Transcript:  I guess if I want to be remembered for anything it’s for introducing a different way of thinking about the world, about war, about human rights, about equality, for getting more and more people to think that way.  Also for getting more people to realize that the power which rests so far in the hands of people with wealth and guns that the power ultimately rests in people themselves and that they can use it.  At certain points in history, they have used it.  Black people in the South used it.  People in the women’s movement used it.  People in the anti-war movement used it.  People in other countries who have overthrown tyrannies have used it.  I want to be remembered as somebody who gave people a feeling of hope and power that they didn’t have before. 

Recorded on: 7/5/08

Question: How are traditional American history books limited?

Transcript:  The basic problem of traditional history books is that they’re nationalistic and they’re elitist.  By nationalistic, I mean they look upon the world centered around us and they look upon American policy as benign.  A more realistic and more truthful history would take a look at American foreign policy over the last several hundred years, really.  It will take a look at American foreign policy and see it for what it has been--expansionist, violent, and militaristic.  In other words, it would be a history that would be honest in the way that we expect individuals to be honest about themselves and their past and to rectify their mistakes.  To do this is not to be unpatriotic or un-American, unless you think that being American means approving everything your government does or being patriotic means supporting everything your government does.  No, being honest about our past, being honest about what we have done in the world.  A history that looks at what we have done from the standpoint of Black people, Native Americans, poor people, women, people who have generally been omitted from traditional history.  When you look at our history from the point of view of the people at the bottom, rather than people at the top, everything looks different.  Policies look different.  You have different criteria for measuring what the country does.

Question: Do strong nations like the U.S. have an incentive to write accurate historical accounts?

Transcript:  The leaders of the nation don’t have such an incentive.  The textbook publishers don’t have such an incentive.  The only people who have such an incentive are the teachers and students and people who are not benefiting from the present system.  If there’s going to be a change in teaching history, it will have to come from below.  Whatever change has taken place so far, and there has been some change in the teaching of history, whatever changes does take place will take place because teachers and students begin acting in a different way, reading different materials, moving away from the traditional textbooks, rejecting the no child left behind demands of standardized tests and dates and the old view of looking at history through generals and presidents.  It will have to come from below.

Recorded on: 7/5/08

Transcript:  I think the next president should begin, announce the immediate withdrawal of American troops from Iraq.  I think this will be a very healthy thing for Iraq.  The American occupation has not helped a thing.  It has not stopped civil war; it has provoked civil war.  It has not given the Iraqi people security or democracy; it has given them the opposite.  It has ruined their country.  And, of course, it has ruined our country, too.  The most important thing is for the Iraqis.  I think the next president should announce the immediate withdrawal and he should call upon the international community--the UN, the Arab States--to convene an international body to mediate in Iraq among the different groups, among the Shiites and the Sunnis and the Kurds and try to work out--and this is what the United States should not do--try to work out a compromised solution for the conflicts among them.  I say to not try to work out a compromised solution.  The United States moved in, shock and awe with enormous force, set the Shiites up in power, moved the Sunnis out and created the conditions for the present civil war.  So getting out, trying to help with an international group, using our resources to give food and medicine and restore clean water and all the fundamental things that the Iraqis have been deprived of because of the war.  In other words, we can begin to do constructive things, rather than continuing the destruction.

Recorded on: 7/5/08

Question: What did you learn from your experience in WW II?

Transcript:  I didn’t learn much about myself during that time, that is, while I was at war.  You don’t learn much while you’re in the military except doing your job.  By that, I mean you don’t think outside of your job.  I didn’t really learn very much until after the war and when I began to think about the war, and this was the best of wars.  I began to think about what war accomplishes and, as I say, this was the best of wars.  When I examined the best of wars, I found it so ridden through with immorality and atrocity, not just on the Nazi side, but on our side.  I began to question the whole idea of war itself, war for any reason, war against evil.  I decided that even if you’re fighting a great evil, by going to war, you match that evil and you perpetuate the evil in a different form.  All you have to do is look at the world since we defeated Hitler and Mussolini and Japan and ask yourself if we rid the world of them, after 60 million dead, did we rid the world of fascism or racism or militarism?  Not at all.  Yes, I began to think after the war about all of these things.  I came to the recognition that we cannot, whatever the excuse, whatever the justification, whatever tyranny is going on in the world, whatever border has been crossed, we must not resort to war.  War is the indiscriminate killing of huge numbers of people, especially with modern technology.  It should not be tolerated in a world that considers itself humane.

Question: How can we confront atrocities?

