privilege and status in return for quiescence and obedience – in short, for the
surrender of freedom? Can we accept unquestioning subservience to the state
when the state, nowhere in the world, represents its people, in their variety,
in their fullness? It is the essence of modern democratic theory that
governments, to be considered legitimate, must rest on the consent of all the
people, and on the principle that all human beings, of whatever sex or color,
are equal in their right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, that
governments which are destructive of these rights are not legitimate.
I am paraphrasing, as you probably know, the
American Declaration of Independence, but the ideas are universal. The United
States today is recklessly squandering the nation’s wealth – over a thousand
billion dollars allocated for the next five years – to build superfluous weapons
of mutual annihilation, while children, old people, sick people are in need,
while the arts fade for lack of funds, while ten million are out of work and
the cities are in decay – is violating the spirit of its own Declaration of
Independence. The Soviet Union today, by its deprivation of basic liberties, by
its ironic imitation of capitalist America in militarism and waste, is
betraying the philosophy of Karl Marx, who, in his critique of Hegel’s writings
on the state, emphasized freedom as the goal of Communism, and supported the
principle of popular sovereignty.(13) Because that principle is being violated
everywhere in the world today, we require a vast effort of cooperation among peoples
everywhere, in defense of all our lives and liberties.
With all that I have said about governments,
however, I must point out that there is a form of control operating in the
university which is more insidious than governmental control. I am speaking of
self-censorship, self-control, where the interests of the state, of the great
corporations, are internalized by the academy itself: its administration, its
students, its faculty. That is the most effective form of control, because it
takes on the appearance of freedom, even self-determination.
Everyone collaborates in this control, simply
by pursuing, day-to-day, their their traditional roles. No external restraints
are needed to ensure this, only the invisible coercion exercised by a system
rich enough to offer job security, promotions, social standing, and confortable
incomes, and powerful enough to withold these rewards from the unorthodox.
External control is then replaced by a whispering in the inner ear, with the
single message: play it safe. In this way, behind a façade of academic freedom,
the university, with the cooperation of the faculty, will turn out able and
docile students, who will dutifully, efficiently ply their trades to keep the
wheels of the economic system turning, and who will obey the state when it
summons them to service, especially to war.
Thus, without extraordinary measures, in the
natural course of its operation, the academy weeds out undesirable faculty,
students, courses, by a panoply of political devices masquerading as lofty
academic standards. Through a process of natural selection, a structure of
quiet coercion is created, within which a prudent professor then works. The
rule of safety then dictates the substance of scholarship and teaching.
Probably all here illustrate this from their own experience. I will point to a
few examples from my own fields: history and political science.
Note, first, that these are two separate
departments, to avoid contamination. Why spoil political theory with a dose of
historical reality? Why test Locke’s notion, of an original contract pleasantly
agreed to by all the members of the society, with the actual history of the
American Constitution, which speaks for ‘We the people…’ in the very first
words of its preamble, but which, in fact, was drawn up by 55 wealthy
slave-owners, merchants, bondholders, in such a way as to assure protection of
the interests of their class?(14)
Also, political science is not to be joined
to economics – that would be equivalent to interracial marriage. A study of
textbooks on international relations used in American universities has shown
that virtually no attention was paid in these texts to the influence of
corporations on US foreign policy, despite voluminous evidence attesting to
such influence. The average student of international affairs will not learn
that International Telephone and Telegraph helped to plan the overthrow of the
Allende government in Chile, or that United Fruit participated in and profited
from the CIA’s program of armed overthrow of the Arbenz government in Guatemala,
or that the three reasons given most frequently by the National Security
Council for US involvement in Vietnam, in its secret memoranda of the 1950s,
were ‘tin, rubber, and oil’.
You will find in the American study of
politics an enormous attention to voting, and an obsession with all the details
of legislation and parliamentary government. This is presumed to simply
describe reality. However, in all complex situations, there is a choice of what
to describe. There is no such thing as a mere description, because each choice
has different consequences. To describe is, therefore, to prescribe. It is true
that Americans have been voting every few years for Congressmen and Presidents.
But it is also true that the most important social changes in the history of
the United States – independence from England, black emancipation, the
organization of labor, gains in sexual equality, the outlawing of racial
segregation, the withdrawal of the United States from Vietnam – have come about
not through the ballot box but through the direct action of social struggle,
through the organization of popular movements using a variety of extra-legal
and illegal tactics. The standard teaching of political science does not
describe this reality.
