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A PAGE OF QUOTATIONS |
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"To announce that there must be NO criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President Right or Wrong, is not only UNPATRIOTIC and SERVILE, but is Morally TREASONABLE to the American Public." Former Republican President, Theodore Roosevelt
- John Swinton - New York Times - New York Press Club
-Russian saying (Russia has two well-known "newspapers", Pravda and Izvestia. Pravda means "truth," and Izvestia means "news.")
- Walter Lippmann
- Rod Serling
- Joseph Pulitzer
- Richard Salant
- Alexander Solzhenitsyn
"Qualities of a moral order are measured by deeds." "When the governing class isn't chosen for quality it is chosen for material wealth : this always means decadence, the lowest stage a society can reach." LINDBERGH, CHARLES. 20th c. American aviator, writer. Wednesday, August 23, 1939 We are disturbed about the effect of the Jewish influence in our press, radio and motion pictures. It may become very serious. [Fulton] Lewis told us of one instance where the Jewish advertising firms threatened to remove all their advertising from the Mutual system if a certain feature were permitted to go on the air. The threat was powerful enough to have the feature removed. Thursday, May 1, 1941 The pressure for war is high and mounting. The people are opposed to it, but the Administration seems to have 'the bit in its teeth' and is hell-bent on its way to war. Most of the Jewish interests in the country are behind war, and they control a huge part of our press and radio and most of our motion pictures. There are also the 'intellectuals' and the 'Anglophiles,' and the British agents who are allowed free rein, the international financial interests, and many others. (The Wartime journals)
"We were always a pretty informal group, but we eventually noticed that we no longer had any management. At first it was kind of scary, but as long as our paychecks continued we decided that not having a manager offered some significant benefits--no meetings, no reports, no timecards; it was great! In fact, our productivity actually increased, but that was probably just due to our enhanced morale." --John Smedly, explaining what happened after his group was accidently "detached" from the official org. charts.
"There is only one thing in this world, and that is to keep acquiring money and more money, power and more power. All the rest is meaningless." -Napoleon Bonaparte
"If there ever was in the history of humanity an enemy who was truly universal, an enemy whose acts and moves trouble the entire world, threaten the entire world, attack the entire world in any way or another, that real and really universal enemy is precisely Yankee imperialism." -Fidel Castro Cuban leader and Communism supporter
"The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter." -Winston Churchill
"He who allows oppression, shares the crime." -Erasmus Darwin
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws." -Tacitus
- Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason, 1794
-"The Requirement", read by Spaniards to native tribes they encountered in the New World
"Israel may have the right to put others on trial, but certainly no one has the right to put the Jewish people and the State of Israel on trial," - Ariel Sharon
"I want to tell you something very clear, don't
worry about American pressure on Israel, we, the Jewish people control
America, and the Americans know it." -Ariel Sharon to Shimon Peres, October 3rd, 2001, as reported on Kol Yisrael radio.
"No free man shall ever be de-barred the use of
arms. The strongest reason for the people to retain their right to keep
and bear arms is as a last resort to protect themselves against tyranny in
government." -Thomas Jefferson
"The state.... must see the sword as the main if not the only, instrument with which to keep its morale high and to retain its moral tension. Toward this end it may no it MUST invent dangers, and to do this it must adopt the method of provocation and revenge.... And above all, let us hope for a new war with the Arab countries so that we may finally get rid of our troubles and acquire our space." - Diary of Moshe Sharett, Israeli's first Foreign Minister from 1948-1956, and Prime Minister from 1954-1956.
