Citizenship Human Rights Quotes

Until the philosophy which holds one race superior and another inferior is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned, everywhere is war. And until there are no longer first-class and second-class citizens of any nation, until the colour of a man's skin is of no more significance than the colour of his eyes. And until the basic human rights are equally guaranteed to all without regard to race, there is war. And until that day, the dream of lasting peace, world citizenship, rule of international morality, will remain but a fleeting illusion to be pursued, but never attained... now everywhere is war.” - Popularized by Bob Marley in the song War

Until the philosophy which holds one race superior and another inferior is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned - well, everywhere there's war. And until the basic human rights are equally guaranteed to all without regard to race - it's a war. And until there's no longer first-class or second-class citizens of any nation... Until the color of a man's skin is of no more significance than the color of his eyes - it's a war. Until that day the dream of lasting peace, world citizenship, and a rule of international morality will remain in but a fleeting illusion to be pursued, but never attained.

Because they claim to be concerned with the welfare of whole societies, governments arrogate to themselves the right to pass off as mere abstract profit or loss the human unhappiness that their decisions provoke or their negligence permits. It is a duty of an international citizenship to always bring the testimony of people's suffering to the eyes and ears of governments, sufferings for which it's untrue that they are not responsible. The suffering of men must never be a mere silent residue of policy. It grounds an absolute right to stand up and speak to those who hold power.

The notion of human right builds on our shared humanity. These rights are not derived from the citizenship of any country, or the membership of any nation, but are presumed to be claims or entitlements of every human being. They differ, therefore, from constitutionally created rights guaranteed for specific people.

Each person possesses and inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override. For this reason, justice denies that the loss of freedom for some is made right by a greater good shared by others. It does not allow that the sacrifices imposed on a few are outweighed by the larger sum of advantages enjoyed by many. Therefore in a just society the liberties of equal citizenship are taken as settled; the rights secured by justice are not subject to political bargaining or to the calculus of social interests. The only thing that permits us to acquiesce in an erroneous theory is the lack of a better one; analogously, an injustice is tolerable only when it is necessary to avoid an even greater injustice. Being first virtues of human activities, truth and justice are uncompromising.

As a citizen of the world, I stand only with Truth and my conscience is my only leader. This is the only way to peace and justice on earth. To always do the right thing, be the right person, and stand with whoever is right always and forever.

With the end of empire, we are coming to an end of the epoch of rights. We have entered the epoch of responsibilities, which requires new, more socially-minded human beings and new, more participatory and place-based concepts of citizenship and democracy.

The conception of human rights based upon the assumed existence of a human being as such broke down at the very moment when those who professed to believe in it were for the first time confronted with people who had indeed lost all other qualities and specific relationships except that they were still human. The world found nothing sacred in the abstract nakedness of being human.

By creating a society in which all people, of all colors, were granted freedom and citizenship, the Haitian Revolution forever transformed the world. It was a central part of the destruction of slavery in the Americas, and therefore a crucial moment in the history of democracy, one that laid the foundation for the continuing struggles for human rights everywhere. In this sense we are all descendents of the Haitain Revolution, and responsible to these ancestors.

That until the philosophy which holds one race superior and another inferior is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned: That until there are no longer first-class and second class citizens of any nation; That until the color of a man's skin is of no more significance than the color of his eyes; That until the basic human rights are equally guaranteed to all without regard to race; That until that day, the dream of lasting peace and world citizenship and the rule of international morality will remain but a fleeting illusion, to be pursued but never attained; And until the ignoble and unhappy regimes that hold our brothers in Angola, in Mozambique and in South Africa in subhuman bondage have been toppled and destroyed; Until bigotry and prejudice and malicious and inhuman self-interest have been replaced by understanding and tolerance and good-will; Until all Africans stand and speak as free beings, equal in the eyes of all men, as they are in the eyes of Heaven; Until that day, the African continent will not know peace. We Africans will fight, if necessary, and we know that we shall win, as we are confident in the victory of good over evil.

