"I prefer to make common cause with those whose weapons are guitars, banjos, fiddles and words"
About this Quote
It is a quietly militant line: Bikel doesn’t reject “weapons” so much as he repurposes them. By calling guitars and banjos weapons, he borrows the vocabulary of conflict to argue that culture is where power really gets exercised. The phrase “common cause” signals coalition, not performance - he’s aligning himself with a collective struggle, the kind waged in movements where songs travel faster than speeches and where a lyric can smuggle courage into a room that’s afraid.
The subtext is a rebuttal to the macho romance of violence. Bikel, an actor and folk singer with a life threaded through 20th-century upheavals (a Viennese-born Jewish refugee, a performer in the postwar folk revival, a political activist), is making an identity claim: my side fights, but we fight with stories, harmony, language. There’s also a knowing acknowledgment that “soft” tools aren’t soft at all. Words can recruit, expose, shame, dignify; music can turn private grief into public unity. If guns enforce obedience, songs coordinate feeling - and coordinated feeling becomes action.
What makes the line work is its strategic humility. He doesn’t announce himself as a hero; he chooses to “make common cause,” a phrase with labor-movement and civil-rights DNA. The list of instruments is plain, almost domestic, which sharpens the contrast: everyday objects become instruments of resistance. Bikel’s intent isn’t pacifism-as-innocence; it’s pacifism-as-method, a belief that persuasion and solidarity can be more disruptive than force.
The subtext is a rebuttal to the macho romance of violence. Bikel, an actor and folk singer with a life threaded through 20th-century upheavals (a Viennese-born Jewish refugee, a performer in the postwar folk revival, a political activist), is making an identity claim: my side fights, but we fight with stories, harmony, language. There’s also a knowing acknowledgment that “soft” tools aren’t soft at all. Words can recruit, expose, shame, dignify; music can turn private grief into public unity. If guns enforce obedience, songs coordinate feeling - and coordinated feeling becomes action.
What makes the line work is its strategic humility. He doesn’t announce himself as a hero; he chooses to “make common cause,” a phrase with labor-movement and civil-rights DNA. The list of instruments is plain, almost domestic, which sharpens the contrast: everyday objects become instruments of resistance. Bikel’s intent isn’t pacifism-as-innocence; it’s pacifism-as-method, a belief that persuasion and solidarity can be more disruptive than force.
Quote Details
| Topic | Music |
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