By Lillian Hellman

• June 4, 1975

I hope this is a happy day for you. Because tomorrow you will join the rest of us. I do not mean to say that life is full of trouble, but there is, of course, trouble ahead for anybody who leads a full life. That's the way it always has been, that's even the way it should be.

I say this now because it has often seemed to me that we were unprepared by teachers and parents for the time ahead of us. Americans, unlike any other people in the world, have a deep historical belief in something called “happiness.”

In their efforts to make us feel more “secure”—that awful new word—the “people who bring us up tell us very little about a real world. The belief that all ahead is going to be “good” comes from a view of what never was, what our elders never found for themseives. There was a time when this hopeful babbling brook in the American character did have a kind of truth.

We were a large rich country, the opportunities were great, the system for the white man was mostly unoppressive, the lowest man could be President. And here, indeed, we were right. The lowest man has been President. And Mr. Nixon's surrounding clean‐cut kiddies did come up from nowhere, and did undoubtedly fulfill the hopes of their mothers and fathers as they sat spinning new tricks in a new language in the White House.

It is natural enough that older people should believe that the young will be able to skip their struggles and go on to something easier and better. Life in America has indeed become easier for most people: the car is more efficient than the horse; death in childbirth has sharply fallen; certain diseases have totally disappeared; and even a kind word can be said occasionally for a computer. Almost everything is better. Everything is so much better that we have been blinded into thinking that not much could go wrong.

But it has gone wrong. In the South, when I was born, there still remained an intense interest in personal rights and freedom. For the white man, of course, only for the white man. But that at least is better than for no man at all. That concern with personal freedom permitted eccentricity, and made for an interesting people. The excellence of Southern writers in our time has proved that.

But now the South, almost in the lead, accepts what has come upon us: the overactive state of the powerful, and the overpassive state of the powerless. Both groups know perfectly well that the country is controlled by big business, and that big business has large controls over government. Sùch controls have now become so open that the titans of the nineteenth‐century, usually observing some rules of country club manners, hired smaller men to do their dirty tricks.

Within the last few years, it is evidently considered extravagant to waste money on such messengers; the milk people go themselves to the White House, Mr. Geneen of I.T.T. goes directly to the C.I.A. with proposals for Chile, a number of airlines sent their presidents and one airline worked out a new system of ticket forgery to hide its illegal contributions to Mr. Nixon.

■

And yet parents and teachers are old enough to remember Mr. Nixon's California history, his time on the House Un‐American Activities Committee, his lies and his trickery in the 1950's. But there seemed little interest in stopping him on his long run for his Presidency. Many people thought a man's past should not be held against him, and when you said that, you proved yourself something called tolerant. That, by the way, has become a remarkable word in our language, and you will hear it misused every day.

I have been teaching for many years, watching with great interest the changes in action and thought of those I taught. I was impressed, and I still am, at how much better educated you are, how much better kind of grownup than the people I went to college with. But for a long, long time I wondered why the world, the outside world, the world of their country so little concerned the people I was teaching.

They read carefully, they seemed to understand what they read, but they understood in space. The plays of Shakespeare, for example, were admitted to be great, but the actions of kings, the ambitions of princes, the murders, the nobility, the venality, were read as having happened in a long ago forgotten world. No strings in the plays led students to their own lives, there were no reflective nods of recognition toward their own vanities or ambitions or to what was happening in the world.

Even Mr. Ibsen's more recent Nora, having slammed the door and opened it for women's liberation, was embraced by students, but not really recognized for what she did, or couldn't do. It seems to me that the true wisdom of the play is contained in a story about Henrik Ibsen and the critic, George Brandes.

They were taking a walk on a wintry day in Oslo. They passed an open park with a great wind blowing through it. The park was empty except for a middle‐aged woman sitting on a bench. Ibsen shook his head and said, “Poor lady.” Brandes said, “I have always wanted to ask you. Whatever happened to Nora?” Ibsen turned round, pointed back to the lady on the bench, and said, “That is Nora.”

