Charles Reich Quotes

Former president Bill Clinton (born in 1946 and a Yale Law Student of Charles Reich) describes this divide: "If you look back on the sixties and, on balance, you think there was more good than harm, then you're probably a Democrat. If you think there was more harm than good, you're probably a Republican.

It makes me wonder what belonging to a place means. Charles died a Russian in Paris. Viktor called it wrong and was a Russian in Vienna for fifty years, then Austrian, then a citizen of the Reich, and then stateless. Elisabeth kept Dutch citizenship in England for fifty years. And Iggie was Austrian, then American, then an Austrian living in Japan. You assimilate, but you need somewhere else to go. You keep your passport to hand. You keep something private.

No person’s gain in wisdom is diminished by anyone else’s gain.

In northwest Seattle, there is an immensely popular 'old-fashioned' ice cream parlor. It is modern, spotless, and gleaming, bursting with comfortable looking people on a warm summer evening. The parlor is dedicated to nostalgia, from the old-time decor to the striped candy, the ragtime music, the costumes of the smiling young waiters, the Gibson-girl menu with its gold-rush type, and the open-handed hospitality of the Old West. It serves sandwiches, hamburgers, and kiddie 'samiches,' but its specialty is ice-cream concoctions, all of them with special names, including several so vast and elaborate that they cost several dollars and arrive with so much fanfare that all other activities stop as the waiters join in a procession as guards of honor. Nobody seems to care that the sandwiches and even the ice cream dishes have a curious blandness, so that everything tastes rather alike and it is hard to remember what one has eaten. Nothing mars the insistent, bright, wholesome good humor that presses on every side. Yet somehow there is pathos as well. For these patrons are the descendants of pioneers, of people who knew the frontiers, of men who dared the hardships of Chilkoot Pass to seek gold in the Klondike. That is their heritage, but now they only sit amid a sterile model of the past, spooning ice cream while piped-in ragtime tinkles unheard.

The school is a brutal machine for destruction of the self, con. trolling it, heckling it, hassling it into a thousand busy tasks, a thousand noisy groups, never giving it a moment to establish a knowledge within.

They had been fed on legends of heroism for as long as they could remember. For them the call to the ‘ultimate sacrifice' was no empty phrase. It went straight to their hearts and they felt that now their hour had come, the moment when they really counted and were no longer dismissed because they were still too young…If there is anything that forces us to examine the principles on which we operated as leaders in the Hitler Youth and in the Labor Service, it is this senseless sacrifice of young people.”[104] The top leader of Hitler Youth was Baldur Benedikt von Schirach. He claimed that he had no desire for the boys to fight, and that he used his power to prevent it, but he was demoted for criticizing the plans to keep the boys out of harm’s way. In addition to challenges to this claim, there remains the fact that Von Shirach’s purpose was to indoctrinate the youngest of Germans to remain loyal to Hitler and his cause. He later admitted that while he had opposed the idea of the youth taking part in the fight, his educational programs had caused the youth to desire to do exactly that.[105]

Conservatives are fond of employing foreign examples of the cruelty and terror that governments may inflict on a people that has been systematically deprived of its weaponry. Among them are the Third Reich’s exclusion of Jews from the ranks of the armed, Joseph Stalin’s anti-gun edicts of 1929, and the prohibitive firearms rules that the Communist party introduced into China between 1933 and 1949. To varying degrees, these do help to make the case. And yet, ugly as all of these developments were, there is in fact no need for our augurs of oppression to roam so far afield for their illustrations of tyranny. Instead, they might look to their own history. 'Do you really think that it could happen here?' remains a favorite refrain of the modern gun-control movement. Alas, the answer should be a resounding 'Yes.' For most of America’s story, an entire class of people was, as a matter of course, enslaved, beaten, lynched, subjected to the most egregious miscarriages of justice, and excluded either explicitly or practically from the body politic. We prefer today to reserve the word 'tyranny' for its original target, King George III, or to apply it to foreign despots. But what other characterization can be reasonably applied to the governments that, ignoring the words of the Declaration of Independence, enacted and enforced the Fugitive Slave Act? How else can we see the men who crushed Reconstruction? How might we view the recalcitrant American South in the early 20th century? 'It' did 'happen here.' And 'it' was achieved — in part, at least — because its victims were denied the very right to self-protection that during the Revolution had been recognized as the unalienable prerogative of 'all men.