Being worshiped (for most women) is preferable to being defiled, and being looked up to is better than being walked on. It is hard for women to refuse the worship of what otherwise is despised: being female. Woman’s special moral nature has sometimes been used to plead her case: being moral, she will be able to upgrade the morality of the nation if she has the rights of citizenship, the tone of the marketplace if she is employed, the quality of the church if she officiates, the humanism of government if she is in it; being moral, she will be on the side of good. It has also been argued, more loudly and more often, that her moral nature must not be contaminated by vulgar responsibilities; that she has a special moral role to play in making the nation and the world good— she must be in her person the example of good that will civilize and educate men and make the nation moral. One cannot do what men do—not in government, not in the family, not even in religion, not anywhere—and be an example of good.

Cicero deplored the practice, saying, “It may not be right… for one who is not a citizen to exercise the rights and privileges of citizenship,” but actually expelling non-Romans was “contrary to the laws of humanity.

I’m convinced that this crowd was made up of people who were, as my sister would say, “dog-tired of second-class citizenship,” of being made to feel less than a human being worthy of respect. When one is feeling this way, anyone who spoke with passion, whose words and spirit challenged the status quo, would be applauded. A clearer, more focused response would come from being in action and experiencing—feeling—a certain energy and response from one with whom one is interacting. In other words, one has to be open to the truth that at some level we are all the same and want the same things, like a peaceful community in which to live and grow and thrive.

Of course, it was a lie, and that bald man in a blue suit was definitely harassing her, teasing her with dirty, rude jokes. Nothing physical from the body of a High Grade can heal. No matter if it’s blood or sperm or saliva or even a discarded hair or nail—as some fraudulent religious groups claim, taking advantage of Low Grades’ fascination with the living gods among them. Though, the archive mentions a however as a footnote: ***However, when they pass strong prana (the energy controllable by the evolved, High Grade humans) to the sick or wounded, it heals, no matter whether they are plants or animals. Their prana flows strongly when they feel strong emotions. Some people say their sperm heals, but it’s not the semen. It’s the strong prana-boosts the High Grades experience when they reach climax during intimacy … Kusha felt a tinge of pride, exponentially multiplied by her Low-Grade inferiority complex, reading this footnote. It worsened when ads started coming up on her HOME page after reading it. The ads had horrible titles: Dream Youth For The Low Grades. Alternate Longevity. A Secret Pleasurable Way To Youth. Get Your Dream Citizenship With Pleasing Pleasure Contract. The last one is for non-citizens, of course. At least, she’s a citizen. But when Kusha discovered how many unevolved men and women enter such contracts just for citizenship, it made her face crease. As if she’d caught a nasty smell. For a moment, she even thought, she hated every High Grade in the world, including everyone in her adoptive family. Right now, standing in front of Meera, the hatred swells.

With the end of empire, we are coming to an end of the epoch of rights. We have entered the epoch of responsibilities, which requires new, socially-minded human beings and new, more participatory and place-based concepts of citizenship and democracy.

And see what happened to America, after. It became everything it accused others of being. It tore itself apart, riddled by the rot of unfettered free speech, drowned in a deluge of propaganda foisted upon an uneducated public with no formalized training in critical thinking. Liberal democracies and scheming socialist regimes were doomed from the start. You give a human being freedom and personhood as some innate right, and what do they have to fight for? Personhood is earned. Residency is earned. Citizenship is earned. If you’re not earning for the company, you are costing it

Periodic expulsions of foreigners became a recurring feature of the later Republic, and Cicero deplored the practice, saying, “It may not be right… for one who is not a citizen to exercise the rights and privileges of citizenship,” but actually expelling non-Romans was “contrary to the laws of humanity.

Periodic expulsions of foreigners became a recurring feature of the later Republic, and Cicero deplored the practice, saying, “It may not be right… for one who is not a citizen to exercise the rights and privileges of citizenship,” but actually expelling non-Romans was “contrary to the laws of humanity.”9

These policies create a reality where a Jewish citizen of any other country who has never been to Israel can move there or to a West Bank settlement and automatically gain citizenship, while a Palestinian refugee expelled from his home and languishing for more than 70 years in a refugee camp in a nearby country cannot move to either Israel or the OPT.

