University of Virginia Library

Legislator Julian Bond Warns Of Totalitarian State In U.S.

By Barry Levine
Cavalier Daily Staff Writer

Lashing out against the Nixon
Administration, Georgian legislator Julian
Bond warned Sunday night that the
nation is fast becoming a totalitarian
state.

"As in 1984," he said, "large segments
of the population are becoming so
accustomed to oppression that they are
no longer shocked by it."

He said that the first steps toward the
totalitarian state are the destroying of
privacy and the subversion of the English
language.

'Freedom,' for example, doesn't mean
what we were taught it meant in grade school,"
he said. "It means instead killing the
Vietnamese in order to make them free. It
means destroying villages in order to free them.

"It means arming fascist dictatorships in
Greece and Cambodia in order to free the
Greek and Cambodian people. Freedom now
means exploiting people and whole continents
in the name of free trade.

"Peace doesn't mean what it used to mean,"
he continued. "It now means vast preparations
for nuclear war."

Mr. Bond told the crowd of approximately
1200 people that many different approaches
have been used to solve the problems that have
existed for blacks since they first came to
America.

"Presidents ... have tried New Frontiers," he
said, "they have tried Great Societies, and now
they are trying New Federalism. Officials of the
Nixon Administration tell us that 'benign
neglect' is the best approach - in other words
they say progress can be made faster if we do
nothing, and the Administration is trying to
prove that thesis by doing even less than that."

He said that "nothing" means "a failure to
take steps to protect black people from police
brutality and police state tactics ... to make
legal the standard police practice of no-knock
and preventive detention that have been the
staples of repressive law-enforcement since the
beginning of time. President Nixon has
increased that kind of brutality."

He also charged that the Nixon
Administration is failing to push for the
desegregation of public schools. "Richard
Nixon's Department of Injustice," he said,
"fights court battles for Southern racists, and
presents for the first time the sorry spectacle of
the Attorney General of the state of Mississippi
and the Attorney General of the United States
arguing on the same side.

"Richard Nixon," he continued, "has urged
dissenters to 'lower their voices,' but
encourages his vice-president to shout his verbal
bombasts and pseudo-pornographic political
obscenities even louder.

"The Administration," he remarked, "says it
wants law and order in the black community,
but believes it's fine for the little tyrant who
runs the Federal Bureau of Investigation to use
legal wiretapping to intimidate us.'

Contending that taking care of the business
of the nation does not mean violence by those
who seek change, Mr. Bond said that the violent
outbreaks that have occurred are reflections of
the greater society.

"It is violent and criminal," he said, for
black children to get a poor education. He
added that it was also "criminal" for blacks to
compose a disproportionate share of the
Vietnam casualties, making blacks" first in war,
last in peace, and seldom in the hearts of our
countrymen.

"But it is even more violent," he continued,
"for [some of America's young people] to
show more interest in music, in drugs, in the
romantic rhetoric of revolution, the ennobling
sacrifice of self-enforced poverty, than in the
very real problems of human existence that
afflicts so many poor people in this country.

"The rhetoric of the last 20 years of black
struggle has to be transformed into action," he
said.

"We can't afford 20 more years of preaching
that the hour is late. The hour, in fact, is now.

"We can't afford the luxury of warning that
this is the eleventh hour; it's bean past midnight
since Richard Nixon rose from the dead," he
said.

In a question and answer period following
his speech, Mr. Bond came out in favor of a
volunteer army, and said that the current
student apathy after last spring's strike is the
result of a "turning inward" on the part of
many that may be "defeating" and turn them
away from the situation of others.

Responding to a question as to whether
busing should be used to desegregate the
schools, Mr. Bond noted that busing was not
new, and that its use is acceptable if "no one is
bussed inordinately long distances," and if the
buses run two ways.

Mr. Bond was one in a series of speakers to
be presented by the University Union, and his
speech will be broadcast over WTJU (91.3 FM)
tomorrow, 8 to 10 p.m.

Legislator Julian Bond And University Professor Joseph Washington, Jr.

He Said Sunday That Americans Are Growing "Accustomed To Oppression."