Word: berrigans
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...Berrigan: I have never been able to look upon myself as a criminal and I would feel that in a society in which sanity is publicly available I could go on with the kind of work which I have always done throughout my life. I never tried to hurt a person. I tried to do something symbolic with pieces of paper. We tend to overlook the crimes of our political and business leaders. We don't send to jail Presidents and their advisers and certain Congressmen and Senators who talk like bloodthirsty mass murderers. We concentrate obsessively and violently...
...Berrigan: Well, that subject came out very acutely at our trial; the judge and the prosecution asked me that same question. How would we feel about people invading our offices and burning our files? And our answer was very simple: if that was done, the people who did it should also present their case before the public and before the judiciary and submit themselves to what we went through...
...Berrigan: Well, it seems to me what we have got to discover is whether nonviolence is an effective force for human change. The Klansmen, as I understand it, have been rather violent over the years; so their methods are not ours...
...Berrigan: Well, I look upon the Weatherman as a very different phenomenon because I have seen in them very different resources and purposes. I believe that their violent rhythm was induced by the violence of the society itself -and only after they struggled for a long time to be nonviolent. I don't think we can expect young people, passionate young people, to be indefinitely nonviolent when every pressure put on them is one of violence-which I think describes the insanity of our society. And I can excuse the violence of those people as a temporary thing...
...Berrigan: O.K. Well, let's agree to differ on that, maybe from the point of view of a certain risk that I am willing to take in regard to those young people -a risk that I would be much less willing to take in regard to something as long-term as the Klan. But there is always danger in taking these risks, and the only way in which I can keep reasonably free of that danger is by saying in public and to myself that the Weatherman ideology (for instance) is going to meet up with people...