“Let us be reminded that before there is a final solution, there must be a first solution, a second one, even a third. The move toward a final solution is not a jump. It takes one step, then another, then another.”
This was the opening paragraph of novelist Toni Morrison‘s address at Howard University in 1995. University campuses seem to be settings that inspire revolutionary and thought-provoking speeches, regardless of whether or not those words are welcomed by University administrators and funders. Sometimes those voices are silenced, microphones turned off or drowned out by the the booing of those in disagreement or beaten down by a militarised police force. Sometimes, as is the case with the two speeches highlighted here in this post, those voices find hearts, minds and ears and are given the chance to become part of our cultural history, our collective insight, hindsight and oftentimes a portent of things to come, as well as a plea or opportunity for change.
In her address, Morrison went on to list some of the steps potentially taken toward those “final solutions.” Here are just a few:
“Construct an internal enemy, as both focus and diversion.”
“Isolate and demonize that enemy by unleashing and protecting the utterance of overt and coded name-calling and verbal abuse. Employ ad hominem attacks as legitimate charges against that enemy.“
“Enlist and create sources and distributors of information who are willing to reinforce the demonizing process because it is profitable, because it grants power and because it works.“
“Subvert and malign all representatives of and sympathizers with this constructed enemy.”
“Pathologize the enemy in scholarly and popular mediums.”
“Criminalize the enemy.”
“Maintain, at all costs, silence.”
These tactics, sentiments and framings are not only used by Israel and others to frame Palestinians as an existential enemy, but it is also the strategy of manipulation used to demonise today’s anti-war and anti-genocide student protestors, to paint them as hate-mongers and anti-semites and attempt to link them directly to supposedly dangerous foreign superpowers and influencers. This is the overt language and tactics of Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, Antony Blinken, Tom Cotton, Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, Lindsey Graham, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, the vast majority of both Democrats and Republicans in office today as well as university presidents and police. I’ve shared their many words, actions and speeches in previous posts.
American blogger, Jason Kottke, writes in his post, Toni Morrison’s Ten Steps Towards Fascism:
“Writing in the era of the “super-predator” myth (a Newsweek headline the next year read, “Superpredators: Should we cage the new breed of vicious kids?”), Morrison unflinchingly read fascism into the practices of US racism. Twenty-five years later, those “forces interested in fascist solutions to national problems” are closer than ever to winning a multi-decade national fight.”
We must never forget that it was Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton who were the leading public advocates for the myth of the black “Super-Predator.”
This social and political form of fear-mongering and demonisation for the purposes of control and subjugation (and profit) is inexorably linked to both Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton’s entire political careers, whether it’s stirring fears of blackness or of Russia or of China or of student protestors or of the Left itself. They have also been at the center of the sweeping privatisation of American industry as well as our education system, health care system and prison system.
Morrison continued:
“The forces interested in fascist solutions to national problems are not to be found in one political party or another, or in one or another wing of any single political party. Democrats have no unsullied history of egalitarianism. Nor are liberals free of domination agendas. Republicans may have housed abolitionists and white supremacists. Conservative, moderate, liberal; right, left, hard left, far right; religious, secular, socialist – we must not be blindsided by these Pepsi-Cola, Coca-Cola labels because the genius of fascism is that any political structure can become a suitable home.
“Fascism talks ideology, but it is really just marketing – marketing for power… It is recognizable by… its terror of truly democratic agendas. It is recognizable by its determination to convert all public services to private entrepreneurship; all non-profit organizations to profit-making ones – so that the narrow but protective chasm between governance and business disappears… so that we vote against the interests of our own children; against their healthcare, their education, their safety from weapons. And in effecting these changes, it produces the perfect capitalist, one who is willing to kill a human being for a product – a pair of sneakers, a jacket, a car – or kill generations for control of products – oil, drugs, fruit, gold.
