Speech about race and war in American life, 1972 June (2 of 2)

D/6/72 One cannot discuss what life was like in the sixties or what it will be like in the seventies without discussing what appear to be two continuing factors in American life: race and war.

Growing war in southeast Asia, with little possibility of an end, has been a fact of American life for th last ten years or more growing concern about the condition of the non-white peoples of this country - at least on their part - has been the number one item on the domestic priority list of the sixites. States

These two frightening facts - the one because it threatens international annihiation, the other because it threatens domestic genocide - color our lives.

Their presence is a reflection of everything else American: the sorry condition of our cities; the dependence of one tenth of our labor force on war spending; the reactionary stance of the United States Congress; the election of "law and order" candidates;

2 the incredible² hunger and malnutrition in the richest country of earth.

There is no escaping the duality of these subjects in a country where more money is spent on pet food than on food stamps; where private citizens spend more on tobacco than all government does on education:where airlines and rail lies receive income supplements: where farmers receive welfare payments of $1 billion dollars a year; where the oil industry in the past ten years received government handouts of upwards or 50 billions of dollars and where supplements for the poor are laughed out of Congress; where five percent of the people haave 20% of the wealth and 20% of the people have 5% of the wealth. There can be no denial that we are a generation of people who may be without a future: we may be living on the edge of domestic as well as world-wide revolution that may destroy us all.

It cannot be a mistake that the Communist Party of the Soviet ³ Union and certain American capitalists make the same analysis of the United States. That analysis suggests that this country has to maintain

3 its present grip on the economies of the underdeveloped nations of the world or we shall have to lower our standard of living. It may be true that consumption will have to be changed in this nation, both in order to redistribute what there is to be consumed and also in order to have something to be consumed, but it is also true that our preserving this economic advantage is done at a prohibitive cost. "We cannot afford continues Imperialism, either financially or spiritually, without the nation ceasing to function as a democratic state."*

The United States of America makes up 6% of the world's population; each year we consume 60% of the earth's consumable resources. This fact contitutes the only real threat from the undeveloped world. To imagine that the Vietnamese peasants who have been successfully resisting domination of their land from any quarter for several hundred years are^x going to attack Honolulu in concert with the revolutionaries from Cuba is to imagine that the United States constitutes a real threat

*Richard J. Barnet. The Economy of Death

4 to all the nations which have expressed a reao desire to foceen themselves. If we⁰⁰ constitute that threat, then the fear is real: if the fear is real, we had better try to dispel it in a way radically different from the gun-boat diplomacy of the past.

But it is this ^{over-abundance of} concern with the revolutionary activity of the rice farmers of southeast Asia and the cane cutters and tin miners of South America that has taken our attention from the more serious threat from within; this is not the obviously absurd threat that a minority of black people will somehow overthrow the government of the United States. But the real fear that the age old division of black and white and rich and poor will become so pronounced that no bringing together will be possible: that the two separate societies so long in existence in this nation will continue indefinitely with one more⁵ closely resembling the colonizer and the other the colonized.

To suggest that these two problems can be attacked separately

[vertical text in right margin] Claudis Pouley Polley 212 822 1664

5 is to believe one is not a function of the other; no nation which cares for its people can make ^agressive war on another; no nation which cares about the individuaity of all men could let the people of its own soil exist as some of the people of this nation do.

A superficial solution would ssuggest that the system functions well, but that it is run now by corrupt men; that representative democracy as we know it can work, but it has somehow gone astray that people are basically good, but have lead down the wrong path. If that were true, then we would have a simple task indeed; an army of young people and others toppled one president in 1968; that same army could be ^{is being} reconstituted ^now, we could topple this one and many of his underlings, replace them with decent people, and our new world would be secure.⁶

But a perfect system ought to work well no matter how imperfect the men in it; radical change in American foreign and domestic policy takes much more than ^means a reconstitution of the instruments of power as well.