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Zinn over verkiezingen VS

 De
gerenommeerde linkse geschiedkundige Howard Zinn heeft in een artikel in het
tijdschrift The Progressive mooi commentaar geleverd op het verkiezingscircus
in de VS. Hij adviseert iedereen om "zich te bevrijden van de
verkiezingswaanzin die de hele maatschappij bevangen houdt, inclusief
links". (So we need to free ourselves from the election madness engulfing
the entire society, including the left
).

3 min leestijd
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Je kunt
het hele stuk hier vinden

Howard
Zinn stelt niet dat verkiezingen geheel geen belang hebben:

No, I’m
not taking some ultra-left position that elections are totally insignificant,
and that we should refuse to vote to preserve our moral purity. Yes, there are
candidates who are somewhat better than others, and at certain times of
national crisis (the Thirties, for instance, or right now) where even a slight
difference between the two parties may be a matter of life and death.

Maar er
zijn belangrijkere dingen te melden door de media en te bespreken door de
burgers dan elke scheet die elke mogelijke kandidaat laat:

I’m
talking about a sense of proportion that gets lost in the election madness.
Would I support one candidate against another? Yes, for two minutes-the amount
of time it takes to pull the lever down in the voting booth.


But before and after those two minutes, our time, our energy, should be
spent in educating, agitating, organizing our fellow citizens in the workplace, in the
neighborhood, in the schools. Our objective should be to build, painstakingly,
patiently but energetically, a movement that, when it reaches a certain
critical mass, would shake whoever is in the White House, in Congress, into
changing national policy on matters of war and social justice.

En hij
waarschuwt voor de gevaarlijke illusies die vaak rond dergelijke spektakels
gekoesterd worden: We should not expect that a victory at the ballot box in
November will even begin to budge the nation from its twin fundamental
illnesses: capitalist greed and militarism.

Waar
zou je je aandacht dan beter op kunnen richten?

For
instance, the mortgage foreclosures that are driving millions from their
homes-they should remind us of a similar situation after the Revolutionary War,
when small farmers, many of them war veterans (like so many of our homeless
today), could not afford to pay their taxes and were threatened with the loss
of the land, their homes. They gathered by the thousands around courthouses and
refused to allow the auctions to take place.

The
evictions today of people who cannot pay their rents should remind us of what
people did in the Thirties when they organized and put the belongings of the
evicted families back in their apartments, in defiance of the authorities.

Historically,
government, whether in the hands of Republicans or Democrats, conservatives or
liberals, has failed its responsibilities, until forced to by direct action:
sit-ins and Freedom Rides for the rights of black people, strikes and boycotts
for the rights of workers, mutinies and desertions of soldiers in order to stop
a war. Voting is easy and marginally useful, but it is a poor substitute for
democracy, which requires direct action by concerned citizens.

(lees
het hele stuk hier )