The Problem is Civil Obedience
1970 from
the Zinn Reader, Seven Stories Press
By Howard Zinn
Transcript of my opening statement in the
debate at Johns Hopkins. It was included in a book
published by Johns Hopkins Press in 1972, entitled
Violence: The Crisis of American Confidence. -
Howard Zinn
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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 protesters, 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.
Well, that is our topic, that is our problem: civil obedience.
Law is very important. We are talking about obedience to
law-law, this marvelous invention of modern times, which we
attribute to Western civilization, and which we talk about
proudly. The rule of law, oh, how wonderful, all these courses
in Western civilization all over the land. Remember those bad
old days when people were exploited by feudalism? Everything was
terrible in the Middle Ages-but now we have Western
civilization, the rule of law. The rule of law has regularized
and maximized the injustice that existed before the rule of law,
that is what the rule of law has done. Let us start looking at
the rule of law realistically, not with that metaphysical
complacency with which we always examined it before.
When in all the nations of the world the rule of law is the
darling of the leaders and the plague of the people, we ought to
begin to recognize this. We have to transcend these national
boundaries in our thinking. Nixon and Brezhnev have much more in
common with one another than - we have with Nixon. J. Edgar
Hoover has far more in common with the head of the Soviet secret
police than he has with us. It's the international dedication to
law and order that binds the leaders of all countries in a
comradely bond. That's why we are always surprised when they get
together -- they smile, they shake hands, they smoke cigars,
they really like one another no matter what they say. It's like
the Republican and Democratic parties, who claim that it's going
to make a terrible difference if one or the other wins, yet they
are all the same. Basically, it is us against them.
Yossarian was right, remember, in Catch-22? He had been accused
of giving aid and comfort to the enemy, which nobody should ever
be accused of, and Yossarian said to his friend Clevinger: "The
enemy is whoever is going to get you killed, whichever side they
are on." But that didn't sink in, so he said to Clevinger: "Now
you remember that, or one of these days you'll be dead." And
remember? Clevinger, after a while, was dead. And we must
remember that our enemies are not divided along national lines,
that enemies are not just people who speak different languages
and occupy different territories. Enemies are people who want to
get us killed.
We are asked, "What if everyone disobeyed the law?" But a better
question is, "What if everyone obeyed the law?" And the answer
to that question is much easier to come by, because we have a
lot of empirical evidence about what happens if everyone obeys
the law, or if even most people obey the law. What happens is
what has happened, what is happening. Why do people revere the
law? And we all do; even I have to fight it, for it was put into
my bones at an early age when I was a Cub Scout. One reason we
revere the law is its ambivalence. In the modern world we deal
with phrases and words that have multiple meanings, like
"national security." Oh, yes, we must do this for national
security! Well, what does that mean? Whose national security?
Where? When? Why? We don't bother to answer those questions, or
even to ask them.
The law conceals many things. The law is the Bill of Rights. ;'~
fact, that is what we think of when we develop our reverence for
the law. The law is something that protects us; the law is our
right-the law is the Constitution. Bill of Rights Day, essay
contests sponsored by the American Legion on our Bill of Rights,
that is the law. And that is good.
But there is another part of the law that doesn't get
ballyhooed- the legislation that has gone through month after
month, year after year, from the beginning of the Republic,
which allocates the resources of the country in such a way as to
leave some people very rich and other people very poor, and
still others scrambling like mad for what little is left. That
is the law. If you go to law school you will see this. You can
quantify it by counting the big, heavy law books that people
carry around with them and see how many law books you count that
say "Constitutional Rights" on them and how many that say
"Property," "Contracts," "Torts," "Corporation Law." That is
what the law is mostly about. The law is the oil depletion
allowance-although we don't have Oil Depletion Allowance Day, we
don't have essays written on behalf of the oil depletion
allowance. So there are parts of the law that are publicized and
played up to us-oh, this is the law, the Bill of Rights. And
there are other parts of the law that just do their quiet work,
and nobody says anything about them.
It started way back. When the Bill of Rights was first passed,
remember, in the first administration of Washington? Great
thing. Bill of Rights passed! Big ballyhoo. At the same time
Hamilton's economic pro gram was passed. Nice, quiet, money to
the rich-I'm simplifying it a little, but not too much.
Hamilton's economic program started it off. You can draw a
straight line from Hamilton's economic program to the oil
depletion allowance to the tax write-offs for corporations. All
the way through-that is the history. The Bill of Rights
publicized; economic legislation unpublicized.
You know the enforcement of different parts of the law is as
important as the publicity attached to the different parts of
the law. The Bill of Rights, is it enforced? Not very well.
You'll find that freedom of speech in constitutional law is a
very difficult, ambiguous, troubled concept. Nobody really knows
when you can get up and speak and when you can't. Just check all
of the Supreme Court decisions. Talk about predictability in a
system-you can't predict what will happen to you when you get up
on the street corner and speak. See if you can tell the
difference between the Terminiello case and the Feiner case, and
see if you can figure out what is going to happen. By the way,
there is one part of the law that is not very vague, and that
involves the right to distribute leaflets on the street. The
Supreme Court has been very clear on that. In decision after
decision we are affirmed an absolute right to distribute
leaflets on the street. Try it. Just go out on the street and
start distributing leaflets. And a policeman comes up to you and
he says, "Get out of here." And you say, "Aha! Do you know Marsh
v. Alabama, 1946?" That is the reality of the Bill of Rights.