He was saying, of course, what is still the basic problem: how can there ever he liberation of women unless they can earn a living. The talk of brassieres or no brassieres, who washes the dinner pots, whether you are a sex object—whatever the hell that is —has very little meaning unless the woman who slams the door can buy herself dinner and get out of a winter wind.

In 1961 something began to happen. It was the beginning of the student movement. It had not occurred to me that I would ever again watch young people protesting the values on which they had been raised. This is not to say that I approved of everything that was done, or even understood it. But whatever were the mistakes of the youth movement, and there were many among the kiddies who were both wild and silly, we all owe them a great debt for helping to end the disgusting Vietnam war.

I was at the time teaching at Harvard. What worried me was that most students knew what they were against —the war—but they had not read very much, nor studied, nor worried enough about the forces that had made and continued that war.

No people can function for more than time's minute by knowing only what they are against. Man is made to fight well for something he truly believes in. And you can only believe in something by thinking about it, reading about it, appraising yourself. Thus, when the Vietnam war began to be over—in the American student sense, not for the poor Vietnamese—that lack of belief began to show.

Beginning in 1969 and 1970, the difference between my graduate students and my undergraduate students was very large. The undergraduates said they were tired of the whole thing. The graduate students were proud of what they had done, but they were influenced by those who were tired: nothing is more catching than weariness, and nothing is more corrupting.

Thus, in the last years, most students have gone back to a calm, pleasant, well‐mannered shrugging acceptance of life in America as it is. The powerless, and that is most of us, have thrown up our hands in disbelief that government was ever intended to belong to us. And we have had those hands high in hopelessness for a long time.

That is very sad. It is my deep belief that if you live in a country you owe it something, as it, of course, owes you. You who are graduating today, far more than those who graduated in the sixties, have very possibly lived through the most shocking period of American history. You have seen a White House disgraced. You have heard a President of your country lie over and over again to you. You have seen a pious‐talking Vice President thrown out because he was a crook.

Perhaps more important than anything they did individually, you know that Government agencies—the C.I.A., the F.B.I., the Department of Justice, and God knows what yet hasn't come to light—have spied on innocent people who did nothing more than express their democratic right to say what they thought. You have read that the C.I.A. has not alone had a hand in upsetting foreign governments it did not like, but has very possibly been involved in murder, or plots to murder. Murder. We didn't think of ourselves that way once upon a time.

I came here today—I don't like to make speeches—to say that I think it is your duty to put an end to all that. Your absolute duty. I wish you well.

https://www.nytimes.com/1975/06/04/archives/for-truth-justice-and-the-american-way.html

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

PLEASE DO NOT BLAME RUSSIA IF WW3 STARTS. BLAME YOURSELF.

Lillian Florence Hellman (June 20, 1905 – June 30, 1984) was an American playwright, prose writer, memoirist and screenwriter known for her success on Broadway, as well as her communist views and political activism. She was blacklisted after her appearance before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) at the height of the anti-communist campaigns of 1947–1952. Although she continued to work on Broadway in the 1950s, her blacklisting by the American film industry caused a drop in her income. Many praised Hellman for refusing to answer questions by HUAC, but others believed, despite her denial, that she had belonged to the Communist Party.[1]

As a playwright, Hellman had many successes on Broadway, including The Children's Hour, The Little Foxes and its sequel Another Part of the Forest, Watch on the Rhine,  The Autumn Garden, and Toys in the Attic. She adapted her semi-autobiographical play The Little Foxes into a screenplay, which starred Bette Davis. Hellman was romantically involved with fellow writer and political activist Dashiell Hammett, who also was blacklisted for 10 years; the couple never married.

