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- Newsgroups: misc.activism.progressive
- Path: sparky!uunet!spool.mu.edu!agate!usenet.ins.cwru.edu!ukma!mont!pencil.cs.missouri.edu!daemon
- From: rich@pencil.cs.missouri.edu (Rich Winkel)
- Subject: Today's Quote...
- Message-ID: <1992Nov12.093516.14932@mont.cs.missouri.edu>
- Followup-To: alt.activism.d
- Originator: daemon@pencil.cs.missouri.edu
- Sender: news@mont.cs.missouri.edu
- Nntp-Posting-Host: pencil.cs.missouri.edu
- Organization: ?
- Date: Thu, 12 Nov 1992 09:35:16 GMT
- Approved: map@pencil.cs.missouri.edu
- Lines: 42
-
-
- "The events of those years underlined what prisoners
- already sensed--that whatever crimes they had committed, the
- greatest crimes were being committed by the authorities who
- maintained the prisons, by the government of the United
- States. The law was being broken daily by the President,
- sending bombers to kill, sending men to be killed, outside
- the Constitution, outside the "highest law of the land."
- State and local officials were violating the civil rights of
- black people, which was against the law, and were not being
- prosecuted for it.
-
- [p.508, Howard Zinn, in reference to the US prison
- rebellions of the late sixties and early seventies]
-
-
- ** ** **
-
- My viewpoint, in telling the history of the United
- States, is different: that we must not accept the memory of
- states as our own. Nations are not communities and never
- have been. The history of any country, presented as the
- history of a family, conceals fierce conflicts of interest
- (sometimes exploding, most often repressed) between
- conquerors and conquered, masters and slaves, capitalists
- and workers, dominators and dominated in race and sex. And
- in such a world of conflict, a world of victims and
- executioners, it is the job of thinking people, as Albert
- Camus suggested, not to be on the side of the executioners.
-
- [pp.9-10, Howard Zinn, in response to Henry Kissinger's
- statement, "History is the memory of states," in his book _A
- World Restored_]
-
- [Submitted by Jamie Pehling [january@eskimo.celestial.com]]
- From: Zinn, Howard. _A People's History of the United States_. New
- York: Harper and Row, 1980.
-
-
- ##################################################################
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