Transcript:  It’s not easy to deal with things like Darfur and Sudan.  The problem is how to deal with these things without making things worse.  There may be situations with some small and focused and temporary use of military force, which may have been true in Rwanda for instance in the 1980s, may stop a genocide, situations like that.  In other words, I’m not a total pacifist.  I’m a pacifist with regard to war, because I define war as the indeterminable, since there’s no end to war as we’ve seen, and indiscriminate killing of large numbers of innocent people, totally unfocused in an attempt to right some wrong.  That cannot solve any problem.  It cannot solve a problem with genocide.  It cannot solve a problem where atrocities are going on.  We have to figure out ways of dealing with these situations without war.  We have only begun, not really begun, to explore all the alternatives that exist in the vast spectrum between passivity and war.

Recorded on: 7/5/08

Question: Race in America

Transcript:  The situation of Black people in this country.  I started becoming involved in the movement for desegregation and racial equality when I moved South in 1956 to teach at a Black women’s college in Atlanta, Georgia, Spellman College.  I became involved in the movement.  That was in 1956.  Here we are, just about 50 years later.  Talking about the trajectory, we have gone from a tightly segregated society in the South and a partially segregated society in the North to a more open society.  Not a fully integrated society, but certainly the South has changed. Legal segregation which existed is over.  We are seeing more Black people and White people doing things together. There’s more intermarriage which, of course, the people feared but which is a good thing, and come to think of it, which Obama represents in a good way.  Progress has been made.  There’s now perhaps 10%-20% of the Black population which is economically much better off than ever has been true of that part of the Black population before.  There are more openings in media and business and the professions for a certain number of Black people.  But I speak about 10 or 20 percent.  For the vast majority of Black people, their lives are still constricted by poverty and racism.  The civil rights movement accomplished a good deal by beginning to remove some of the important social barriers.  What it did not remove was the barrier of class, the barrier of economic injustice.  Martin Luther King recognized this.  That’s why toward the end of his life he began working for economic rights for Black people.  The trajectory is one which took a very sharp upturn in the 1960s and which then has you might say settled down into a situation which is not going to change very much until there’s a change in the economic system of this country.  So long as we have an economic system based on profit and corporate wealth, there’s going to be an impoverished class.  And so long as there is an impoverished class, I’m talking about the 40 million people who don’t have health care, the 20% of children in the country who grow up very, very poor.  So long as we have an impoverished class, Black people will be disproportionately in that class.  The trajectory has reached a point where it is not going to go up much further unless we have economic changes which benefit not just Black people but White people, fundamental change in our economic and social system. 

Question: What should we change?

Transcript:  Those changes have to be for the government to go back and look at what the New Deal did in the 1930s.  The New Deal was not constrained as governments are today by this idea that government must not take a hand in the economy, which is a hypocritical remark anyway, because the government takes a hand in the economy all the time.  They just took a big hand in the economy to help the financial institutions.  When I say going back to the New Deal, the principle that the government must take care of people.  The government has to guarantee jobs to everybody, because private enterprise won’t do it.  It has not been able to do it.  The government has to guarantee decent housing for everybody, which again, private enterprise cannot do.  The government has to get rid of privatization in the health system and guarantee free medical care for everybody, what is called a single-payer system.  These are the things that need to be done if we are going to have an egalitarian and just humane society for people of all races.

Recorded on: 7/5/08

Question: Who do you endorse for President?

Transcript:  Yeah, we have three candidates.  We have a definite Republican candidate, McCain.  We have two Democratic candidates, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.  I certainly wouldn’t choose McCain, because McCain is a war hawk.  This war in Iraq is one of the most disastrous things the United States has ever done for our people and certainly for the people of Iraq.  McCain wanting to continue the war that Bush started five years ago, McCain is absolutely repulsive to me. Between Clinton and Obama, well both of them have promised to end the war, but I must say their proposals for bringing the troops out of Iraq are rather halfhearted and they talk about keeping troops there or Barack Obama says, “Let’s take troops out of Iraq, send troops to Afghanistan.”  Neither of them has shaken what Barack Obama rightly called the mindset that led to the Iraq war.  The mindset is a mindset which sees war and military intervention as a solution.  Neither of them has shaken that.  I’m not happy, as you can see, with any of the candidates.  When I get to the voting booth, I will be forced against my will, because I want somebody else other than those three.  I will be forced against my will to make a choice and I will probably choose Obama, because in many ways he represents something really different, a multi-racial person who is supported by a large number of young and enthusiastic people and who may, that is these young and enthusiastic people may, if he is elected, become a force that he has to reckon with and will push him in a better direction than he has shown so far.

