Rev. Anselm Atkins, Conyers, Ga.

The United States began its history as a revolutionary nation. Our revolution, along with the British, French, and Bolshevik, was one of the four major revolutions in world history. We were born as a people willing to fight and die for self-determination. We stood with Patrick Henry: “Give me liberty or give me death.”

Where do we stand today? We are again experiencing revolutionary currents, emotions, acts, within our country. But now the revolt is against our OWN country, America. Voices shout that the United States is acting like an oppressive, freedom-destroying nation. Can this be true? What does it mean? Are we being overrun by Commies?

The July 7th issue of THE GREAT SPECKLED BIRD, Atlanta’s underground newspaper, has part of the American Declaration of Independence printed on the front cover, noting that it is also the declaration used by Ho Chih Minh in 1945 and by the Black Panther Party in 1967. It reads in part: “…whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends (life, liberty, equality, etc.) it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government…” The Declaration was issued as a defense of revolution. If we accept our origins and our national history, then we must also accept the right of men to revolt against their government in certain extreme situations. In 1776 a handful of young men in their late twenties and early thirties started a movement to revolt against their mother-country, their fatherland, Great Britain. The movement caught on, arms were taken up—and the rest is history, OUR history. The question being raised for us today is this: Is the revolutionary attitude forever a thing of the past, or are there again circumstances in the world—in the United States—that would justify another revolution?

Many of us are very angry at the new revolutionaries. Deep down we may even be a little bit afraid of them. They will destroy our homes, our jobs, the country itself. Let us have a little more law and order around here.

We don’t like revolutionaries in other countries, either. They are terrorizing good citizens and are the tools of the commies. We don’t want their revolutions to come near us. It is a good thing we have Marines.

This is an understandable attitude. There is much to say for it. Everyone knows that violence only breeds more violence. Everyone wants peace and security.

Peace and security. The pursuit of happiness. What about liberty? This is curious. Liberty, it seems, is something we already have. The present American way of life insures it. For us. So we don’t want to change anything very much. We want America to stay just like it is now so we can keep on being free to do just as we are doing now.

But we have to admit that our positions is not like that of our forefathers, the American revolutionaries. They did not have their freedom yet. They had to get it. So they had to change something. If speeches in parliament failed to bring change, if protests like the “Boston Tea Party” failed, then they were willing to take their rifles down off their walls.

But now, we think, revolution is over. We can just settle down and enjoy what we have. We are at the top of the wheel now, so let the wheel stop turning. Leave it like it is. If necessary, call in the state troopers.

And lock up those crazy young revolutionaries.

Isn’t it rather obvious that today we are where England was in 1776? Now it is WE who are the good mother-country—why should anyone want to revolt against America? America is our country! Revolutionaries are traitors. Send General Cornwallis to stamp them out.

George Washington was, after all, a traitor!

(So was Robert E. Lee.)

The new revolutionaries are trying to tell us that we have ceased to be a revolutionary, freedom-loving nation and have become a contented, security-loving nation. Why do they say this, and how much truth is there in it?

The hard fact is that the United States has never been a country of total freedom for everybody. The Indians were human beings, men like ourselves. (In those days most of the “civilized” people did not think that primitive savages were fully human.) America was their land and we took it away from them by treachery and force. They fought for their freedom but we were stronger and utterly destroyed them. We never cared a white flag for the Indians’ right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We wanted their land and wealth and we took it. We benevolently let the scraggly remnant scratch a living out of the western wastelands.

It’s not a pretty picture, but it too is part of our history.

And we didn’t care much of a whit about Negro liberties either. For one hundred years our economy was built on plantation slavery. (We may have treated our slaves well at times, but we wouldn’t let them be FREE.) After the North forcibly restored some political liberties to slaves, it turned around and took advantage of them economically and excluded them socially. These conditions still exit in Atlanta, Georgia, not very far from your house. Do we wonder why today’s black man tells us that the United States is not letting him be free? What does the 4^th of July mean to an American black man? And the same often holds true of the immigrant Puerto Rican or Mexican.

America, land of the free!

Are we a freedom-loving people? Yes, we are, in theory. But who is “we”? It is those of us who have already made it to the top or the middle of the heap. But we are not extremely interested in what happens to the man on the bottom. It is OUR freedom we like to sing about on July 4^th, not his. Above all, we don’t want the bottom man making revolutions.