Israel is one of the most multiracial and multicultural countries in the world. More than a hundred different countries are represented in its population of 6 million. Consider how the Israeli government spent tens of millions of dollars airlifting more than forty thousand black Ethiopian Jews to Israel in 1984 and 1991. Since 2001 Israel has reached out to help others, taking in non-Jewish refugees from Lebanon, the Ivory Coast, Sierra Leone, Vietnam, Liberia, and Congo, and even Bosnian Muslims. How many such refugees have the twenty-two states in the Arab League taken in? The Arab world won’t even give Palestinian refugees citizenship in their host countries. Remember, Jews can’t live in the neighboring Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan or in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. But Arabs are living as citizens in Israel. What does that tell you about their respect for other cultures? Over 1 million Arabs are full Israeli citizens. An Arab sits on the Supreme Court of Israel. There are Arab political parties expressing views inimical to the State of Israel sitting in the Knesset, Israel’s parliament. Women are equal partners in Israel and have complete human rights, as do gays and minorities. Show me an Arab nation with a Jew in its government. Show me an Arab country with half as many Jewish citizens as Israel has Arab citizens. Show me freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of the press, and human rights in any Arabic country in the Middle East the way they exist and are practiced in Israel. It is those same freedoms that the Muslims resent as a threat to Islam and that they are fighting against, be it in Israel, Europe, or the United States.

If I had been born in America, I'd be called Korean-American and would have all the rights accorded to an American citizen. I'd be treated like I was human. But this country is different. If I become a model person, more so than any Japanese, I still wouldn't be treated like a proper human as long as I have Korean citizenship. The way a sumo wrestler can't become a stable master while he still has foreign citizenship. Assimilation or exclusion. There are only two choices in this country.

Going beyond the retelling of historical events and seeking deeper emotional and intellectual connection with the visitor; 2.   Have meaningful impact on a person’s sense of citizenship, value for life, freedom, respect, tolerance and human rights; 3.   Strive toward a high retention level of knowledge by making subject matter “come alive,” making past experience “relatable” and appeal to a sense of morality to action against wrongdoing;

We are in a decade, perhaps an age, when all sorts and conditions of men are rising up to protest (declare against) all sorts and conditions in our human situation. Everywhere, the "have-nots" are challenging the "haves"; the morally awake are prodding the indifferently asleep; the impatient are threatening the patient; both the Left and the Right are attacking the Center; the new thinks, that it despises the old. In a well-worn sense, "whatever is" is wrong. The current traitor is the middle class, and treason is gradually being defined as the liberal view. The choice offered seems to be be either a soma-soaked brotherly "happening" with Whirl as benevolent king or the orderly, albeit vicious, tyranny of Orwell's 1984. Within our own borders the arenas are brimming and booming: inner city ghettos, rural slums, local draft boards, P.T.A. committees, factories exuding smog, churches gathering affluence, campuses and coffee houses, Selma and Cicero, the Mississippi Delta and the cities of Detroit and Newark, nuclear test sites and pornographic paperbacks. Under attack are segregation, the war in Vietnam, control of the universities, inequalities in selective service, Christian hypocrisies, second-class citizenship, white collar culture, poverty, river pollution, and the BOMB.

Agamben has elaborated upon how certain subjects undergo a suspension of their ontological status as subjects when states of emergency are invoked. He argues that a subject deprived of rights of citizenship enters a suspended zone, neither living in the sense that a political animal lives, in community and bound by law, nor dead and, therefore, outside the constituting condition of the rule of law. These socially conditioned states of suspended life and suspended death exemplify the distinction that Agamben offers between "bare life" and the life of the political being (bios politikon ), where this second sense of "being" is established only in the context of political community. If bare life, life conceived as biological minimum, becomes a condition to which we are all reducible, then we might find a certain universality in this condition. Agamben writes, "We are all potentially exposed to this condition," that is, "bare life" underwrites the actual political arrangements in which we live, posing as a contingency into which any political arrangement might dissolve. Yet such general claims do not yet tell us how this power functions differentially, to target and manage certain populations, to derealize the humanity of subjects who might potentially belong to a community bound by commonly recognized laws; and they do not tell us how sovereignty, understood as state sovereignty in this instance, works by differentiating populations on the basis of ethnicity and race, how the systematic management and derealization of populations function to support and extend the claims of a sovereignty accountable to no law; how sovereignty extends its own power precisely through the tactical and permanent deferral of the law itself.