Question: How can Americans live up to their potential?

Transcript:  I think Americans need to recognize that they cannot depend on our political system to do the right thing.  Americans need to recognize that they have to create local institutions, organizations, town halls.  They have to create grassroots organizations which all over the country will speak to the national

politicians in order to bring about change, both in foreign and domestic policy.  In other words, I think Americans need to realize that they cannot limit their participation as citizens to go into the polls every several years to vote.  They must participate every day.  Henry David Thoreau said, “We must vote with our arms, with our legs, with our feet, with our whole bodies.”  By that he meant people should be active and involved every day of the year if we are really going to have a democratic society.

Recorded on: 7/5/08

Transcript:  We don’t have a lot of democracy in America today.  We have these formal institutions.  We have representative government and we have a Bill of Rights.  But the fact is that the representative government doesn’t work very well.  The electoral system is dominated by wealth.  For instance, in the upcoming presidential election, most people I speak to cannot find a candidate that they like.  They have no choice.  The candidates have been selected for them and they have Republican or Democrat and Third Party candidates don’t have a chance.  The political system, therefore, is very limited.  Even freedom of speech and press, which are supposedly guaranteed in the Bill of Rights, they are very severely constricted by the control of the press and the control of all the arenas of free speech by huge corporations that control the major television channels and control the major newspapers.  Sure, we are more democratic than an absolutist and totalitarian state, but we in the United States are still quite a long way from democracy and certainly a long way from economic democracy.  Because of the control of the economy by corporations and the tax structure, which is set up by an unrepresentative Congress and approved by a president, a tax structure which has so far channeled the wealth of the country towards the richest one percent of the population.

Recorded on: 7/5/08

Question: What is your philosophy?

Transcript:  I believe, I suppose, in what could be called democratic socialism.  I believe that we need a society where the motive for the economic system is not corporate profit, but the motive is the welfare of people, health care, jobs, child care, and so on.  But that is dominant.  Where there is a greater equalization of wealth and a society which is

peaceful, which devotes its resources to helping people in the country and elsewhere.  I believe in a world where war is no longer the recourse for the settling of grievances and problems.  I believe in the wiping out of national boundaries.  I don’t believe in visas and passports and immigration quotas.  I think we need to move toward a global society.  They use the word “globalization,” but they use it in a very narrow sense to mean the freedom of corporations to move across boundaries.  But what we need is a freedom of people and things to move across boundaries.  When I talk about socialism in our jails, I mean greater societal intervention into the economy, but without deprivation of civil liberties.  Dalton Trumbo, the Hollywood writer, put it very simply.  He said, “Socialism without jails.”

Question: How do you blend anarchism, socialism and communism?

Transcript:  I like to think of taking the best elements of all of them.  If you separate communism from the Soviet Union and from those bureaucratic and totalitarian countries that call themselves Marxist or communist and just treat communism as it was envisioned by Marx and Engels, ultimately a society where there would be a freedom of the individual and a rational use of the world’s resources.  That’s something to take from communism.  From socialism I would take what I just described and that is the use of the government, a democratically-elected government, to equalize resources and help people.  I would take from anarchism the suspicion of authority and suspicion of all governments and the readiness to criticize and rebel against any government that may have started out in a humanitarian way, but they can easily become ossified and dictatorial.  Anarchism has as its goal the idea of a decentralized society where individuals are free from the oppression of government and corporate power and the church.  I think there are elements in all three that are useful.

Question: Is that a practical way of thinking?

Transcript:  It’s certainly not practical in the sense of something that’s immediately achievable.  But I think it’s very important to hold as a goal.  It’s philosophical, but not in a utopian sense that makes it simply theoretical and unworkable.  It’s philosophical only in the sense that it’s long term.  So although it’s not an immediate possibility or probability, I think it’s very important to have an idea of what a good society would be like so that you can measure what is happening today and what the policies are today against that goal.

Recorded on: 7/5/08

Transcript:  The world today, 2008, it’s trying to overcome American dominance in the world, trying to overcome the American military bullying that’s taking place here and there in the world in Iraq and Afghanistan and military bases in a hundred countries.  People are trying to work their way toward a more democratic society wherever possible and to do it without war.  I think this movement towards more democratic societies more concerned with human rights.  We’ve already seen it begin to happen in Latin America with movements from autocratic and elitist states to more populous states.  It may be that the European Union represents this in some way.  It’s a long term process.  I think what is going on is an attempt to create a world which is different than the world of the past hundred years, which was a world of incessant war and domination of the world by super powers.  First two super powers and now one super power.

Recorded on: 7/5/08