| Fragments from The Thirty Year's War | ||
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ANDREW KOPKIND Politics without promise rapidly loses its coherence. Pg 178 Now some say that the police attacked first, and others say that the Weathermen took the first offensive, but it is true that the Weathermen did not shrink from the fight, and we all though in the cell-block that night that simply not to fear fighting is a kind of winning. Pg 181 "I will not war against women and children. I have ordered my air force to restrict itself to attacks on military objectives." For weeks now, the atmosphere in Washington has been heavy with such promises of humility and restraint That particular promise happened to be made by Adolf Hitler, on the occasion of his declaration of war against Poland in Sept. 1939, but it serves to illustrate the universal desire of statesman to make their most monstrous missions seem like acts of mercy. Pg 61 In America, the cult of personality is the faith of the outcast, the politics of salvation. [The] only mandatory article of faith is the belief that the qualities of his personality can somehow become the values of their society. Pg. 64 The kind of top-down reforms he is capable of will result only in the superficial readjustments that can buy off the cutting edge of resistance. To do more requires the kind of dislocation and reconstruction of underlying relationships that can come only from new politics, based on movement and conflict, not coalition and consensus. Pg 71 The movement is dead; the Revolution is unborn. The streets are bloody and ablaze, but it is difficult to see why and impossible to know for what end. Government on every level is ineffectual, helpless to act either in the short term or the long. The force of army and police seems not to suppress violence but to incite it. Mediators have no space to work; they command neither resources nor respect, and their rhetoric is discredited in all councils, but all classes. The old words are meaningless, the old explanations irrelevant, the old remedies useless. It is the worse of times. It is the best of times. The wretched of this American earth are together as they have never been before, in motion if not in movement. No march, no sit-in, no boycott ever touched so many. The social cloth that binds and suffocates them is tearing at its seamiest places. The subtle methods of co-optation work no better to keep it intact than the brutal methods of repression; if it is any comfort, liberalism proves hardly more effective than fascism. Above all, there is a sense that the continuity of an age has been cut, that we have arrived at an infrequent fulcrum of history, and that what comes now will be vastly different from what we before. Pg. 87 Turn-the-other-cheek was always a personal standard, not the general rule; people can commit suicide but peoples cannot. Morality, like politics, starts at the barrel of a gun. Pg 90 The civil war and the foreign one have contrived this summer to murder liberalism in its official robes. There are few mourners. The urgent business now is for imaginations freed from old myths to see what kind of society might be reconstructed that would have no need for imperialism and no cause for revolt. Pg 95 It is at once the most tragic and redeeming social experience. It is what societies do instead of committing suicide, when the alternatives are exhausted and all the connections that bind men’s lives in familiar patterns are cut. Death and transfiguration is the ultimate human drama; revolution combines those two acts in a single transcendent scene. To be a revolutionary is to love your life enough to change it, to choose struggle instead of exile, to risk everything with only a glimmering hope of a world to win. Pg 154 The left wants to define the peace-mass in anti-imperialist and anti-racist terms. “Give peace a chance” is nice but nowhere; why not “Give revolution a chance”? The left emphasizes growth in understanding of society and action against the state, rather than the mindless collection of bodies. Both sides use symbolic action, but the symbols stand for totally different perspectives on political change. The liberals assemble crowds to petition a basically legitimate government for a redress of grievances; the radicals fight in the street, tear up draft records, shut down militarized schools or blow up corporations’ headquarters to demand destruction of illegitimate authority. United on the issue of the war, the two sides are actually poles apart on the meaning and quality of politics in America. Pg 183. Wholly unorganized and utterly undirected, the revolutionary movement exists not because a handful of young blacks or dissident middle-class whites will it but because the conditions of American life create it; not because the left is so strong but because the center is so weak. Pg 211 The escalation of radical protest into revolutionary action will produce two major social effects: a sense of crisis in the society as a whole, and a need for more repression by the authorities. Pg 212 |
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