Morris Schappes Quotes

the entire commercial press of our nation is not the "free" press it loudly claims to be that it is, rather, the principal means yet devised by the owners of the giant newspaper industry for dominating the public mind.

Words must be backed by deeds.

An active conscience is a formidable thing.

It helps one keep one's balance to remember that there are other important problems clamoring for action...just the other week one of my Negro neighbors had her brother come home, discharged from the Army for medical reasons. He told his sister something which helps me maintain a proper perspective and relative sense of values. Her brother had been stationed in Alabama. In this Army camp there was a group of war prisoners, Germans. On Saturday nights these German war prisoners, properly protected, of course, by guards, would be escorted to the Alabama town for an American Saturday night "in town." But the Negro troops stationed there were not allowed, either escorted or under their own power, to go to town in Alabama on a Saturday night. Since hearing this story I have been thinking that surely there is nothing that can be done to one man at Sing Sing, either in two years or a year and a half or in any time that you may commute the sentence to, that can be quite as vicious, quite as brutalizing, quite as demoralizing as that which almost a half million Negro soldiers face in the armed forces or that which so many millions face in civilian life that is not yet entirely civilized.

As Marxists, we stress the need of bringing the mask for privilege and the mask for frustration into their proper relationship. In this way the ruling class can be shown to be exploiting those it frustrates by diverting their resentment onto a scapegoat who is innocent of frustrating them and whose sacrificial slaughter, therefore, cannot release them from their frustration.

Anti-Semitism has become a major issue for the American people, and for all democratic mankind. In the pattern of imperialist reaction, anti-Semitism today looms ever larger, not only alongside of anti-Communism, anti-Sovietism, anti-unionism, anti-alienism, and anti-Negroism, but in a kind of special relationship to these other elements: Negroes, aliens, union men, the Soviets, and Communists are all in some degree tarred by reaction as Jewish or as the dupes of the Jews. Every reactionary movement today is itself anti-Semitic, or is allied with anti-Semites; on the other hand, the more consistent a progressive movement is, the more it makes the fight against anti-Semitism a prominent part of its program of action. No anti-Semite can be in any sense progressive now; no progressive can for any reason compromise with anti-Semitism.