Beginning in the late 1960s, and continuing through to her death, Hellman turned to writing a series of popular memoirs of her colorful life and acquaintances. Hellman's accuracy was challenged in 1979 on The Dick Cavett Show, when Mary McCarthy said of her memoirs that "every word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the'." Hellman brought a defamation suit against McCarthy and Cavett, and during the suit, investigators found errors in Hellman's Pentimento. They said that the "Julia" section of Pentimento, which had been the basis for the Oscar-winning 1977 movie of the same name, was actually based on the life of Muriel Gardiner.[2] Martha Gellhorn, one of the most prominent war correspondents of the twentieth century, as well as Ernest Hemingway's third wife, said that Hellman's remembrances of Hemingway and the Spanish Civil War were wrong. McCarthy, Gellhorn and others accused Hellman of lying about her membership in the Communist Party and of being a committed Stalinist.[3]

The defamation suit was unresolved at the time of Hellman's death in 1984; her executors eventually withdrew the complaint.[4] Hellman's modern-day literary reputation rests largely on the plays and screenplays from the first three decades of her career, and not on the memoirs published later in her life.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lillian_Hellman

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptWrPcIzCuY

Remember when Joe Biden SWORE up and down that he was not going to pardon his son, Hunter? Shouldn’t be too difficult to remember, seeing as how Biden made the pledge repeatedly, and the promise was echoed again and again by his mouthpiece, Karine Jean-Pierre. Biden would probably prefer that we all forget, but the video doesn’t lie — unlike Biden!

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

PLEASE DO NOT BLAME RUSSIA IF WW3 STARTS. BLAME YOURSELF.

SOME OF MY FRIENDS, DEMOCRATS IN AMERICA, STILL MAKE EXCUSES FOR JOE BEING "ABOVE THE LAW".... IT'S FRIGHTENING...

SEE ALSO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lryM5_Kzmm8

SEE ALSO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=04wkkEHHiFk

Mr. President, If you can pardon your son, why can’t you free the Indigenous political prisoner Leonard Peltier?

The 80-year-old man, a leader of the American Indian Movement, has been imprisoned for 48 years. He suffers from diabetes, high blood pressure, and a heart condition.

The FBI framed Leonard Peltier in retaliation for the historic 1973 occupation of Wounded Knee. Three years of violence followed this courageous stand for Indigenous rights, with over 60 AIM members and supporters murdered. Despite a large FBI presence, nothing was done to stop these murders and even more numerous assaults.

Peltier was convicted of killing two FBI agents—Jack Coler and Ronald Williams—in a shootout on the Pine Ridge Reservation on June 26, 1975. The agents were in unmarked cars.

Leonard Peltier was asked by traditional people at Pine Ridge, who were being targeted, to protect them from violence. Peltier and a small group of young AIM members set up camp on a ranch owned by the traditional Jumping Bull family. More than 150 FBI agents, cops, and vigilantes surrounded the ranch when shooting began.

Besides the two FBI agents killed, an AIM member—Joseph Stuntz Killsright—was shot and killed by a sniper’s bullet. His death has never even been investigated.

Although the FBI claim that 40 Indigenous people were involved in the gunfight, only AIM members Bob Robideau, Darrell Butler, and Leonard Peltier were brought to trial. A jury acquitted Robideau and Butler on grounds of self-defense.

Leonard Peltier was arrested in Canada on Feb. 6, 1976. The U.S. government in its extradition request, used affidavits signed by Myrtle Poor Bear who claimed she saw Leonard Peltier shoot the two FBI agents.

Ms. Poor Bear had never met Mr. Peltier and wasn’t present during the shoot-out. Soon after, Ms. Poor Bear recanted her statements and said the FBI threatened and coerced her into signing the affidavits.

Leonard Peltier was brought to the United States and tried in 1977. Myrtle Poor Bear wasn’t allowed to testify by the Nixon-appointed Judge Paul Benson. Not one witness identified Mr. Peltier as the shooter of the FBI agents.

More than 140,000 pages of FBI documents were withheld from the defense. A ballistic test proving that a bullet casing found near the FBI agents’ bodies did not come from the gun tied to Mr. Peltier was intentionally concealed.

Because this evidence was withheld, the jury found Leonard Peltier guilty. Judge Benson sentenced Mr. Peltier to two consecutive life terms.

The Eighth Federal Appeals Circuit ruled that “there is a possibility that the jury would have acquitted Leonard Peltier had the records and data improperly withheld from the defense been available to him in order to better exploit and reinforce the inconsistencies casting strong doubts upon the government’s case.”

Yet, the court denied Mr. Peltier a new trial. The late Federal Judge Gerald William Heaney, who wrote the decision denying a new trial, later urged Leonard Peltier’s release, stating that the FBI used improper tactics to convict him.

