Save the Humans?

Common Preservation in Action

Jeremy Brecher

• Publisher: PM Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781629638164
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Advocacy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

We the people of the world are creating the conditions for our own self-extermination, whether through the bang of a nuclear holocaust or the whimper of an expiring ecosphere. Today our individual self-preservation depends on common preservation—cooperation to provide for our mutual survival and well-being.

For half a century Jeremy Brecher has been studying and participating in social movements that have created new forms of common preservation. Through entertaining storytelling and personal narrative, Save the Humans? provides a unique and revealing interpretation of how social movements arise and how they change the world. Brecher traces a path that leads from the sitdown strikes on the pyramids of ancient Egypt through America's mass strikes and labor revolts to the struggle against economic globalization to today's battles against climate change.

Weaving together personal experience, scholarly research, and historical interpretation, Jeremy Brecher shows how we can construct a "human survival movement" that could "save the humans." He sums up the theme of this book: "I have seen common preservation—and it works." For those seeking an understanding of social movements and an alternative to denial and despair, there is simply no better place to look than Save the Humans?

PART 1

DISCOVERING SOCIAL PROBLEMS

1

DISCOVERING SOCIAL PROBLEMS

SOCIAL PROBLEMS ARE BY DEFINITION SHARED, BUT EACH OF US APPROACHES SHARED problems from an idiosyncratic personal starting point. As a child I became aware of some of the problems of society through my own and my family’s experiences with war, genocide, political repression, racism, environmental degradation, and oppressive labor.

I grew up in a family of educated professionals, first in a pleasant suburb of New York City, then in a rural area in northwestern Connecticut. My parents were writers who often worked together as a team. My father was a very secular Jew; my mother came from old stock Pennsylvania Dutch Calvinists and herself became a Quaker. My father had been a low-level staffer in the New Deal and had the politics of a left New Dealer; my mother was a pacifist and shared the social concerns for which Quakers are known. I had a loving family and a childhood filled with many joys.

But I was also born into a terrible time in history. The years immediately before and after my birth saw the Great Depression, the Second World War, the Holocaust, and Hiroshima.

As I see it now, these years marked the beginning of an era in which the efforts of individuals and groups for a better life were bound to be futile, indeed, likely to accelerate human self-destruction, unless they were part of a broader effort for common preservation. Consciousness of the necessity for common preservation has grown throughout that era, but it has come only fitfully and in fragments and is far from being implemented. Many of the problems I was discovering half a century ago not only remain with us today, but have become more threatening to our individual and common survival.

While I became aware of social problems at a tender age, I had little idea of what to do about them. I experienced the threat of nuclear war, or my father’s terrible job-related migraine headaches, as something that affected me as an individual, but that I had no way as an individual to affect.

The story I tell here represents a selection from among the immensely wider range of experiences of my childhood. Were I writing an autobiography, I would tell about my joy in running free in the world of nature, living in the bosom of a tiny community, and being encouraged by my family in all manner of exploration and inquiry. This is instead the story of how I became aware of problems requiring common preservation.

2

KISS YOUR ASS GOODBYE

IN THE PANTRY OF MY CHILDHOOD HOME HUNG A POSTER HEADED “WHAT TO DO IN the Event of Nuclear Attack,” and that’s how I first became aware of “social problems.” It was around 1952 and I was probably six. It was the height of the Cold War and we lived near New York City; nuclear war was a palpable threat. I remember my family planning what we would do in the event of nuclear attack: We had friends with a farm in Canada, and my parents said that if we were separated from each other we should all try to reassemble there.

At school in the early 1950s we had air raid drills. Sirens would sound and we would “duck and cover” under our desks. There were plenty of jokes among the kids about our instructions: “In the event of nuclear attack bend over, put your head between your legs, and kiss your ass goodbye.”

Such a blase attitude concealed the fact that my friends and I, like many of our contemporaries, took it for granted that we were likely to die in a nuclear war.¹1 certainly never expected to live beyond twenty or at most thirty if nuclear overkill continued to grow unabated.

In the mid-1950s,² Saturday Review editor Norman Cousins and others brought a group of victims of Hiroshima to the United States for plastic surgery. They were dubbed the Hiroshima Maidens. Two of them lived with my family one summer. Aka and Toyo’s faces and hands were hideously scarred from burns—no, more than scarred; it was as if the flesh had melted and then recongealed. It was difficult for a child to look at or accept, and Aka and Toyo were very shy, but we found the magic to transcend it all—Ping-Pong—and we became pals. The horror of nuclear war was not an abstraction for me, but something I had seen burned into human flesh.

I loved Picasso’s painting Guerniea, but I had no idea what it was about. When I asked my father, he explained that Guernica was a Spanish city that had been bombed by German airplanes during the Spanish Civil War, in the time leading up to World War II, and that the German military had used it as an opportunity to test their air force and bombing techniques.³ He explained how utterly horrified and outraged people around the world had been at the idea of bombing civilian populations from the air. Then he added that by 1944 the United States was doing the same thing on a massive scale over Dresden and other German cities.⁴ It was but a step from that to dropping atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

For me and my contemporaries, the threat of nuclear war was not something imaginary or distant. It was something you heard about on newscasts regarding Washington and Moscow and Bikini, but it was also as close as the family pantry and your desk at school. No doubt my own reaction to it was much influenced by my parents’ attitudes, but it was also a response to what I experienced. The threat of nuclear war was part of my reality. It led me to be aware of myself as someone directly affected by what went on in the larger world beyond my own home and community.