But which of us is the “true American”? If freedom and revolution are “American” values, and from our history they seem to be, the rebellious man at the bottom turns out to be the truest American. Maybe he’s wrong, but at least he’s AMERICAN.

Or take the problem of war, national security, and world peace. The ideal situation would be for everyone in the world to have both peace or security, and freedom. But when men’s interests come into conflict, as they invariable, do, it is hard to have both peace AND freedom at the same time.

To get down to brass tacks, what about Vietnam? Peace and freedom are at stake in the war in Vietnam. But whose peace, and whose freedom? These questions are not easy to answer, and there is much that one has to learn about the concrete situation before one can make an intelligent reply. But, to be very brief, the new revolutionaries—hippies, peaceniks, radical students, radical priests and nuns, militant black people—say that the policy of the United States in Vietnam is against both peace (international) and freedom (Vietnamese). They say that the actions of the United States are un-American. That say that it is THEY, the new radicals, who are upholding the values upon which this country is supposedly based. They say that we have ceased to be friends of revolution and freedom, and that our war-making habits are leading us farther from world peace and closer to total self-destruction by nuclear and chemical war. They say that to be a true American one must join in the protest against the policies of the United States—just as British subjects in the Thirteen Colonies once dropped tea into Boston Harbor in protest over British policies. Can we possibly begin to understand why the revolutionaries think this way?

To begin with, the main trouble is that anyone who talks like a peacenik is immediately called a Communist. He is secretly using his buttery arguments to hasten a communist takeover. Reds are everywhere: running the newspapers, infiltrating the pulpits, hiding under the beds. (I am a communist and I am gently leading you on, trapping you with rhetoric and false arguments. No one who talks like I do could be an American. I MUST be a Communist.) Now this Red-scare argument is airtight—there is nothing anyone can say to answer, since every answer is assumed to be a Communist answer. All part of the same slick Red trick. And so rational argument and debate become useless, for all revolutionaries and protestors are Commies.

But if this is how one thinks, how FREE is his mind? What is the difference between him and the brainwashed citizen of the totalitarian dictatorship? How American is such a person?

And so this thing has to be argued out and we have to try to get to the facts and we have to listen to each other. Each one of us has his own different set of facts, depending on what he has been reading. And each draws different conclusions. So there will be a lot of argument. But one thing we mustn’t do is turn each other off before the argument even starts.

Now what about Vietnam? When we see a little guy fighting for his freedom against a big guy, we like to dive in and help. Americans are for the underdog. (For some reason; we didn’t help Hungary or Czechoslovakia against Russia, but never mind.) Our government, along with much of the news media, tells us that the South Vietnam government is fighting against a coalition of Communist forces: the Viet Cong, North Vietnam, and ultimately Red China. We have gone to help that government fight for its freedom. But there is another version of the story which is also well documented and can be discovered by doing just a little bit more reading on the subject (for instance, Senator Fulbright’s book, THE ARROGANCE OF POWER). According to this view, the Cong represents the native South Vietnamese in his fight for freedom against foreign powers (first the French, until 1954, and then the United States, when we moved into the power-vacuum left by the French pullout). If this is true, then we are not helping the little guy at all. Instead, we are moving in to suppress the little guy’s revolt. The “Spirit of ‘76” is with the Cong, and we are the British Redcoats. Even if this latter analysis is not correct (and I cannot decide it for you), it is surely understandable that the peaceniks who want us to stop fighting the Cong should think it is they, the peaceniks, who are the true Americans. It is possible that the peaceniks are mistaken somewhere along the lines, but it is hard to see how their general attitude can be called “un-American” of unpatriotic.

There is a larger issue which the peaceniks are even more concerned about. For them, the war in Vietnam is just an example of war in general. What they want is an end to war, period. They know that conflicts will always arise, but they want them to be resolved peacefully.

Some of us take war pretty much as a matter of course. Painful, but necessary: “War is hell, madam” For instance, we often hear the slogan “Better Dead than Red,” which seems to be a translation of Patrick Henry’s “Give me liberty or give me death.” But there are two things wrong with his slogan. One is that it presupposes a wholly negative appraisal of Communism. Secondly, we do not have the right to talk so easily about the deaths of OTHER people—and making war involves other people.