I wandered over to the adobe birthplace of Ignacio Seguin Zaragoza, whose father was posted at the garrison in the early 1800s. Zaragoza went on to become a national hero in Mexico, leading a reformist revolt against Santa Anna and defeat- ing an invading French force on May 5, 1862, the date celebrated as Cinco de Mayo. While exploring the birthplace, I met Alberto Perez, a history and so- cial studies teacher in the Dallas area who was visiting with his family. When I confessed my ignorance of Zaragoza, he smiled and said, "You're not alone. A lot of Texans don't know him, either, or even that Mexico had its own fight for independence." The son of Mexican immigrants, Perez had taught at a predominantly Hispanic school in Dallas named for Zaragoza. Even there, he'd found it hard to bring nuance to students' understanding of Mexico and Texas in the nineteenth century. "The word 'revolution' slants it from the start," he said. "It makes kids think of the American Revolution and throwing off oppression." Perez tried to balance this with a broader, Mexican perspective. Anglos had been invited to settle Texas and were granted rights, citizenship, and considerable latitude in their adherence to distant authority. Mexico's aboli- tion of slavery, for instance, had little force on its northeastern frontier, where Southerners needed only to produce a "contract" that technically la- beled their human chattel as indentured servants. "Then the Anglos basically decided, 'We don't like your rules,"" Perez said. "This is our country now.

If you are to be human, rejecting the society's rampant psychosis of nationalism, you are bound to become an object of an insane amount of hate. The west will hate you for meddling without citizenship, the east will hate you for being a traitor, or vice versa. Despite all this unbearable hate if you can uphold your humanity with a smile, then - you shall be human - then, you shall be an armor of the world.

The human heart is first a human heart, then everything else - American, Christian, Asian, Jew, or whatever.

Humans have natural rights in the state of nature but they do not have civil rights. Civil rights are derived from membership in a society. The Republicans who controlled both houses of Congress after the Civil War knew this. They also knew that, before conferring civil rights, they had to once and for all abolish slavery. The Thirteenth Amendment ending slavery was passed by the Senate on April 8, 1864, and by the House on January 31, 1865. Republican support for the amendment: 100 percent. Democratic support: 23 percent. Even after the Civil War, only a tiny percentage of Democrats were willing to sign up to permanently end slavery. Most Democrats wanted it to continue. In the following year, on June 13, 1866, the Republican Congress passed the Fourteenth Amendment overturning the Dred Scott decision and granting full citizenship and equal rights under the law to blacks. This amendment prohibited states from abridging the “privileges and immunities” of all citizens, from depriving them of “due process of law” or denying them “equal protection of the law.” The Fourteenth Amendment passed the House and Senate with exclusive Republican support. Not a single Democrat either in the House or the Senate voted for it. Two years later, in 1868, Congress with the support of newly-elected Republican president Ulysses Grant passed the Fifteenth Amendment granting suffrage to blacks. The right to vote, it said, cannot be “denied or abridged by the United States or any state on account of race, color or previous condition of servitude.” In the Senate, the Fifteenth Amendment passed by a vote of 39 to 13. Every one of the 39 “yes” votes came from Republicans. (Some Republicans like Charles Sumner abstained because they wanted the measure to go even further than it did.) All the 13 “no” votes came from Democrats. In the House, every “yes” vote came from a Republican and every Democrat voted “no.” It is surely a matter of the greatest significance that the constitutional provisions that made possible the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, and the Fair Housing Bill only entered the Constitution thanks to the Republican Party. Beyond this, the GOP put forward a series of Civil Rights laws to further reinforce black people’s rights to freedom, equality, and social justice. When Republicans passed the Civil Rights Act of 1866—guaranteeing to blacks the rights to make contracts and to have the criminal laws apply equally to whites and blacks—the Democrats struck back. They didn’t have the votes in Congress, but they had a powerful ally in President Andrew Johnson. Johnson vetoed the legislation. Now this may seem like an odd act for Lincoln’s vice president, but it actually wasn’t. Many people don’t realize that Johnson wasn’t a Republican; he was a Democrat. Historian Kenneth Stampp calls him “the last Jacksonian.”8 Lincoln put him on the ticket because he was a pro-union Democrat and Lincoln was looking for ways to win the votes of Democrats opposed to secession. Johnson, however, was both a southern partisan and a Democratic partisan. Once the Civil War ended, he attempted to lead weak-kneed Republicans into a new Democratic coalition based on racism and white privilege. Johnson championed the Democratic mantra of white supremacy, declaring, “This is a country for white men and, by God, as long as I am president, it shall be a government of white men.” In his 1867 annual message to Congress, Johnson declared that blacks possess “less capacity for government than any other race of people. No independent government of any form has ever been successful in their hands. On the contrary, wherever they have been left to their own devices they have shown a consistent tendency to relapse into barbarism.”9 These are perhaps the most racist words uttered by an American president, and no surprise, they were uttered by a Democrat.