That's the reality of the Constitution, that part of the law
which is portrayed to us as a beautiful and marvelous thing. And
seven years after the Bill of Rights was passed, which said that
"Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech,"
Congress made a law abridging the freedom of speech. Remember?
The Sedition Act of 1798.
So the Bill of Rights was not enforced. Hamilton's program was
enforced, because when the whisky farmers went out and rebelled
you remember, in 1794 in Pennsylvania, Hamilton himself got on
his horse and went out there to suppress the rebellion to make
sure that the revenue tax was enforced. And you can trace the
story right down to the present day, what laws are enforced,
what laws are not enforced. So you have to be careful when you
say, "I'm for the law, I revere the law." What part of the law
are you talking about? I'm not against all law. But I think we
ought to begin to make very important distinctions about what
laws do what things to what people.
And there are other problems with the law. It's a strange thing,
we think that law brings order. Law doesn't. How do we know that
law does not bring order? Look around us. We live under the
rules of law. Notice how much order we have? People say we have
to worry about civil disobedience because it will lead to
anarchy. Take a look at the present world in which the rule of
law obtains. This is the closest to what is called anarchy in
the popular mind-confusion, chaos, international banditry. The
only order that is really worth anything does not come through
the enforcement ... of law, it comes through the establishment
of a society which is just and in which harmonious relationships
are established and in which you need a minimum of regulation to
create decent sets of arrangements among people. But the order
based on law and on the force of law is the order of the
totalitarian state, and it inevitably leads either to total
injustice or to rebel lion-eventually, in other words, to very
great disorder.
We all grow up with the notion that the law is holy. They asked
Daniel Berrigan's mother what she thought of her son's breaking
the law. He burned draft records-one of the most violent acts of
this century- to protest the war, for which he was sentenced to
prison, as criminals should be. They asked his mother who is in
her eighties, what she thought of her son's breaking the law.
And she looked straight into the interviewer's face, and she
said, "It's not God's law." Now we forget that. There is nothing
sacred about the law. Think of who makes laws. The law is not
made by God, it is made by Strom Thurmond. If you nave any
notion about the sanctity and loveliness and reverence for the
law, look at the legislators around the country who make the
laws. Sit in on the sessions of the state legislatures. Sit in
on Congress, for these are the people who make the laws which we
are then supposed to revere.
All of this is done with such propriety as to fool us. This is
the problem. In the old days, things were confused; you didn't
know. Now you know. It is all down there in the books. Now we go
through due process. Now the same things happen as happened
before, except that we've gone through the right procedures. In
Boston a policeman walked into a hospital ward and fired five
times at a black man who had snapped a towel at his arm-and
killed him. A hearing was held. The judge decided that the
policeman was justified because if he didn't do it, he would
lose the respect of his fellow officers. Well, that is what is
known as due process-that is, the guy didn't get away with it.
We went through the proper procedures, and everything was set
up. The decorum, the propriety of the law fools us.
The nation then, was founded on disrespect for the law, and then
came the Constitution and the notion of stability which Madison
and Hamilton liked. But then we found in certain crucial times
in our history that the legal framework did not suffice, and in
order to end slavery we had to go outside the legal framework,
as we had to do at the time of the American Revolution or the
Civil War. The union had to go outside the legal framework in
order to establish certain rights in the 1930s. And in this
time, which may be more critical than the Revolution or the
Civil War, the problems are so horrendous as to require us to go
outside the legal framework in order to make a statement, to
resist, to begin to establish the kind of institutions and
relationships which a decent society should have. No, not just
tearing things down; building things up. But even if you build
things up that you are not supposed to build up-you try to build
up a people's park, that's not tearing down a system; you are
building something up, but you are doing it illegally-the
militia comes in and drives you out. That is the form that civil
disobedience is going to take more and more, people trying to
build a new society in the midst of the old.
But what about voting and elections? Civil disobedience-we don't
need that much of it, we are told, because we can go through the
electoral system. And by now we should have learned, but maybe
we haven't, for we grew up with the notion that the voting booth
is a sacred place, almost like a confessional. You walk into the
voting booth and you come out and they snap your picture and
then put it in the papers with a beatific smile on your face.
You've just voted; that is democracy. But if you even read what
the political scientists say-although who can?-about the voting
process, you find that the voting process is a sham.
Totalitarian states love voting. You get people to the polls and
they register their approval. I know there is a difference-they
have one party and we have two parties. We have one more party
than they have, you see.
What we are trying to do, I assume, is really to get back to the
principles and aims and spirit of the Declaration of
Independence. This spirit is resistance to illegitimate
authority and to forces that deprive people of their life and
liberty and right to pursue happiness, and therefore under these
conditions, it urges the right to alter or abolish their current
form of government-and the stress had been on abolish. But to
establish the principles of the Declaration of Independence, we
are going to need to go outside the law, to stop obeying the
laws that demand killing or that allocate wealth the way it has
been done, or that put people in jail for petty technical
offenses and keep other people out of jail for enormous crimes.
My hope is that this kind of spirit will take place not just in
this country but in other countries because they all need it.
People in all countries need the spirit of disobedience to the
state, which is not a metaphysical thing but a thing of force
and wealth. And we need a kind of declaration of interdependence
among people in all countries of the world who are striving for
the same thing.
Frank Zappa, Howard Zinn, and Noam Chomsky on American Fascism
What's your response?
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