Somehow, on the crucial matters, the men of wealth and power and privilege make the decisions

of life and death for everybody else, and that's not democracy.

They decide who lives and dies.

This is sound of Howard Zinn, the well-known author of a People's History of the United

States.

Zinn, who died in 2010, would have been 100 today.

So to raise a glass, we're revisiting a historic speech that he gave.

It's from a 1969 protest in Boston against the Vietnam War, one of the largest ever

in the city's history.

Over 100,000 people had gathered on Boston Common, a park downtown on October 15th, for

the moratorium to end the war in Vietnam.

This moratorium was a country-wide protest in which 2 million people took part in demonstrations,

teachings, and other actions in over 200 cities.

At this time, Zinn was teaching political science at Boston University, and had released a book

called Snick, The New Abolitionists, based on his own experience in the radical student

movement, and had more recently published another book called Disobedience and Democracy.

It was recorded in broadcast by WBCN, kind of legendary music and alternative news station,

and just keep in mind the age of the tape, the sound is a little crunchy, and the first

few sentences are missing.

But for some basic context, this was in the middle of the war, it had been escalating ever

since the Johnson Administration had sent in US troops in 1965.

In at this stage, there was basically no end in sight.

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