Things had been different when Garveyism and Ethiopianism rather than afro-centrism and occultism set the tone. To contain modernity, to appreciate its colonial constitution and to criticise its reliance on racialised governmental codes all required finding an autonomous space outside it. A desire to exist elsewhere supplied the governing impulse. It was captured in compelling forms in the period's best songs of longing and flight, like Bunny Wailer's anthem ‘Dreamland’ 5. However, there is no longer any uncontaminated, pastoral or romantic location to which opposition and dissent might fly, and so, a new culture of consolation has been fashioned in which being against this tainted modernity has come to mean being before it. Comparable investments in the restorative power of the pseudo-archaic occur elsewhere. They help to make Harry Potter's world attractive and are routine features of much ‘new age’ thinking. They govern the quest for a repudiation of modernity that is shared by the various versions of Islam which have largely eclipsed Ethiopianism as the principal spiritual resource and wellspring of critique among young black Europeans. Their desire to find an exit from consumerism's triumphant phantasmagoria reveals them to be bereft, adrift without the guidance they would have absorbed, more indirectly than formally, from the national liberation movements of the cold war period and the struggles for both civil and human rights with which they were connected. Instead, an America-centred, consumer-oriented culture of blackness has become prominent. In this post-colonial setting, it conditions the dreams of many young Britons, irrespective of their ancestral origins or physical appearance. This brash and celebratory imperial formation is barely embarrassed by the geo-political fault-line that re-divides the world, opposing the overdeveloped north to the suffering south. That barrier provides the defining element in a new topography of global power which is making heavy demands upon the overwhelmingly national character of civil society and ideal of national citizenship. It is clear that the versions of black politics that belonged to the west/rest polarity will not adapt easily to this new configuration.

The recovery of ethics under neoliberalism requires a multiplicity of factors- not just governments- who can create overlapping spheres of justice to achieve a complex equality for the laboring power in America and elsewhere. The question remains whether the political sphere continues to be a vital force in the struggle for democratic rights beyond the human needs of hidden, exploited refugee and immigrant workers.

There is only one label worth fighting for, nay, not fighting for, that is “human”.

But on the ground in modern day, the gap-toothed border wall on the U.S. side was in the advanced stages of decay. It was an unsightly, rusted monstrosity, thoughtlessly imposing itself through the cacti masses who, until a few decades ago, had been peacefully congregating for millions of years along what was now an arbitrary line begging to be taken seriously.

The well-worn track was as straight as Gadsden’s ruler when the nineteenth-century U.S. diplomat had negotiated yet another strong-armed acquisition of Mexican territory to give Arizona its geometrically pleasing southern boundary. Pleasing on paper, anyway.

Literacy is a human right, an individual competence inextricable from social health. Access to it is a question of social justice, a nonnegotiable entitlement of citizenship. To say...that not everyone has to be a reader is different from saying that not everyone should be taught to read. Everyone has a fundamental right to learn to read. A society in which people are actively denied literacy, or a society that neglects literacy in wide segments of its population, has reason to be ashamed. If the ascendance of the written word may be imagined as a fall from the original paradise of oral culture, the labor with which we are tasked for that primal transgression is making the world of writing available to all comers. It is an enormous labor, requiring unflagging, communal commitment.

Our laws, regulations, rights, and citizenship are shaped by the belief that humans are fundamentally their own. So we have good reason to desire a political solution. If we resist the spirit of the city in our hearts and homes but passively permit its dominance in the political sphere, we cannot honestly say that we are glorifying God in the midst of the city. We are not living faithfully. We are not even really resisting the spirit of the city. We’re just trying to save ourselves.

Citizenship” in a Vietnamese village was personal and untransferable. In the past, few Vietnamese ever left their village in times of peace, for to do so was to leave society itself — all human attachments, all absolute rights and duties.

Some readers may wonder what is exactly meant when we are treated and evaluated as customers not as citizens. In short, it means that as customers, we are evaluated based on our income and spending power not based on our value as humans. In fact, referring to people as ‘customers’ or ‘consumers’ in most settings becomes precisely a way to deny those who cannot afford to pay for this or that service any basic human or citizenship rights.