Among those calling for Leonard Peltier’s freedom was the late South African President Nelson Mandela, who spent 27 years in apartheid prisons. Leonard Peltier has spent 48 years in federal prisons.

Mr. President, you recently apologized for the federal government’s role in running boarding schools where thousands of Native American children endured abuse, neglect, and eradication of their tribal identities.

Follow up on your apology by freeing Leonard Peltier.

https://mronline.org/2024/12/07/an-open-letter-to-president-joe-biden/

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

PLEASE DO NOT BLAME RUSSIA IF WW3 STARTS. BLAME YOURSELF.

by Kaddour Naimi

Analyses of events in Syria mention corruption as one of the causes of the fall of the previous political system; these analyses seem, in my opinion, to fail to give corruption its importance. strategic as an explanatory motive.

In a basket, one rotten fruit spoils the others; on a tree, worms rot a fruit until it falls to the ground.

To dominate a people, the the first method is to corrupt its ruling elites. Then, corruption extends to the different layers of society, from the most influential (economic, military) to those that shape citizen opinion (culture).

Corruption can start with the socks of the social pyramid: the people, subjected to a material existence that is too difficult, resort to the most illicit means to survive, including corruption.

Corruption can arise through transmission belt between state leaders and the people, for an improvement of material conditions, for example judge, policeman, customs officer, soldier, employee, teacher, down to the simple doorman of a building.

Corruption can start with the top of the social pyramid. The country's leaders succumb to the desire for enrichment in order to enjoy villas, vehicles, bank accounts at home and/or abroad.

From then on, the nation, in its various domains, devoured by corruption, becomes easy prey to its internal and/or external enemies.

From antiquity to today, the problem is identical: to dominate a people and its nation, by agents indigenous (dictatorship) or and foreigners (imperialism), you have to corrupt.

A foreigner, who came to ancient Sparta and saw no wall, complained to the leader of the city. The latter pointed out the peasants working in the fields: "Here is our wall." The citizens were all equipped with adequate military training and a consistent ideology.

Would you be surprised, for example, to see the demonstrations of jubilation by Syrians after the fall of the Assad political system? ... The leaders of this nation have not desired to build their people into a wall capable of resisting aggression, internal or/and external. I say "desired", because a walled people means giving them the cultural capacity to know how to defend their homeland against two dangers: 1) an internal dictatorship, 2) a foreign aggression.

The Great Wall of China was built to protect the country from invasions. Information provided by Chat-GPT:

«Corruption and betrayals

The idea that the guardians of the Great Wall of China were corrupted by the Mongols refers to specific events where local officers or officials, or even members of the elite, betrayed their own rulers to ally with the invaders. For example, during the Jin dynasty, some local officers or lords opened the gates or facilitated access to the Mongols due to their secret alliances, dissatisfaction with their own government, or in some cases, bribes.

The Mongols, as conquerors, were also very adept at exploiting internal divisions among the peoples they attacked. They often promised rewards, positions of power, or land to those who rallied to their cause. This led to several betrayals, including among the guards of the Great Wall of China fortifications, although historical sources on this aspect are sometimes unclear.

What is certain is that the Mongols' strategy was as much psychological as military, exploiting corruption, internal division and the weaknesses of the Chinese dynasties to achieve their ends.».

How did the Roman Empire conquer other nations? ... through the corruption of their leaders. During Jugurtha's war against Roman imperialism, what aspect worried the more the Roman oligarchy? ... Not the military victories of the Numidian leader, but another fact: he used the same weapon as the Romans, namely to corrupt representatives of the Roman oligarchy with money.

What is the determining motive behind the fall of the "Soviet" system? ... If we take the trouble to know the real history, and not the propaganda, we discover this motive in all  first years of installation of this system:

«He was absolutely right, that peasant who declared at the Eighth Congress of Soviets:

«Everything is going very well... Only, if the land is ours, the bread is yours; the water is ours, but the fish is yours; the forests are ours, but the wood is yours.

