It's not for us to make things worse. That's Bush's job. And what we need to do is to obstruct that. And short of that, or not short of it, it isn't a matter of more, the idea is, of course, of our country and of most humans is that violence is power, and to refrain from it is to... reject power to reject effective action it's to be less than courageous and that violence is on a linear path here of resistance where if you need to do more you do something violent as the weatherman thought and uh i slipped into that just a moment ago by mistake it's so uh so familiar when i said more wrong wrong idea wrong don't do something wrong um But, and I'm not even talking, of course, about the violence that would kill people in a large scale and be as bad as the government. I mean, any violence, breaking windows, hitting cars and whatnot, is not going to help matters.

[01:02]

And I don't really sympathize with the, quote, black bloc or whatever in Seattle and elsewhere. I think they're keeping the pot boiling more by breaking windows and things. I think they're wrong track there. But... The basic idea, first of all, of nonviolence is I came to understand it by reading Martin Luther King and Gandhi, Barbara Deming, that I recommend to you very much, Revolution and Equilibrium, D-E-M-I-N-G, she's dead now, but great influence on me, Revolution and Equilibrium, a book. And Joan Bondurant's Conquest of Violence, various other things. And Thoreau, very much. The basic idea is non-cooperation, is with power in the form of rejection of cooperation with wrongdoing, removal of your collaboration. I think historically the idea goes back to Etienne de la Boétie, the friend of Montaigne, who wrote a piece on obedience, the evils of obedience in some cases.

[02:10]

And I think it's, what is it? Somebody know the title of that? It's sort of like on voluntary subjection or something like that to authority. But anyway, the basic idea was that a dictator of any kind, Machiavelli's heroes, the prince, did not depend for their tyranny on their own strength, their own power. They required, in the end, voluntary collaboration of a lot of people. Some involuntary, you know, by threat and intimidation of various kinds, But a number of their lieutenants and others had to cooperate, had to collaborate. And that if you withdrew that cooperation, the dictator's power dissolved. That's the basic idea. It is power, as David Hartsoe knows here. What's the thing? A force more powerful, he was showing me. There's a TV series on that name. And as I say, I didn't focus on... So people who refused to cooperate with the draft, of course, were using that principle. Boycott.

[03:10]

Strike. General strike. And by the way, when it comes to appropriateness, nothing less than a general strike is really appropriate to the use of nuclear weapons here. Can you get it tomorrow or next week? No. We wouldn't even begin. If you work hard for several months, you could prepare a situation where we do what we ought to do if this country uses a nuclear weapon, and that's shut this country down. It would be very hard to do. It would be hard to get it together. I don't think impossible. That's why we should start preparing now, in my opinion. But maybe you won't get that. That's why I turned to Europe as maybe having more influence in this particular situation. The moratorium in 1969 was a weekday demonstration where people took off from schools for one day in October 1969. How many people took part in that here? Take a look around, let's say, about a third or a fourth. Very good. The people who did that in October 69 and November, when it was supposed to be two days, a weekday, so it had the character of a strike, taking off from school and work.

[04:22]

The man who bankrolled it thought the word strike, general strike, was too provocative, so they came up with the name moratorium. Good idea for now. The people who did that in 69 did not know and most of them don't know to this day, they were preventing nuclear war, which Nixon was threatening that week, that month. Look up Nixon's, you may not have on your shelf, Nixon's memoirs, but I actually read those, and there's a whole chapter on his, my October, I don't know, he calls it my November ultimatum. And he describes it. And how he couldn't carry it out because there were too many people in the streets at that point. Very effective. Probably one of the most effective single actions. So the people who raised their hands, some of whom may have been very young. Sometimes when I've asked those, there are people who were in strollers at that thing. And they were being counted too by a U2 in those crowds.

[05:27]

And they were doing the same thing their parents were. stopping nuclear war, preventing it, keeping the moratorium on nuclear weapons explosions another, it's now almost 30 years, almost, what is it, 45. So here's what needs to be done. We must change this direction. We can and must change it without violence, but not without courage. not without risk-taking. Courage is not an absolute virtue. As I say, there's courage on all sides of every conflict, including very bad ones. But courage is necessary. Civil courage, a willingness to risk career, to risk livelihood, to risk family in order to save many lives.

[06:29]

But it can have that effect. And I believe that if people see that connection and see what power they have in their hands, just by telling the truth, by raising issues, even if you don't have documents. I'll bet a lot of you saw, I was just seeing the video today, of the guy who asked Rumsfeld two days ago, Mr. Rumsfeld, why did you lie to the American public? He got this on television. Rumsfeld was... totally nonplussed. He said, why did you tell the public that we knew where the... How many saw that or heard of it? Well, you can see the actual video. It's very interesting. It's not hard to find on the internet. You can look for it and you'll see the actual video. And so you don't see my friend, Ray McGovern, a 27-year veteran of the CIA, who helped me, wrote with me our draft called to patriotic whistleblowing two years ago.

[07:29]

And he's now a close friend. So we were, as Patricia was saying this morning, hooray for Ray, our buddy. And very good. So he said, why did you say that you knew where they were? So Rumsfeld says, I didn't say that. I said, we knew where the suspected sites were. Another lie, still lying. So McGovern reads him from the document, which, of course, all the video people then do confirm. What he said was, we know where they are. In Tikrit, near Tikrit, near Baghdad. Actually, I think Rumsail could have taken refuge in the fact that he hadn't been all that precise because the actual quote is, near Tikrit, near Baghdad, fairly precise, to the north, south, east, and west. He could say, Come on, you know, you should have read that. Obviously, we didn't know where they were. But they were north, south, east, or west of Baghdad.

[08:33]

Yes, right. But he did say we know where they are, not we know where they suspect they are. And so Rumsfeld was actually stopped on that one for a minute. Good. Everybody can do that. isn't always easy to get next to these people. That's why we were in Crawford. We're telling the judge there that we were there, although that district, that county in Texas is the only one, the only county in Texas that says now that the ditch where Cindy Sheehan took her stand and was not arrested for it earlier, The ditch is part of the road. We were in the ditch next to a barbed wire fence. And indeed, the private property that we were trespassing on. So we were obstructing the roadway, although we weren't on the roadway. They were on the roadway, the police. And we were trespassing on private property in the ditch because that extended to the middle of the roadway.

[09:36]

So there's no other county in Texas that has rules like that. It sounds as though they were directed at people who might want to do what Cindy Sheehan had done. And as we explained, the reason we were doing that there was that the president drives by that back and forth. And it's our chance to penetrate that bubble with a little sound and say the bubble in which he hears nothing but yes, sir, with some Americans not saying... Yes, sir. And our crime was obviously really Les Majesty interfering with the dignity, you know, and walking on the shadow of the monarch, which he thinks of himself as being. Well, the judge read to us our Miranda rights, which we still have, actually, until the next 9-11, I would say, and or the attack on Iran, which includes saying, of course, you have a right to a lawyer. You have a right to remain silent. Well, we hadn't come there to remain silent, after all.

[10:38]

And I really liked when we got out of jail, where, by the way, we were treated to, not to orange jumpsuits, which a lot of you have worn, but to black and white striped suits. Just like Alabama, you know, the chain gag. I wanted to get a mugshot with that suit, but they didn't give it to me. But... We came back to the Peace House, the Crawford Peace House, a little oasis in Crawford, Texas. And there was a sign outside it saying, a big sign, very neatly lettered saying, you have a right not to remain silent. And that's the right we need to act on now. Thank you.

[11:18]

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