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List of Chapters | Main Menu | Contact | About Futurepower ® Is it acceptable to disagree with people who want violence? Guess the source of the following quote. Who talked about the U.S. being "the greatest threat to the peace of the world"? Yes, Osama bin Laden said something like this. However, he is not the source. U.S. senator from Oregon Wayne Morse said this in 1964 [zmag.org]. He was arguing against the U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Here are several paragraphs by Howard Zinn, a columnist for The Progressive, a magazine published in the U.S. since 1909. In a September 14, 2001 article, Violence Doesn't Work [progressive.org], he said, Isn't it clear by now that sending a message to terrorists through violence doesn't work, it only leads to more terrorism? [slight correction to sentence] Haven't we learned anything from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? Car bombs planted by Palestinians bring air attacks and tanks by the Israeli government. That has been going on for years. It doesn't work. And innocent people die on both sides. [slight correction to punctuation] We need new ways of thinking. A $300 billion dollar military budget has not given us security. Military bases all over the world, our warships on every ocean, have not given us security. We need to think about the resentment all over the world felt by people who have been the victims of American military action. In Vietnam, where we carried out terrorizing bombing attacks, using napalm and cluster bombs, on peasant villages. ... In 1967 I was hitch-hiking on Ta Khli Air Base in Thailand. A U.S. pilot who was flying daily bombing missions to Hanoi, Vietnam, gave me a ride. He told me he thought the bombing of Hanoi was foolish. He said that Hanoi was almost always covered with fog, and that he could not see what he bombed. So, don't feel that you are having a radical viewpoint if you oppose U.S. military or political involvement. Plenty of others have come before you. In a democracy, it is the citizens' responsibility to think independently and make their views known. List of Chapters | Main Menu | Contact | About Futurepower ® | Go to top Futurepower
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