War Resistance to World War I
These examples are but a couple from the book “A People’s History of the United States” by Howard Zinn.
Emma Goldman, an anarchist, were sentenced to prison for opposing the draft. She said this to her jury:
“Verily, poor as we are in democracy how can we give of it to the world? …. A democracy conceived in the military servitude of the masses, in their economic enslavement, and nurtured in their tears and blood, is not democracy at all. It is despotism – the cumulative result of a chain of abuses which, according to the dangerous document, the Declaration of Independence, the people have the right to overthrow…..”
In 1918, Eugene Debs spoke out against the war going on:
“They tell us that we live in a great free republic; that our institutions are democratic; that we are a free and self-governing people. That is too much, even for a joke…….
Wars throughout history have been waged for conquest and plunder…. And that is war in a nutshell. The master class has always declared the wars; and the subject class has always fought the battles…..”
He was arrested for violating the Espionage Act.
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