In the struggle for this great end, nations rise from barbarism to civilization, and through it people press forward from one stage of enlightenment to the next. At many stages in the advance of humanity, this conflict between the men who possess more than they have earned and the men who have earned more than they possess is the central condition of progress. In our day it appears as the struggle of freeman to gain and hold the right of self-government as against the special interests, who twist the methods of free government into machinery for defeating the popular will. At every stage, and under all circumstances, the essence of the struggle is to equalize opportunity, destroy privilege, and give to the life and citizenship of every individual the highest possible value both to himself and to the commonwealth. That is nothing new. All I ask in civil life is what you fought for in the Civil War.

[W]e are asked to present or use our bank cards, gym cards, grocery store cards, work ID, and so on, a lot more than we use our state or government IDs. We rarely use our State IDs, unless we are in trouble or to prove that we are ‘legal’ or entitled to some meager benefits. Our existence in the system is measured by many different cards issued by corporate America. As a result, as soon as any card expires, you are denied entrance into places. You are valid only for as long as the expiration date on your credit card, the money you have in your bank account, or the expiration date of your gym membership/card. You become invisible in the society once your cards expire. You are nobody when you can no longer afford to renew your memberships of all these expensive corporate cards.

If we pay attention, it becomes clear that many people have already internalized seeing themselves as ‘customers’. For example, when some express their discontent with any government or corporate policies or services, they often demand changes as ‘taxpayers’ rather than as citizens. Is it implied in this language that those who do not (or cannot) pay taxes, albeit temporarily, have no rights to object as citizens? Is this why poor neighborhoods in America are usually run down and unsafe? If so, we must be careful about accepting this reality, because each one of us at any given point in our lives may be in a place where we may not be deemed as worthy consumers or taxpayers by the system. Seeing oneself as a customer is more about one’s income and payment to exist in the system than it is about their basic human rights or even their real value.

the very concept of citizenship in Israel is built upon the exclusion of Palestinians from the national Jewish collective. Threats of emptying Palestinian second-rate citizenship of any real political meaning and stripping them of basic human rights are constant. As the absolute “other,” Palestinians are always in danger of ethnic cleansing, as the state waits for an opportunity to arise. In contrast, Mizrahim are included in the Jewish national collective and receive full citizenship, even though they are positioned in the socioeconomic hierarchical structure as inferior to that of Ashkenazim. The difference between Mizrahim and Palestinians is essential.

I'm not going to Wichita,' Vladimir said, the word 'Wichita' rendered by his accent as the most foreign word imaginable in the English language. 'I’m going to live with Fran and it’s going to be all right. You’re going to make it all right.' But even as he was laying down the law, his hands were shaking to the point where it was hard to keep the shabby pay-phone receiver properly positioned between his mouth and ear. Teardrops were blurring the corners of his eyes and he felt the need to have Baobab hear him burst out in a series of long, convulsive sobs, Roberta-style. All he had wanted was twenty thousand lousy dollars. It wasn’t a million. It was how much Dr. Girshkin made on average from two of his nervous gold-toothed patients. 'Okay,' Baobab said. 'Here’s how we’re going to do it. These are the new rules. Memorize them or write them down. Do you have a pen? Hello? Okay, Rule One: you can’t visit anyone—friends, relatives, work, nothing. You can only call me from a pay phone and we can’t talk for more than three minutes.' He paused. Vladimir imagined him reading this from a little scrap of paper. Suddenly Baobab said, under his breath: 'Tree, nine-thirty, tomorrow.' 'The two of us can never meet in person,' he was saying loudly now. 'We will keep in touch only by phone. If you check into a hotel, make sure you pay cash. Never pay by credit card. Once more: Tree, nine-thirty, tomorrow.' Tree. Their Tree? The Tree? And nine-thirty? Did he mean in the morning? It was hard to imagine Baobab up at that unholy hour. 'Rule Five: I want you to keep moving at all times, or at least try to keep moving. Which brings us to…' But just as Rule Six was about to come over the transom, there was a tussle for the phone and Roberta came on the line in her favorite Bowery harlot voice, the kind that smelled like gin nine hundred miles away. 'Vladimir, dear, hi!' Well, at least someone was enjoying Vladimir’s downfall. 'Say, I was thinking, do you have any ties with the Russian underworld, honey?' Vladimir thought of hanging up, but the way things were going even Roberta’s voice was a distinctly human one. He thought of Mr. Rybakov’s son, the Groundhog. 'Prava,' he muttered, unable to articulate any further. An uptown train rumbled beneath him to underscore the underlying shakiness of his life. Two blocks downtown, a screaming professional was being tossed back and forth between two joyful muggers. 'Prava, how very now!' Roberta said. 'Laszlo’s thinking of opening up an Academy of Acting and the Plastic Arts there. Did you know that there are thirty thousand Americans in Prava? At least a half dozen certified Hemingways among them, wouldn’t you agree?' 'Thank you for your concern, Roberta. It’s touching. But right now I have other… There are problems. Besides, getting to Prava… What can I do?… There’s an old Russian sailor… An old lunatic… He needs to be naturalized.' There was a long pause at this point and Vladimir realized that in his haste he wasn’t making much sense. 'It’s a long story…' he began, 'but essentially… I need to… Oh God, what’s wrong with me?' 'Talk to me, you big bear!' Roberta encouraged him. 'Essentially, if I get this old lunatic his citizenship, he’ll set me up with his son in Prava.' 'Okay, then,' Roberta said. 'I definitely can’t get him his citizenship.' 'No,' Vladimir concurred. 'No, you can’t.' What was he doing talking to a sixteen-year-old? 'But,' Roberta said, 'I can get him the next best thing…