In The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin introduced the concept known as “survival of the fittest.” Don’t you believe it. Yes, he did discuss the principle, but that is not what he called it. Darwin analyzed the concept in great detail, but referred to it as “natural selection.” The term “survival of the fittest” is nowhere to be found in his original 1859 publication, or in any of its subsequent three editions. The expression was provided by Herbert Spencer, a philosopher contemporary with Darwin, in his Principles of Biology in 1864. Spencer found the phrase descriptive of an economic process—parallel to that of biological evolution—by which companies adapt to the marketplace in order to increase their ability to grow and prosper.

Most tellingly, it was a time when the ideas of William Graham Sumner, a professor of political and social science at Yale, dominated American social thought. Sumner brought Charles Darwin’s thinking to America and twisted it into a theory to fit the times. Few Americans living today have read any of Sumner’s writings, but they had an electrifying effect on America during the last three decades of the nineteenth century.

The important fittings were the coffee mugs and the ashtrays, but books were the true furnishings. They were the soul of a room. They defined the identity of the person who lived there in a series of announcements: Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha. Charles Reich’s The Greening of America. Richard Neville’s Playpower. Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch. Carlos Castañeda’s The Teachings of Don Juan.

As the Soviets contemplated additional expansion following the “Great Patriotic War” and the U.S. military came to understand the putative allies of today would emerge as the enemies of tomorrow, the men possessing knowledge of the V-2 rockets and other Third Reich military technology programs became seen as crucial pieces in the incipient NATO versus Warsaw Pact standoff.               The result was the American-led “Operation Paperclip” on the Western side, which resulted in German scientists putting their expertise at the disposal of the U.S. and other NATO members. Operation Paperclip aimed not only to obtain the benefits of German scientific advances for the United States but also to deny them to the potentially hostile Soviets, as General Leslie Groves enunciated: “Heisenberg was one of the world's leading physicists, and, at the time of the German break-up, he was worth more to us than ten divisions of Germans. Had he fallen into the Russian hands, he would have proven invaluable to them (Naimark, 1995, 207).

Sir Roy Fedden headed the British team sent to defeated Germany by Sir Stafford Cripps. Fedden, a slim, elegant, clean-shaven man whose photographs usually reveal an expression of focused determination, showed keen intelligence and a fascination with car and aircraft engines at an early age. Passionately fond of his wife Norah Crew, and somehow finding time between engine experiments to sail and fish, Fedden, 60 years of age in 1945, attacked his task with customary gusto. Fedden Years earlier, Erhardt Milch and Hermann Goering, to Fedden's astonishment, permitted him to tour no less than 17 of their secret aeronautics facilities when he visited Germany in 1937 and 1938. The Luftwaffe leaders hoped to overawe Fedden with the potential of German military aircraft design, and thus cause him to influence the British government to reach an accommodation with the Third Reich. Fedden, in fact, urged the English leadership to modernize their aircraft design to match the Germans' potential and was fired.               Realizing their error several years later, the government re-employed Fedden in 1944, and a mix of aeronautics engineers, scientists, and RAF officers comprised Fedden's team.

The Soviets, knowing that the Americans would permit the German scientists to leave if they wished to, attempted to take advantage of the much more liberal U.S. attitude towards the Third Reich's inventors and engineers. During the interrogation of these individuals at sites in Germany and in Paris during summer 1945, the various Allies naturally had the right to send their own representatives to the interviews, so the Soviet interrogators approached the German scientists with smoothly plausible claims, offering them considerable rewards and promising they could conduct their research in Germany. Von Braun and most of the other scientists politely declined these offers, knowing them to be outright lies and fearing what the Soviets would do if they voluntarily joined those of their peers already captured by the Red Army.

In some places, such as Kiel, the T-Forces actually enlisted the Third Reich's guards and police temporarily to help protect vital facilities from arson or vandalism, as a British T-Force diary reported: “[T]he German military forces and police would be allowed to keep their rifles. […] The police, evidently used to taking orders, were prepared to do anything ordered. Reports continued to come in to 'T' Force headquarters of German armed guards on certain dumps and targets. All troops were told to allow the Germans to carry on with the guards, which they were doing very well.

