MZ: Yeah. If we strive for justice and freedom, we must extend those goals to all living things. To ignore the ethical nightmare we call factory farming is being a "good German" in the truest sense.
FJS: Do you see any way either to reform or get rid of big-business agriculture?
MZ: Reform? No. Get rid of it? Absolutely. Stop participating in it, educate others about it, organize around the need to end it, and then smash it with everything we've got.
MZ: Control, I guess. It's much easier to control a homogenous culture.
FJS: Explain.
MZ: What better way to align yourself with some factions of the masses than to divide those masses based on ethnicity, gender, sexual preference, etc.? There's a reason why this is the oldest trick in the book: it works like a charm almost every time.
FJS: What is so important about the wild?
MZ: What we call the wild is usually what things looked like before we embraced "civilization" and what good has civilization ever done in the name of peace, health, freedom, justice, and solidarity?
FJS: You're a pretty radical dude, as am I but radicalism can imbue almost anything, and nowadays the term is often conflated with terrorism, regressive extremism, Right-ulp(!)-wingism and religious fundamentalism, etc & c" But there's also a very progressive, exciting and beneficial side to being a certain kind of radical. Explain.
MZ: The Latin origin of the word "radical" is the same as for the word "root," so I subscribe to that interpretation. Radical, for me, means bypassing the surface impressions and digging deep to the root of"well, everything.
Two "radical" quotes that inspire me:
Lenin sez: "Be as radical as reality."
MLK sez: "When you're right, you can never be too radical."
FJS: You wrote a book back in 2005 titled 50 American Revolutions You're Not Supposed to Know: Reclaiming American Patriotism. Without giving away too much about the book, care to expound on a couple of those revolutions?
MZ: That was the only book (of 10 and counting) that I was asked to write so it was, at first, a challenge to match visions. Once we settled in, I was able to blend well-known characters and episodes (Thoreau, Betty Friedan, Stonewall, etc.) with lesser-known, but more radical events like Lolita Lebron and others shooting up Congress in the name of Puerto Rican independence, American Indians occupying Alcatraz Island, and American soldiers switching sides in the Mexican-American War. Something must've clicked because it's by far my biggest seller.
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