Word: war
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...told continually that knowledge will make us free. We are taught to ignore irrational consequences and to put our faith in reason. Anyone who has tried to organize against the war knows that it is not the mind alone that defends the war, but the whole personality. We are fed reason in order to give an inferiority complex to the rest of our emotions and senses. What capitalism requires is a decision-maker who thinks his choices are rational...
living in a situation like Germany during World War II or the U.S. today, in which all of your actions contribute at least in part to the wrong side, you may be forced into terrorism. To the German living in Nazi Germany, he could only exist as a member of the human race by blowing up everything in sight. Efficacy is not an issue. That German could have blown up banks, freight yards, and missiles indiscriminately. His only proof of existence to himself would have been continual destruction...
...existential question leads into a related one. This one is more difficult to explain. As far as I can see, you can never take a relative action. If you participate in a peaceful protest against the war. you have made an absolute decision about the merits of the war. You have said that the war is, on the whole, wrong. In effect, actions always change beliefs into absolutes. There is no way to act against the war by 40 per cent. Any protest at all proves that you have decided that the war's benefits are outweighed by its faults...
Many people misunderstand action. They think that a more timid action shows a more relative position. It may show an uncertain state of mind. It does not show a firmly committed mind that realizes that the war is, in some absurd simplification, only 60 per cent wrong. If you believe that the war is wrong, it becomes totally wrong when you decide to act. You cannot march with one foot in a YAF parade and the other in an SDS demonstration. Therefore, once the decision to fight is made. it is made absolutely. If that decision is not made...
...decided to compromise. We agreed that everyone understood that draft boards and induction centers helped fight the war. I could blow those up, he said. The second part of the agreement was that I would help organize against the CFIA, and wait until people understood what it does before I blow...