“When our fears have all been serialized, our creativity censured, our ideas “market- placed,” or rights sold, our intelligence sloganized, our strength downsized, our privacy auctioned; when the theatricality, the entertainment value, the marketing of life is complete, we will find ourselves living not in a nation, but in a consortium of industries, and wholly unintelligible to ourselves except for what we see as through a screen darkly.“
Historian, author, professor, playwright and activist, Howard Zinn, in his speech at John’s Hopkins University in Baltimore in November 1970, spoke about the civil disobedience taking place in America. So much of what was taking place both politically and socially then mirrors what we are experiencing today. The only difference is that the passage of time has escalated the crimes and actions of U.S. empire. Temporary wars have become “forever wars” and not just one or two at a time, but sometimes 6, 7 even 8 (under Obama). An entire for-profit military industrial complex has been set up with an increase in spending going up each year making the U.S. the world’s leader in military spending. In 2023, US spending rose to an unfathomable $916 billion. Today, presidents (Obama, Biden) and Secretaries of State (Hillary Clinton) completely ignore – without consequence – the 1973 War Powers Resolution that requires Congressional approval before the United States can commit to an armed conflict.
In response to the activism of the civil rights movement and the anti-war movement of the 1950’s, 60’s and 70’s, American politics rebounded in the 80’s and 90’s by becoming even more conservative and Right-wing. The election of Ronald Reagan signalled a massive public and political shift. This was then exacerbated by the election of Bill Clinton and the introduction of neoliberalism into the White House. This conservative ideology effectively gutted what remained of the anti-war and Left-Wing segment of the Democratic Party and turned the party into a mirror image of the then-current Republican Party. As a result of that challenge (and Clinton absolutely framed it as a challenge as he swore never to be outdone by Republicans militarily or in terms of being “tough on crime”), the Republican Party moved even more to the Right, leaving the United States ruled by two ultra-conservative, anti-worker, anti-regulation, pro-corporate, pro-war parties who began to systematically undo most of the gains of workers unions, the civil rights movement and Roosevelt’s New Deal.
As you read the words of Howard Zinn below, understand that names like Kent State University can be replaced by Columbia or Harvard. Daniel Berrigan can be replaced with Julian Assange or Edward Snowden or Chelsea Manning. David Dellinger can be replaced with today’s anti-war and anti-genocide student protesters. J. Edgar Hoover can be replaced with Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, Bill Clinton, Victoria Nuland… The My Lai massacre can be replaced with Libya, Israel’s genocide of Palestinians, Yemen… George Jackson can be replaced with the names of almost every black and poor person imprisoned for non-violent crimes under Joe Biden and Bill Clinton’s 1994 crime bill, which more that doubled America’s prison population making it the biggest (and most profitable) mass-incarceration system on the planet.
Today we live in a United States and a global West that is Howard Zinn’s 1970’s timeline on steroids. What was true then is even more true today. What was urgent then, holds even deeper urgency today because those who are in charge today are the ones who decimated those hard-won laws for humanitarian and democratic change. They are the Right-Wing, pro-war revolutionary boomerang to the Left-Wing, anti-war revolution.
Zinn’s 1970 speech resonates loudly today and outlines quite eloquently why this fight must continue and why these power structures must be aggressively challenged and dismantled:
The Problem Is Civil Obedience
By Howard Zinn (November 1970)
“I start from the supposition that the world is topsy-turvy, that things are all wrong, that the wrong people are in jail and the wrong people are out of jail, that the wrong people are in power and the wrong people are out of power, that the wealth is distributed in this country and the world in such a way as not simply to require small reform but to require a drastic reallocation of wealth. I start from the supposition that we don’t have to say too much about this because all we have to do is think about the state of the world today and realize that things are all upside down. Daniel Berrigan is in jail—a Catholic priest, a poet who opposes the war—and J. Edgar Hoover is free, you see. David Dellinger, who has opposed war ever since he was this high and who has used all of his energy and passion against it, is in danger of going to jail. The men who are responsible for the My Lai massacre are not on trial; they are in Washington serving various functions, primary and subordinate, that have to do with the unleashing of massacres, which surprise them when they occur. At Kent State University four students were killed by the National Guard and students were indicted. In every city in this country, when demonstrations take place, the protestors, whether they have demonstrated or not, whatever they have done, are assaulted and clubbed by police, and then they are arrested for assaulting a police officer.
