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have been extremely class-biased, and they have failed to avoid geno–
cidal implications .
This may, or may not , be the fault of our opponents and of the
ways they wage war and of their ability to wage war in that way,
without concern for civilian populations because of the vitality for
them, as they fight', of ideal notions and absolute doctrines rather
than any direct human concern coming first as with us in our con–
fused simplicities and sophistications .
If
you and I say now that we must write and organize and march
and protest , we are faced with problems having to do with political
program and the purposes of governments and the sophisticated re–
alities in real time of what is actually being proposed and done when
we write and organize , march and protest . Mostly, we do not and
cannot know what we are saying in the world-context that technology
has created for us and in which we live and in terms of which we can–
not yet speak or think clearly or impressively . We fight our peculiar
wars for a number of reasons , one of which, an important one, is that
we do not want to take a cynical responsibility for history.
Peace movements, at least since the Christianization of the Ro–
man throne in the time of Constantine , have, like carnage, operated
according to their abilities, and have most often included internal car–
nage and retirement to an agricultural countryside. This was true in
the Eastern Roman Empire which survived until the time Columbus
found the New World, and it was true in England, and now it is true
for us.
This definition of our present situation is not subject to final ar–
gument.
It
is not reducible to fact or truism.
It
is observed and felt,
seen and summed up from various distances of abstraction. And this
clash of distances in modes of thought tends to become a clash of
mottos in which a great deal of feeling and a great deal of concern is
invested.
This concern is a concern for the future, and I believe that this
concern in its formulations
is
historically new. And, politically, we are
a new sort of state , in terms of suffrage, governmental structures,
and the complete subordination of all cultural and moral structures
to political action. The possibilities of so much newness are , at once,
vertiginous and transparent which is to say unpredictable and un–
chartable .
If
we rise in armed rebellion in the name of peace to show
our sincerity and to act on our beliefs, it is in the nature of political
act troubled by the reality of the spectrum of violence that has histor-