Nobody wanted a nuclear war. Yet the forces leading to it seemed inexorable. A few protested, but the Cold War nuclear arms race felt like a self-perpetuating process that was leading to human self-destruction without human intent. Each “side” armed itself out of fear of the other, but each arms buildup only increased the other side’s fear and made it act in ways that provoked still more fear. This out-of-control process produced fear but above all, despair. Although human beings set the policies and made the weapons, it was as if they were acting only as the puppets of inhuman forces that no one could control.

3

THIS WAY FOR THE GAS

ONE OF MY EARLIEST MEMORIES IS HEARING MY MOTHER TELL ME THE STORY OF TWO relatives of my father who agreed to kill each other rather than be taken to a concentration camp by the Nazis. The two elderly sisters shot each other as the Nazis were coming to their town to round up the Jews.¹

My parents were close to my father’s cousin Dr. George Brecher and his family, who had only managed to escape from Czechoslovakia as the Nazis marched in. They had fled to London. I was told that during the Blitz their daughter, my cousin, had reacted to the shock of the bombing by regressing to the point where she would only lie curled up in a fetal position.

I also heard about anti-Semitic bigotry closer to home. My father had been an honors student at Swarthmore and went to graduate school at Brown University. After a year or so of study, his senior professor asked him what his plans were. My father replied that he intended to get a PhD and become a professor of philosophy. His professor replied that he could pursue that course if he wished, but there was something he should know first. He then named the only three Jews in the entire United States who had appointments as professors of philosophy. My father dropped out of school that spring, never to return.

When my mother’s first husband died in a car crash, she decided to marry my father, who had been her lover in college. Her decision to marry a Jew caused an uproar. Her deceased husband’s family hired a lawyer and threatened to challenge her custody of her two children if she went through with the marriage. When she visited the distinguished professor who had been her mentor at Harvard, he advised her not to marry a Jew.

The extermination of six million Jews shaped my consciousness from an early age. I felt personally connected to tragedy and horror. I can still see the piles of bones in the Life magazine photos from the concentration camps. And I have never been able to see the world as stable and secure. The notorious horrors of the twentieth century shaped my expectations of what was normal. Millions of Americans appeared to go into shock over the assassination of John F. Kennedy and a generation later over the attacks on the World Trade Center, but to me these tragedies seemed like part of the normal way of the world.

The Nazis’ killing of six million Jews represented the deliberate enactment of evil on an awe-inspiring scale. But it also represented the acquiescence of a seemingly indifferent nation and people to that evil. You could imagine the ease with which apparently mild bigotry like that my parents had been subjected to in the United States could provide an atmosphere that might indulge the greatest of crimes. I sensed that without some kind of conscience or moral compass, apparently innocent people could become complicit in unimaginable crimes.

4

McCARTHYISM

IT MUST HAVE BEEN THE EARLY 1950S. I WAS PERHAPS SIX OR EIGHT AND WAS WITH MY mother, who was doing chores in the attic. This particular chore was covering a bright red album of 78 rpm records with a thick adhesive material called contact paper. The album was called Songs of the Red Army. I asked her why she was doing it. She told me that at one time the Russians, who had the Red Army, were fighting side by side with the Americans and were regarded as their friends. But right now things were different, and if people saw Songs of the Red Army when they came to our house they might get the wrong impression.

When I was a bit older, she told me that after her first husband—a rather conventional Harvard political science professor—died and she remarried, she had their old collection of academic books shipped to her new home near Washington, D.C. When she started to put Karl Marx’ Capital on the shelf, her new husband, who worked for the Federal Communications Commission, had looked at her in alarm. “You can’t put that out there!” “Why not?” “What if an FBI man walked in and saw it?” My mother told me that she had thought at the time, “Oh, my God, I’ve married a raving paranoid.” But the next week, sure enough, an FBI man showed up at the door for a surprise visit.

My parents were never Communists, but they moved in a left-wing milieu where some of their friends and associates were, and where many more were likely targets for charges of “disloyalty” in an era when dissent was often equated with treason. My father regarded it as a principle and a point of pride that he would not cut acquaintances when they came under attack or became dangerous to associate with. My mother believed that we children should be exposed to people who did not share mainstream opinions. I grew up knowing many people who had been victims of the red scare. Clifford Durr, a white Alabama lawyer who had been my father’s mentor at the FCC and later known as a hero of the civil rights movement, was red-baited out of one job after another. Ann and Maynard Gertler evacuated the United States to Maynard’s native Canada. The great Central Asian scholar Owen Lattimore coached me in my desperate attempt to pass high school French while describing how he had been taken in and cherished by scholars at the Sorbonne after being hounded out of government and academic positions in the United States. I’d rarely seen my father angrier than when a neighbor refused to shake hands with a visiting Alger Hiss after his release from prison.

I remember everyone gathered around the television—not only in our home but in many others—watching the Army-McCarthy hearings. In the midst of the to-me-incomprehensible proceedings, I remember my mother watching someone refuse to testify against acquaintances and saying, “That’s a very brave man.” I remember my parents coming home from a community forum arguing with neighbors about whether it was a violation of the right to freedom of association for someone to be compelled by a congressional committee to testify against associates.

We lived very much in an atmosphere of fear. After leaving Washington, my father had gone to work at the United Nations. A congressional committee headed by Senator William Jenner had started investigating “Communist infiltration” of the UN staff, and several associates of my father had been fingered in some way. I was never told the whole story, but I know my parents were waiting for the next shoe to drop. (I learned long after that the parents of my life partner, Jill Cutler, had been under the shadow of the same congressional investigation.) When, for a joke, my brother John listed The Daily Worker (which we had never seen) on a school questionnaire as the newspaper that his family read, my paren...