"If the American people ever allow private
banks to control the issue of their money, first by inflation and then by
deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them
(around the banks), will deprive the people of their property until their
children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers
conquered." -Thomas Jefferson
"There is nothing more difficult to plan, more
doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to manage than the creation of a
new system. For the initiator has the enmity of all who would profit by
the preservation of the old system and merely lukewarm defenders in those
who would gain by the new one." -- Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince, 1513
"Man is the missing link between apes and human
beings. -- Konrad Lorenz, Nobel Laureate
"A man's work is nothing but this slow trek to
rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and
simple images in whose presence his heart first opened. -- Albert Camus
"We are unconcerned but not indifferent. -- Inscription on Man Ray's gravestone
-- John Sheehan, S.J. (a Jesuit priest)
" We have a political system that awards office
to the most ruthless, cunning, and selfish of mortals, then act surprised
when those those willing to do anything to win power are equally willing
to do anything with it. " --Michael Rivero
"An elective despotism was not the government we fought for." --Thomas Jefferson
"Degrees do not matter... one does not bargain about inches of evil." ---Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
Mundus Vult Decepi - The World Wants to be Deceived
-- Louis Brandeis, Supreme Court Justice from 1916-1939
" I wonder when the lies will stop and truth
begin, even as grim as the truth may be. And then I remember that for 70
years, the reign of terror in Russia called itself "the people's
government." We have so far to fall, yet we are falling fast and Hell
yawns to receive us. " --Jim McMichael
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free."
"A public that hears only praise and no criticism will predictably answer "yes" to pollsters who ask whether the President is doing a good job."
"If I were reincarnated, I would wish to be returned to earth as a killer virus to lower the human population levels.."
"If the truth is that ugly -- which it is -- then we do have to be careful about the way that we tell the truth. But to somehow say that telling the truth should be avoided because people may respond badly to the truth seems bizarre to me."
‘Let us pray in this hour that nothing can divide
us, and that God will help us against the Devil! Almighty Lord, bless our
fight!’ "The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth becomes the greatest enemy of the State."
"The great masses of people will more easily fall victims to a big
lie than to a small one. Especially if it is repeated over and over."
"Oh Mortal Man, is there nothing you cannot be made to believe?"
"Don't be deceived when they tell you things
are better now. Even if there's no poverty to be seen because the
poverty's been hidden. Even if you ever got more wages and could afford to
buy more of these new and useless goods which industries foist on you and
even if it seems to you that you never had so much, that is only the
slogan of those who still have much more than you. Don't be taken in when
they paternally pat you on the shoulder and say that there's no inequality
worth speaking of and no more reason to fight because if you believe them
they will be completely in charge in their marble homes and granite banks
from which they rob the people of the world under the pretence of bringing
them culture. Watch out, for as soon as it pleases them they'll send you
out to protect their gold in wars whose weapons, rapidly developed by
servile scientists, will become more and more deadly until they can with a
flick of the finger tear a million of you to pieces."
"It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder."
"Find out just what the people will submit to,
and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will
be imposed upon them; and these will continue until they are resisted with
either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed
by the endurance of those whom they oppress."
``The [government] must put the most modern medical
means in the service of this knowledge.... Those who are physically and
mentally unhealthy and unworthy must not perpetuate their suffering in the
body of their children.... The prevention of the faculty and opportunity
to procreate on the part of the physically degenerate and mentally sick,
over a period of only 600 years, would ... free humanity from an
immeasurable misfortune.'' ``The per capita income gap between the developed
and the developing countries is increasing, in large part the result of
higher birth rates in the poorer countries.... Famine in India, unwanted
babies in the United States, poverty that seemed to form an unbreakable
chain for millions of people--how should we tackle these problems?.... It
is quite clear that one of the major challenges of the 1970s ... will be
to curb the world's fertility.''
"Whenever the legislators endeavor to take away
and destroy the property of the people, or to reduce them to slavery under
arbitrary power, they put themselves into a state of war with the people,
who are thereupon absolved from any further obedience..."
If this were a dictatorship, it'd be a heck of a lot
easier, just so long as I'm the dictator.
"If Blair and Bush are up for the peace prize Guiliani, Bin Laden, Kissinger & Sharon can't be far behind. I wish they'd change the name of the award to something like "merchants of death prize" or "best mass murders award" or "guy that made the most bucks for killing the most poor people, most cruelly prize" Then everybody would start cheering for their favorite. How about "best liar who says, "What Me Murder? " It's a shame Hitler is not still alive (though he probably wouldn't win)."
"He who establishes his argument by noise and command shows that his reason is weak."
"...not all of us Third World countries dwellers sleep our nights away dreaming to become AMERICA. We would do much better if her and her friends kept their hands out of cookie jar."
" If you cannot tell the difference between
divine intervention and random stupidity, then there is for all intents
and purposes no divine intervention." -- Michael Rivero
"I never would have agreed to the formulation
of the Central Intelligence Agency back in '47, if I had known it would
become the American Gestapo. " -- Harry S Truman (1961)
"Since Jesus, Moses and Abraham (peace be upon
them all) were not European, would they be escorted off planes if alive
today. --Imam Abdul Malik on the subject of racial profiling.
