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Enemies Of Freedom

Spectators

The End Of A Sixties Dream?

An Interview With Stephen Gaskin

Things did happen. We got out of Vietnam. We made it so that you couldn’t run a racist society separate from the rest of the United States, so that the Constitution reached down into corners of Alabama and Mississippi. We got rid of a President who was a tyrant. We brought new forms of education to other countries through the Peace Corps. There was a tremendous cultural flowering that took place. All flowers eventually curl up. But the significance of the flower is in the seed. The seeds were planted.

Sunbeams

The only real progress lies in learning to be wrong all alone.

Albert Camus

Thoughts On Censorship

What is true for a person, in other words, is not true for a republic; from our private life we can, like a dictator, ban anything which offends us; but in our life as a citizen in a democracy not only can we not ban from the public realm that which offends us, but for our own protection we must fight for its right to exist.

Gift Horse

Notes Toward A Psychology Of The Nuclear Age

I assume that at the site of a nuclear blast people would know literally nothing. One moment they would be living breathing human beings and the next moment they — and the landscape they inhabited — would not even be dust. Would there be any warning at all for such people? Does a missile even from far off make some sound that would warn them of their imminent death? (These are rhetorical questions. I really don’t care to know.) Of all the possibilities in a nuclear war, that has always seemed to me the most fortunate, to be at the site of the blast without warning and never know what hit you. Similarly, not to be at the exact site of the blast, but caught in the firestorm or the gale-like winds that surround it, might be a comparatively fortunate death in nuclear war. 

Cancer Is The Answer

Cancer, which had begun to affect as many as one in four, was a disease whereby an essentially weak, immature, dysfunctional cell invaded and occupied surrounding territories, dislocating the inhabitants, destroying the territory, devouring the resources, providing no exchange whatsoever until the entire territory was devastated and the inhabitants died of starvation, suffocation or toxicity. This dread disease became endemic to the second half of the twentieth century as tuberculosis had been in Europe in the nineteenth, and the plague earlier. Ironically, cancer, which perfectly mirrored imperialism, became through its proliferation the agency of spiritual and social — and therefore political — conversion.

When The War-Father Appears

i can see the worst all right — the earth exploding in some climactic chain reaction and all of us going off sparking out at the same time and i think i am going to like it if it happens that way after all we’ll be learning something together something massive that we’ve been trying to understand for a while and in that final sparking and arcing of the earth’s blow-up we’ll finally get it we’ll understand

Sunbeams

The best politics is right action.

Gandhi