An 11th U-boat, U-234, turned for America following the German surrender, yielding the to Americans and providing them with a full cargo of technical documents, as well as 7.7 lbs of uranium-235, which likely ended up at the Manhattan Project's Oak Ridge facility in Tennessee. Thus, some of the products of Third Reich science ended up being used directly against their ally Japan prior to its surrender.

The Germans drafted a profusion of designs, many intriguingly bizarre, but nevertheless, the ancestor of practically every advanced aircraft made following World War II exists among the blueprints of the Reich.

The other nations spent only stingily on their science programs, and in some cases neglected them entirely, as the derision hurled at Goddard's seminal first rocket experiment shows. They also set very limited goals, while the Third Reich, on the other hand, directed large resources to research and encouraged extreme, visionary, and highly experimental projects.

For any scene to work, along with that freedom there's implicit responsibility - you have to be doing something somewhere along the line - there is no free ride. And you have to know where you're going.

That's the "freedom lie." There's been a lie about what freedom is and the big lie is that freedom means absolutely and utterly free, and it really doesn't mean anything of the sort. The case in point is when you have your own scene like that [Haight-Ashbury in the 60s] Somebody comes in and they're free to move in but likewise you're free to tell them to get out.

The punishment for being a Jew in the Reich crossed the line into barbarism. They were being hunted down like wild animals. What made it so sickening was that it wasn’t perpetrated by a bunch of ignorant half-naked savages, but the citizens of a nation renowned for its culture and intelligence that had produced men like Goethe and Beethoven.

It couldn’t understand that “private property” in the hands of a corporation was a synonym for quasi-governmental power, far different from the property of an individual. It couldn’t understand the crucial point that collective action against corporate power wouldn’t have been a step toward collectivization, but an effort to preserve democracy in a society that had already been collectivized.

The Vietnam War represents that form of madness in which logic is carried to fantastic extremes. Starting with an initial political-ideological dispute in a country on the other side of the globe, we have butchered, burned and mutilated men, women, and children, laid waste a country and created a science-fiction fantasy of weapons capable of destroying the entire world, building more, more and more weapons until the nation has wasted its own cities, schools, and needs in the effort, impoverishing its people and communal life for this single purpose.

secretly dissolved mescaline in coffee or alcohol and began an innocuous conversation with the unsuspecting test subjects. After thirty to sixty minutes a change took place. The alkaloid had passed into the bloodstream via the mucous membrane of the stomach. The experimental subjects who were “opened up” by the drug were now informed that in this special zone where the interrogation was taking place Plötner had direct access to their soul. He suggested they should tell him everything of their own free will or something terrible would happen. The perfidious strategy worked: “When the mescaline took effect, the investigating person could extract even the most intimate secrets from the prisoner if the questions were asked skillfully. They even reported voluntarily on erotic and sexual matters. . . . Mental reservations ceased to exist. Emotions of hatred and revenge could always be brought to light. Tricky questions were not seen through, so that an assumption of guilt could easily be produced from the answer.”39 Plötner could not finish his series of tests. The Americans liberated the camp and confiscated his documents. It was a treasure trove for the U.S. Secret Service. Under the leadership of Charles Savage and the Harvard medic Henry K. Beecher, the experiments were continued under the code name Project Chatter and other rubrics at the Naval Medical Research Institute in Washington, DC.

The object of this book is not to show that Hitler and his confederates were saints or that National Socialism was an ideal or even a desirable form of government. Its aim is a less ambitious one—to demonstrate that the rise of National Socialism was due in the main to the blind and revengeful policy of the Allies; that National Socialism, whatever its defects, saved first Germany and later Spain from becoming bulwarks of Communism; that the Western Powers under Roosevelt’s guidance did everything possible in the pre-War years to drive the German leaders to extremes; that the Roosevelt-Churchill policy of annihilating Germany as a military power served the interests of Communism and of Communism alone; that the “war crimes” were the work of a small band of fanatics; and that the German people as a whole were guilty of nothing more criminal than of defending their country in time of war.

Only in the hearts of those who knew him with all his qualities and all his faults and recognized that willingness to sacrifice himself for his country which no human weakness could entirely conceal, in the hearts of the soldiers and workers and peasants who still speak of “our Hermann” with a sense of personal loss, no order of the International Military Tribunal can cancel the belief that Hermann Göring has received from his Creator another justice and another mercy than those which he received at the hands of his fellow men.