" He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power: "He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:: "For depriving us in many cases of the benefits of Trial by Jury:" -- Declaration Of Independence: Thomas Jefferson
"There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root."
Do not fear the enemy, for your enemy can only take
your life. It is far better that you fear the media, for they will steal
your HONOR. That awful power, the public opinion of a nation, is created
in America by a horde of ignorant, self-complacent simpletons who failed
at ditching and shoemaking and fetched up in journalism on their way to
the poorhouse. -
"It is the duty of the patriot to protect his country from its government." -- Thomas Paine
"Knowledge makes a man unfit to be a
slave."
"They don’t ... deserve the same guarantees and safeguards that would be used for an American citizen going through the normal judicial process." — VICE PRESIDENT DICK CHENEY
Your failure to be informed, does not make me a wacko. -- John Loeffler
The honest man must be a perpetual renegade, the life of an honest man a perpetual infidelity. For the man who wishes to remain faithful to truth must make himself perpetually unfaithful to all the continual, successive, indefatigable renascent errors. -- Charles Peguy
"Let the Jews, who claim to be the chosen race,
prove their title by choosing the way of non-violence for vindicating
their position on earth."
"There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws." --Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged, Ch. III, "White Blackmail"
"A woman is confronted by a big, strong, stranger. She doesn't know what he's planning, and she's cautious. Getting away from him is not possible. They're in a room and he's standing in front of the only way out, or she's in a wheelchair - whatever. Leaving the area is not an option. So now he starts to do things she doesn't like. He asks her for money. She can try to talk him out of it, just like we argue for lower taxes, and maybe it will work. If it doesn't, and she gets outvoted, she'll probably choose to give to give it to him instead of getting into a fight to the death over ten dollars. You would probably choose to pay your taxes rather than have the police arrive to throw you in jail. Maybe this big man demands some other things, other minor assaults on this women's dignity. When should she claw at his eyes or shove her ballpoint pen in his throat? When he tries to force her to kiss him? Tries to force her to let him touch her? Tries to force her to have sex with him?" Henry took a deep breath and shrugged. "Those are questions that each woman has to answer for herself. There is one situation, though, where I tell women to fight to the death. That's when the man pulls out a pair of handcuffs and says, 'Come on, I promise I won't hurt you, this is just so you won't flail around and hurt either of us by accident. Come on, I just want to talk, get in the van and let me handcuff you to this eyebolt here, and I promise I won't touch you. I'm not asking you to put on a gag or anything, and since you can still scream for help, you know you'll be safe. Come on, I got a full bar in here, and color TV, and air-conditioning, great stereo, come on, just put on the cuffs.' "I tell women that if that ever happens, maybe the man is telling the truth, and maybe after talking to her for a while he'll let her go and she will have had a good time drinking champagne and listening to music. But if she gets in the van and puts her wrists in the handcuffs, she has just given up her future ability to fight, and now it is too late." Henry realized he had been making eye contact with all the other people in the lecture hall, just as he did when he taught a course. Now he looked directly at the professor. "How do you spot the precise point where a society is standing at the back of the van and the State has the handcuffs out?" "Trust me", sayeth the government. --John Ross' Unintended Consequences pages 337 and 338
"The first rule is to keep an untroubled spirit. The second is to look things in the face and know them for what they are." --Marcus Aurelius
"Necessity is the plea of every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves." -- William Pitt
"Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" "Who watches the watchmen?" -- Juvenal, Satires, VI, 347
'No question that an admission of making false statements to government
officials and interfering with the FBI is an impeachable offense.'
Vulgas vult decepi - the (common) people wish to be decieved. 'I did not have sex with that woman [Monica Lewinsky].'
"The United States is not nearly so concerned that its acts be kept secret from its intended victims as it is that the American people not know of them." -–U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark
"Authoritarian government required to speak, is silent...Representative government required to speak, LIES with impunity". -- Napoleon Bonaparte
"The seizing or detaining, and threatening to kill, injure, or continue to detain, another individual in order to compel a third person (including a governmental organization) to do or abstain from doing any act as an explicit or implicit condition for the release of the individual seized or detained." or "A violent attack upon an internationally protected person (as defined in section 1116(b)(4) of title 18, United States Code) or upon the liberty of such a person." -- Official US Department of State definition of a terrorist.
