These people—the employed, the somewhat privileged—are drawn into alliance with the elite. They become the guards of the system, buffers between the upper and lower classes. If they stop obeying, the system falls.

But human beings are not machines, and however powerful the pressure to conform, they sometimes are so moved by what they see as injustice that they dare to declare their independence. In that historical possibility lies hope.

The stories coming out of Iraq everyday - the violence, the chaos, the deaths of Americans, the deaths of Iraqis... Of course the deaths of Iraqis are not played up as much. But when they count the corpses they see women and children. We are constantly killing the people who are suspected of something. Now, in the United States or under any decent system of justice, you don't kill people on suspicion. That's what you do when you bomb a house because there are suspected leaders there. But we've been doing that again and again and the result has been a toll of thousands of civilians.

The United States builds weapons presumably secretly, and then it sells them to other countries. So the whole business of secrecy is kind of a fake issue because hardly anything technological remains a secret for very long.

And in such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, as Albert Camus suggested, not to be on the side of the executioners.

If history is to be creative, to anticipate a possible future without denying the past, it should, I believe, emphasize new possibilities by disclosing those hidden episodes of the past when, even if in brief flashes, people showed their ability to resist, to join together, occasionally to win. I am supposing, or perhaps only hoping, that our future may be found in the past's fugitive movements of compassion rather than in its solid centuries of warfare.

If those in charge of our society - politicians, corporate executives, and owners of press and television - can dominate our ideas, they will be secure in their power. They will not need soldiers patrolling the streets. We will control ourselves.