Apart from that, the worker need not worry.».1

In other words, after the October Revolution, a privileged caste was quickly formed and imposed its domination, camouflaged as a "dictatorship of the proletariat". The rotting of the "apple" took place over seventy years (19212-1991).

During the US military aggression against Iraq, geostrategic analyst Scott Ritter stated: eighty generals of the Iraqi army, accomplices of the US army, were taken to the United States.

In 2024, AIPAC, the US Zionist lobby organization, claimed to have bought about 65% of the US Congressional Representatives. Faced with them, what can the country's elected president, Trump, do?

Regarding the fall of Syria, what happened to the army leaders?

How do the agencies, clandestine or declared as NGOs, of a current imperialist oligarchy operate to recruit representatives of the elites of a nation, then change the political system in favor of the interests of this foreign oligarchy? ... through bribes, the granting of scholarships, the training of "Young Leaders", the more or less hidden financing of activities in all areas, particularly cultural (Centers, Institutes, etc.), the publication of "works" and the dissemination of widely publicized declarations of "influencers".

THEmoney, used to enrich the corrupt elements of a nation, is le means of submission. All other areas follow: economic, military, cultural.

Within a nation, the dictatorial oligarchy creates an opportunistic caste, thirsty for enrichment, to supervise the people and live to their detriment.

On an international scale, the imperialist oligarchy creates an indigenous oligarchy at its service: both live from the exploitation of the natural resources of the vassal nation.

If money proves insufficient as a means of submission, it is supplemented by the exercise of violence. It is exercised by indigenous dictatorship and/or by foreign military aggression. This violence is all the more effective as the degree of corruption in society is serious.

Money allows the creation of mercenary armies, capable of overthrowing corrupt political regimes; and the lack of money weakens armies to the point of making them ineffective in the face of internal and/or external military aggression.3Money is the sinews of war, and of the strength or weakness of a nation.

An independent nation, a sovereign people must, first of all, eliminate all forms of corruption among their representatives, in all fields.

For a nation to be victoriously resistant to aggression foreigner, this nation must be so to its contradictions internal. To be so, his people must be informed et aware issues. For it to be so, there must be a relationship not of fear, mistrust and hostility, but of confidence and cooperation between leaders and led, in all sectors of social activity.

This excellence of a nation's situation is not easy to achieve: the corrupt exist in every society. Even more serious: they practice the art of presenting themselves as the best defenders of the nation and the people, hence the difficulty of spotting their misdeeds.

How can we discover these latter, in order to neutralize them?

Any representative or defender of the nation and the people, who acts in the social field, must make public his Bank account and material goods. This information must be known before entry into office and end of this: this makes it possible to verify whether, during the public activity, the person did not take advantage of it to enrich themselves illegally.

A national monitoring body, networked throughout the country, verifies the conformity of the declarations of these representatives. This body functions properly on one condition: that the state leaders allow it; and, for this to be so, they must truly defend the interests of their people.

Is this a utopian proposition? ... Corruption Perception Indexes exist in various nations. They serve as indicators for investors and ... corrupters. It is therefore possible to reduce corruption to a minimum that puts the proper functioning of a nation out of danger.

To accuse the corrupters of enslaving the corrupt is to accuse a snake of emitting its poison, a virus of invading the body: stupid and useless. The correct attitude is to ensure that the snake does not use its venom, that the virus does not invade the body. The venom or the virus, in a society, are the individuals devoid of human dignity: they sell themselves to the highest bidder and carry out his most abominable orders, presenting themselves as the most benevolent people. Prevention is better than cure.

https://en.reseauinternational.net/corruption-lennemi-public-numero-1-et-comment-le-neutraliser/

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

PLEASE DO NOT BLAME RUSSIA IF WW3 STARTS. BLAME YOURSELF.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tfP1KutgOvs

SEE ALSO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGVb-hfGfFM

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

HYPOCRISY ISN’T ONE OF THE TEN COMMANDMENTS SINS.

HENCE ITS POPULARITY IN THE ABRAHAMIC TRADITIONS…

PLEASE DO NOT BLAME RUSSIA IF WW3 STARTS. BLAME YOURSELF.