Word: civilization
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...book is divided into nine chapters, each of which is a rebuttal to an aspect of Fortas' theory of civil disobedience. Zinn's best chapters are those which deal with Fortas' smug complacency over the role of the Supreme Court in contemporary American life...
With this assurance, Fortas goes on to describe the role of the Court as that of "striking the balance between the state's right to protect itself and its citizens, and the individual's right to protest, dissent, and oppose." And, with extraordinary civil libertarian vigor, Fortas contends that the U.S. government "recognizes and has always recognized that an individual's fundamental moral or religious commitments are entitled to prevail over the needs of the state...
Confronted with this statement, Zinn devastatingly probes into some of the Court's recent decisions on draft protests and civil rights and finds Fortas' view of the Court as a balancer more than a little one-sided--in fact, hypocritical and patently untrue. The Court is not our stalwart friend and defender, as Fortas would have us believe. What the Court should be doing, Zinn then argues, is standing squarely on the side of the individual's rights, protecting him as best it can from the already stifling massiveness of the federal bureaucracy...
...fine. But what is troubling is a question that Zinn raises in the first chapter, but never answers. Left unanswered, it seems to haunt and make slightly unreal all of the emotional energy of Zinn's attack on the Court and American society. If we justify one act of civil disobedience, he asks...
Must we not justify them all? If a student has a right to break the conscription law, does this not give the Klan the right to disobey the Civil Rights Act? There is a confusion here between the tolerance of all speech, and the tolerance of all actions. I would argue that all promulgation of ideas by speech or press whether odious to us or not, should be tolerated without distinction; that we, as citizens, should defend someone's right to speak stupidly (even while we expose that studidity), that whatever "harm" may come from bad ideas...