Nor does the teaching of history, which in
the main emphasizes the laws passed by Congress, the decisions made by Presidents,
the rulings of the Supreme Court, and relegates the work of social movements to
minor notice.(16) The identification of political action with voting,
attributing social change to the beneficence of authorities, has a distinct
effect: it teaches young people that if they want to bring about change, the
ballot box is the way. But what if students were taught about another reality:
the history of strikes, boycotts, demonstrations, refusals of military service,
the development of mass movements? Is it a matter of chance that the choice of
what to describe in the process of social change is the choice safest for the
existing social system, which then uses punishments and rewards to make it also
safest for teachers and for students? The choices made have an air of
neutrality, but can one be neutral in a world which is already moving in a
certain direction?
What if one overcomes all the restraints,
from outside and inside, and proceeds to teach, to write unstintingly, on
behalf of radical solutions, to present sophisticated radical analyses, to
become bold theoreticians of social change? What if one seizes the territory of
theory, and remains there, with enough provisions – that is, books, documents,
bibliographies – for a thousand years, never venturing outside, except for
scholarly meetings? I am sure we all know the jet-set marxists, the mandarins
of revolutionary theory, who, whenever there is a call to walk on a picket
line, are en-route to an international conference on the withering away of the
state. I am suggesting, I suppose, that the theorist of radical change who does
not act in the real world of social combat is teaching, by example, the most
sophisticated technique of safety.
I have been talking as if to students of
history or politics. But you may be engineers, scientists, artists, physicians.
For you, the internalized control, the once-conditioned, now automatic reflex
action for prudence is based on an even simpler maxim: stick to your last, stay
in your field, leave politics – problems of war and peace, racial oppression,
class exploitation, sexual equality – to someone else. A neat formula for the
continuation of things as they are: just as people are artificially divided
into races and nationalities to keep them apart, and preferably in conflict
with one another, divide them also into specialities. Let word spread through
the culture that one who ventures out of one’s assigned field is not a true ‘professional’.
I think of J. Robert Oppenheimer, who
supervised the development of the atomic bomb in the United States, and then,
as part of a scientific panel advising on the question of what to do with it,
affirmed the political decision to drop it on the city of Hiroshima. He said
that he didn’t really know what was going on politically, and thought it best
to let the political leaders decide.
In contrast with Oppenheimer, there was
Albert Einstein, also brilliantly gifted in his field, who insisted, throughout
his life, in speaking his mind on questions of war and peace, armament and
disarmament. Refuse to fight, he said bluntly, to the young people of all
countries. Refuse to make the weapons of war, he said to the populations of
countries preparing for war. And when these ideas become widespread enough, Einstein
said, wars must end.(17)
Today, in the United States, the doctors,
most conscientious of specialists, said always to be ready to send a person
with an earache on to someone else who specializes in left ears rather than
right ears, have begun to speak up loudly on the question of nuclear war. Organized
into one of the fastest-growing groups of citizens in the United States, the
Physicians for Social Responsibility, they have inititiated a national campaign
to alert the nation to the dangers of nuclear war and the necessity for disarmament.
Other specialists have been stimulated to organize similarly: artists,
businessmen, social scientists, teachers, writers. Because of this, it was
possible last month to assemble in New York the largest anti-war demonstration
in the history of the United States – three-quarters of a million people
calling for a halt to the arms race. Einstein, I think, would be pleased.
I have wanted, as you can see, to go beyond
the more crude interfences of the state, to suggest that the most important
limits on our freedom are our own. If enough of us broke through our own
restraints, no outside force could suffice to deny our freedom. Modern systems
of control still depend on force, in emergencies, but for day-to-day discipline
they depend on the compliance of vast numbers of people. When that compliance
is withdrawn, en masse, even force is inadequate to hold back the impulse for
justice.
Please understand that I am addressing myself
when I am addressing you, admonishing myself, reminding myself, trying to keep
my own spirit of resistance intact even while I speak to you of yours. And what
I am asking of you, what I am asking of myself, is not simply to help someone
else to achieve justice. I believe that the time is past for philanthropy, for
missionary work, for good samaritans and kindly advisers. We are all in it
together. History has come to that point. We have run out of time and space and
boundary lines. We are all crowded together on a planet which must find
universal brotherhood and sisterhood, across lines of class, of race, of
religion, of nationality – or we will all go down, whether in nuclear holocaust
or endless civil war.
What we do now, therefore, we do for us all.
If enough people begin to recognize that, I believe, your extinguished torch of
freedom will be again, as will be a thousand more in other parts of the world.
Reprinted with the kind permission of Dr. Howard Zinn, to whom
we owe our thanks for pointing the way out of history.
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