“Now, I have been studying very closely what happens every day in the courts in Boston, Massachusetts. You would be astounded—maybe you wouldn’t, maybe you have been around, maybe you have lived, maybe you have thought, maybe you have been hit—at how the daily rounds of injustice make their way through this marvelous thing that we call due process. Well, that is my premise.
“All you have to do is read the Soledad Letters of George Jackson, who was sentenced to one year to life, of which he spent ten years, for a seventy-dollar robbery of a filling station. And then there is the U.S. Senator who is alleged to keep 185,000 dollars a year, or something like that, on the oil depletion allowance. One is theft; the other is legislation. Something is wrong, something is terribly wrong when we ship 10,000 bombs full of nerve gas across the country, and drop them in somebody else’s swimming pool so as not to trouble our own. So you lose your perspective after a while. If you don’t think, if you just listen to TV and read scholarly things, you actually begin to think that things are not so bad, or that just little things are wrong. But you have to get a little detached, and then come back and look at the world, and you are horrified. So we have to start from that supposition—that things are really topsy-turvy.
“And our topic is topsy-turvy: civil disobedience. As soon as you say the topic is civil disobedience, you are saying our problem is civil disobedience. That is not our problem…. Our problem is civil obedience. Our problem is the numbers of people all over the world who have obeyed the dictates of the leaders of their government and have gone to war, and millions have been killed because of this obedience. And our problem is that scene in All Quiet on the Western Front where the schoolboys march off dutifully in a line to war. Our problem is that people are obedient all over the world, in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity, and war and cruelty. Our problem is that people are obedient while the jails are full of petty thieves, and all the while the grand thieves are running the country. That’s our problem. We recognize this for Nazi Germany. We know that the problem there was obedience, that the people obeyed Hitler. People obeyed; that was wrong. They should have challenged, and they should have resisted; and if we were only there, we would have showed them. Even in Stalin’s Russia we can understand that; people are obedient, all these herdlike people.
“But America is different. That is what we’ve all been brought up on. From the time we are this high—and I still hear it resounding in Mr. Frankel’s statement—you tick off, one, two, three, four, five lovely things about America that we don’t want disturbed very much.
“But if we have learned anything in the past ten years, it is that these lovely things about America were never lovely. We have been expansionist and aggressive and mean to other people from the beginning. And we’ve been aggressive and mean to people in this country, and we’ve allocated the wealth of this country in a very unjust way. We’ve never had justice in the courts for the poor people, for black people, for radicals. Now how can we boast that America is a very special place? It is not that special. It really isn’t.”
In “Declarations of Independence” (HarperCollins, 1990), Zinn writes:
“Surely, peace, stability, and order are desirable. Chaos and violence are not. But stability and order are not the only desirable conditions of social life. There is also justice, meaning the fair treatment of all human beings, the equal right of all people to freedom and prosperity. Absolute obedience to law may bring order temporarily, but it may not bring justice. And when it does not, those treated unjustly may protest, may rebel, may cause disorder, as the American revolutionaries did in the eighteenth century, as antislavery people did in the nineteenth century, as Chinese students did in this century, and as working people going on strike have done in every country, across the centuries.”
It is essential to have historical context on what is taking place today and the narratives and ideologies being disseminated across corporate media platforms, as well as from our political leaders and from those who obediently parrot them, those Stalin referred to as his “useful idiots.” The laws that have been passed under both Democratic and Republican parties for the past several decades have been a dismantling of democracy and equality in exchange for corporate control, hegemonic power and the desires and arrogance of a white supremacist nation. Many of those laws (the 1994 Crime Bill, the Patriot Act) were penned by our current president, Joe Biden. The ones he did not write himself, he backed with his full might and support (NAFTA, TPP, Citizens United, school segregation, every single war since he’s been in public office).
There comes a point where obeying these draconian laws and corporate elites, and/or staying silent and obedient, works directly against the values many of us were raised with, the values many of us still believe in. Equality. Freedom. Justice. Humanitarianism. Democracy.
“We always obeyed the law. Isn’t that what you do in America? Even if you don’t agree with a law personally, you still obey it. Otherwise life would be chaos.” – Gertrude Scholtz-Klink, chief of the Women’s Bureau under Hitler.
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