At the risk of really being thought a Commie, I would like to expand a bit on the first remark. As economic systems, Communism and Capitalism both have good and bad points. We think that capitalism brings greater prosperity than Communism, and this seems to be true. (Whether capitalism brings prosperity for some at the expense of others is another question. Some say that the lower classes in a capitalist economy have little economic freedom and little political voice. Social workers who have helped with voter registration know this very well.) But prosperous or not, it seems a little far-fetched to say that it is better to be DEAD then to practice some type of communist economy. After all, Catholic monasteries such as the one I live in are, economically speaking, very much like a commune.

Communism—like democracy—is also a political system. It has taken many different concrete forms in the twentieth century (Stalinist, post-Stalinist, Chinese, Cuban, Vietnamese). Like any political system—and again, like democracy—it has both good and bad features. We like Democracy better, though we are not blind to its shortcomings. For instance, one might question whether even the upper and middle classes are as “free” as they assume that they are. (Do you stop for red lights? Are you free not to pay taxes? Are you free to watch TV that doesn’t have advertising? And so on.) One would certainly grant that even with all its un-freedoms, America is freer than Stalinist Russia ever was. But this does not apply to all aspects of Democracy as compared to all aspects of Communism. At least there are some people in the world who take Communism in stride and seem to thrive on it. Once again, there is no unanimous agreement that it is better to be “Dead than Red.”

The main point which the peaceniks want to make, however, is this. Since the invention and spread of nuclear and chemical weapons, WAR HAS BECOME A DIFFERENT THING. War between nations is not just a matter of taking the gun off the wall as it was in the days of the American Revolution or in pioneer days. It is a question of total annihilation of the human race, or at least of modern civilization as we now know and enjoy it. Let us not be John Waynish or Gary Cooperish about this. We are not going out to whack redskins. It is a question of complete self-destruction. Never before in the history of the world has there been a situation like it. None of the old answers and attitudes are adequate here. This is something different. Patrick Henry knew nothing about it. Neither did Woodrow Wilson or General MacArthur.

An escalation into a World War I or II just meant that a few tens of millions of people would be dead. But the escalation we are in right now means that YOU, my friend, will be dead. And your husband or wife. And your children. That is why peaceniks say, NO MORE WAR.

All the informed people knew that World War I was coming years and years before it finally came. The strategy of the German sweep through the low countries was planned ten years in advance. The railroad timetables which controlled the mobilization of army units was worked out meticulously long before the inevitable day. Books were written and published about the coming war. People read them in their living rooms before going to bed. Yet that knowledge did nothing to STOP the war from happening. And so it happened.

It is just like that today.

Isn’t it?

That is why the peaceniks are so anguished. If SOMEBODY doesn’t really try to stop this WHOLE THING, war will happen again. It always does. But this time it will be the last time. The very last time. After this there won’t be any more war any more.

All there will be is rats.

And the bodies of the people who said they would rather be “Dead than Red.”

And the Reds will be dead and the peaceniks will be dead and everybody will be dead.

You get what I mean?

That is why they burn draft cards and pour blood on draft files and raise hell on campuses and capital steps. Somebody—everybody—has to try to stop this self-destruction, somehow.

It is in these terms that we have to understand the revolutionary protest that is rising in America today. The youth of the country seem to feel something that most of us older people have apparently missed. It seems to them that America, for once, is committing some very great faults, even crimes, both at home and abroad. Our desire to support an anti-Communist government, no matter how dictatorial and corrupt, and our desire to protect our far-flung economic interests, appear to be leading us ever deeper into war and preparation for war. At home our indifference or blindness to the subhuman conditions in which our poorer citizens and our nonwhite citizens often live is breeding the very revolution we fear. The young protestors are trying to arouse us before it is too late, if it is not too late already.

And these say, furthermore, that if America refuses to redress these wrongs, quickly and massively, then it will be time for another little revolution in America itself. Like in 1776. “When in the course of human events it becomes necessary….” Let us hope that bloody revolution will not be necessary. Let us do what we can to make it unnecessary. Let us work for peaceful, effective change—now. But in any case let us not be fooled into thinking that it is only we, the comfortable, who are the true Americans.