Wise words from Emma Goldman.

[StellaBlue]

To view the full text - http://sunsite3.berkeley.edu/Goldman/Writings/Speeches/170709.html


Powerful snip:

If that be crime, we are criminals even like Jesus, Socrates, Galileo, Bruno, John Brown and scores of others. We are in good company, among those whom Havelock Ellis, the greatest living psychologist, describes as the political criminals recognized by the whole civilized world, except America, as men and women who out of deep love for humanity, out of a passionate reverence for liberty and an all-absorbing devotion to an ideal are ready to pay for their faith even with their blood. We cannot do otherwise if we are to be true to ourselves--we know that the political criminal is the precursor of human progress--the political criminal of to-day must needs be the hero, the martyr and the saint of the new age.

But, says the Prosecuting Attorney, the press and the unthinking rabble, in high and low station, "that is a dangerous doctrine and unpatriotic at this time." No doubt it is. But are we to be held responsible for something which is as unchangeable and unalienable as the very stars hanging in the heavens unto time and all eternity?

Gentlemen of the jury, we respect your patriotism. We would not, if we could, have you change its meaning for yourself. But may there not be different kinds of patriotism as there are different kinds of liberty? I for one cannot believe that love of one's country must needs consist in blindness to its social faults, to deafness to its social discords, of inarticulation to its social wrongs. Neither can I believe that the mere accident of birth in a certain country or the mere scrap of a citizen's paper constitutes the love of country.

I know many people--I am one of them--who were not born here, nor have they applied for citizenship, and who yet love America with deeper passion and greater intensity than many natives whose patriotism manifests itself by pulling, kicking, and insulting those who do not rise when the national anthem is played. Our patriotism is that of the man who loves a woman with open eyes. He is enchanted by her beauty, yet he sees her faults. So we, too, who know America, love her beauty, her richness, her great possibilities; we love her mountains, her canyons, her forests, her Niagara, and her deserts--above all do we love the people that have produced her wealth, her artists who have created beauty, her great apostles who dream and work for liberty--but with the same passionate emotion we hate her superficiality, her cant, her corruption, her mad, unscrupulous worship at the altar of the Golden Calf.

We say that if America has entered the war to make the world safe for democracy, she must first make democracy safe in America. How else is the world to take America seriously, when democracy at home is daily being outraged, free speech suppressed, peaceable assemblies broken up by overbearing and brutal gangsters in uniform; when free press is curtailed and every independent opinion gagged. Verily, poor as we are in democracy, how can we give of it to the world? We further say that a democracy conceived in the military servitude of the masses, in their economic enslavement, and nurtured in their tears and blood, is not democracy at all. It is despotism--the cumulative result of a chain of abuses which, according to that dangerous document, the Declaration of Independence, the people have the right to overthrow.

[AlamoDemoc]

1. I watched her story on PBS's American Experience

I was in tears. Shamefully, She died as an outcast in Canada.


On edit: She was an American Hero

[Selatius]

3. Yeah, her contribution to the US has been ignored or forgotten

Her life wasn't any easier than other activists of the era. Another person I admire from the period in US history, Eugene Debs, a democratic socialist, also suffered persecution as well, and he, too, came to know the inside of a prison cell.

The sad part is her name isn't in history books the same as some others in history at the time, but their contributions were equally real and their suffering equally tragic.

[AlamoDemoc]

4. I agree... American history can be selective, and deceptive at times

especially in era when many had their loyalty questioned...especially if at the time you were member of certain ethnicity. I feel many Arab Americans are experiencing of this type of persecution in the name of terrorism.

[BrklynLiberal]

2. Powerful words.

[StellaBlue]

5. Thomas Paine, Emma Goldman, and Eugene Debs

Are my favorite Americans.

My other favorite thinker is Mary Wollstonecraft. In fact, I've often said I would name my firstborn Thomas Paine, regardless of gender :), but now I am leaning toward Mary-Emma. Sounds so WASPy. hahahahaha

[Charlie Brown]

6. Another fascinating activist was Randolph Bourne

His "War is the Health of the State" essay should be required reading in every school.

http://struggle.ws/hist_texts/warhealthstate1918.html

[StellaBlue]

7. I've bookmarked that

Thanks.