Book: You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times
Quotes of Book: You Can't Be Neutral on a
In late April of 1971, several thousand antiwar veterans converged on Washington, to camp out, to lobby. As one of them said, "It's the first time in this country's history that the men who fought a war have come to Washington to demand its halt while the war is still going on." In the final event of the veterans' Washington encampment, a thousand of them, many in wheelchairs or on crutches, tossed their medals over a fence that the police had built around the Capitol steps to keep them away. As they did so, one by one, they made personal statements. One of them said, "I'm not proud of these medals. I'm not proud of what I did to receive them. I was in Vietnam for a year and … we never took one prisoner alive." An Air Force man said that what he had done was a disservice to his country. "As far as I'm concerned, I'm now serving my country. book-quoteColumbus was one of the great heroes of world history, to be admired for his daring feat of imagination and courage. In my account, I acknowledged that he was an intrepid sailor, but also pointed out {based on his own journal and the reports of many eyewitnesses} that he was vicious in his treatment of the gentle Arawak Indians who greeted his arrival in this hemisphere. He enslaved them, tortured them, murdered them-all in the pursuit of wealth. He represented, I suggested, the worst values of Western civilization: greed, violence, exploitation, racism, conquest, hypocrisy book-quote