I start from the supposition that the world is topsy-turvy, that things are all wrong,
that the wrong people are in jail and the wrong people are out of jail, that the wrong
people are in power and the wrong people are out of power, that the wealth is distributed
in this country and the world in such a way as not simply to require small reform but
to require a drastic reallocation of wealth. I start from the supposition that we don't
have to say too much about this because all we have to do is think about the state of
the world today and realize that things are all upside down.
If you don't think, if you just listen to TV and read scholarly things, you actually
begin to think that things are not so bad, or that just little things are wrong. But
you have to get a little detached, and then come back and look at the world, and you are
horrified. So we have to start from that supposition-that things are really topsy-turvy.
And our topic is topsy-turvy: civil disobedience. As soon as you say the topic is civil disobedience,
you are saying our problem is civil disobedience. That is not our problem.... Our problem is
civil obedience. Our problem is the numbers of people all over the world who have obeyed
the dictates of the leaders of their government and have gone to war, and millions have been
killed because of this obedience.
We recognize this for Nazi Germany. We know that the problem there was obedience, that
the people obeyed Hitler. People obeyed; that was wrong. They should have challenged, and
they should have resisted; and if we were only there, we would have showed them. Even
in Stalin's Russia we can understand that; people are obedient, all these herdlike people.
Remember those bad old days when people were exploited by feudalism? Everything was terrible
in the Middle Ages-but now we have Western civilization, the rule of law. The rule of
law has regularized and maximized the injustice that existed before the rule of law, that
is what the rule of law has done.
When in all the nations of the world the rule of law is the darling of the leaders and the
plague of the people, we ought to begin to recognize this. We have to transcend these
national boundaries in our thinking. Nixon and Brezhnev have much more in common with
one another than - we have with Nixon. J. Edgar Hoover has far more in common with the
head of the Soviet secret police than he has with us. It's the international dedication
to law and order that binds the leaders of all countries in a comradely bond. That's
why we are always surprised when they get together -- they smile, they shake hands,
they smoke cigars, they really like one another no matter what they say.
What we are trying to do, I assume, is really to get back to the principles and aims and
spirit of the Declaration of Independence. This spirit is resistance to illegitimate
authority and to forces that deprive people of their life and liberty and right to pursue
happiness, and therefore under these conditions, it urges the right to alter or abolish their
current form of government-and the stress had been on abolish. But to establish the
principles of the Declaration of Independence, we are going to need to go outside the law,
to stop obeying the laws that demand killing or that allocate wealth the way it has been
done, or that put people in jail for petty technical offenses and keep other people out
of jail for enormous crimes. My hope is that this kind of spirit will take place not just
in this country but in other countries because they all need it. People in all countries
need the spirit of disobedience to the state, which is not a metaphysical thing but a thing
of force and wealth. And we need a kind of declaration of interdependence among people
in all countries of the world who are striving for the same thing.