In the short term, as liberal economies floundered in the early 1930s, fascist economies could look more capable than democracies of performing the harsh task of reconciling populations to diminished personal consumption in order to permit a higher rate of savings and investment, particularly in the military. But we know now that they never achieved the growth rates of postwar Europe, or even of pre-1914 Europe, or even the total mobilization for war achieved voluntarily and belatedly by some of the democracies. This makes it difficult to accept the definition of fascism as a “developmental dictatorship” appropriate for latecomer industrial nations. Fascists did not wish to develop the economy but to prepare for war, even though they needed accelerated arms production for that. Fascists had to do something about the welfare state. In Germany, the welfare experiments of the Weimar Republic had proved too expensive after the Depression struck in 1929. The Nazis trimmed them and perverted them by racial forms of exclusion. But neither fascist regime tried to dismantle the welfare state (as mere reactionaries might have done). Fascism was revolutionary in its radically new conceptions of citizenship, of the way individuals participated in the life of the community. It was counterrevolutionary, however, with respect to such traditional projects of the Left as individual liberties, human rights, due process, and international peace. In sum, the fascist exercise of power involved a coalition composed of the same elements in Mussolini’s Italy as in Nazi Germany. It was the relative weight among leader, party, and traditional institutions that distinguished one case from the other. In Italy, the traditional state wound up with supremacy over the party, largely because Mussolini feared his own most militant followers, the local ras and their squadristi. In Nazi Germany, the party came to dominate the state and civil society, especially after war began. Fascist regimes functioned like an epoxy: an amalgam of two very different agents, fascist dynamism and conservative order, bonded by shared enmity toward liberalism and the Left, and a shared willingness to stop at nothing to destroy their common enemies.

Until the philosophy which holds one race superior and another inferior is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned; that until there are no longer first – and second-class citizens of any nation; that until the color of a man’s skin is of no more significance that the color of his eyes; that until the basic human rights are guaranteed to all without regard to race; until that day, the dream of everlasting peace and world citizenship and the rule of international morality will remain but a fleeting illusion to be pursued but never attained. And

Each belt buckle that German soldiers wore had embossed upon it 'Got Mitt Uns' (God Is With Us). Over the door of the courthouse in the Palace of Justice complex in Nuremberg were engraved the Ten Commandments. The group that established those commandments was precisely the group that was deprived of citizenship, human rights, and even life, under the laws promulgated in the name of that very city—the anti-Jewish Nuremberg Laws of 1935.

It was clear to the government that denying citizenship on the one hand, and not allowing independence on the other, condemned the inhabitants of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip to life without basic civil and human rights...The demographic fear that haunted Ben-Gurion -- a greater Israel with no Jewish majority -- was cynically resolved by incarcerating the population of the occupied territories in a non-citizenship prison.

Before 1967, Israel definitely could not have been depicted as a democracy. As we have seen in previous chapters, the state subjected one-fifth of its citizenship to military rule based on draconian British Mandatory emergency regulations that denied the Palestinians any basic human or civil rights.