"A government that neither trusts nor respects its own people cannot trust or respect other nations. What is the domestic policy of enslavement today must be the foreign policy of conquest tomorrow. -- Michael Rivero
"Such as it is, the press has become the greatest power within the Western World, more powerful than the legislature, the executive and judiciary. One would like to ask: by whom has it been elected, and to whom is it responsible?" --Alexander Solzhenitsyn
"The real advantage which truth has, consists in this, that when an opinion is true, it may be extinguished once, twice, or many times, but in the course of ages there will generally be found persons to rediscover it, until some one of its reappearances falls on a time when from favorable circumstances it escapes persecution until it has made such head as to withstand all subsequent attempts to suppress it." --John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (1859)
"If ye love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquility of servitude greater than the animating contest for freedom, go home from us in peace. We seek not your counsel nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you. May your chains set lightly upon you; and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen." --Samuel Adams
"Scerrorism: Terrorism of a population by the media, carried out by reporting acts of terror that might happen but never actually do." -- Bonny Stilwell
" There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all arguments and which can not fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance--that principle is contempt prior to investigation." -- Herbert Spencer
"I’m not sure we can ever satisfy the federal government’s insatiable appetite for more power." — REP. ROBERT L. BARR JR. (R-GA.)
"A little sunlight is the best disinfectant." —U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis
"Ye shall know the Truth, And the Truth shall make you angry!" —Aldous Huxley
"Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people, who have a right and a desire to know; but besides this, they have a right, an indisputable, unalienable, indefeasible, divine right to know that most dreaded and envied kind of knowledge, I mean of the characters and conduct of their rulers." —John Adams
"Let me now warn you in the most solemn manner. Observe good faith and justice toward all nations. Cultivate peace and harmony with all. The Nation which indulges toward another an habitual hatred or an habitual fondness is in some degree a slave. It is a slave to its animosity or to its affection, either of which is sufficient to lead it astray from its duty and its interest." —President George Washington, Farewell Address, 1796
"Enlighten the people generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day." –Thomas Jefferson
"Violence does not and cannot exist by itself; it is invariably intertwined with the lie." —Alexander Solzhenitsyn, convicted for writing, accepting Nobel Prize. He survived Stalinist genocide that massacred tens of millions of Russians (USA's ally with Pakistan's military dictatorship for invading Afghanistan and establishing a coup d'etat against the US CIA freedom fighters of Osama bin Laden and Taliban, for benefit of King Shah in October 2001).
"The US Vice-President, Dick Cheney, revealed in a television interview over the weekend that President George Bush had given an order last Tuesday for the military to shoot down any civilian aircraft that disregarded instructions from air traffic control and appeared to be a threat. The fourth hijacked plane, United Airlines Flight 93 from Newark to San Francisco, was thought to be on its way to Washington but crashed in rural Pennsylvania following some kind of altercation between the hijackers and a group of passengers determined to thwart their plans. The rumors that this plane was shot down are based on the fact that debris was found up to eight miles from the crash site, that one of the passengers talking on a mobile phone reported hearing an explosion and seeing a plume of white smoke in the cabin, and that eyewitnesses saw a second aircraft in the sky at the time of the crash." —The Independent, London, England, September 20,
2001
"The President, Vice-President, and all civil officers of the United States, shall be removed from office on impeachment for, and conviction of, treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors." —Constitution of the United States
"These sectors of the doctrinal system serve to divert the unwashed masses and reinforce basic social values: passivity, submissiveness to authority, the overriding virtue of greed and personal gain, lack of concern for others, fear of real or imagined enemies, etc. The goal is to keep the bewildered herd bewildered." —Dr. Noam Chomsky, from What Uncle Sam Really
Wants
"We stare at TV screens and try to comprehend the suffering in the aftermath of terrorism. At the same time, we're witnessing an onslaught of media deception. Silence, rigorously selective, pervades the media coverage of recent days. ABC News analyst Vincent Cannistraro helped to put it all in perspective for millions of TV viewers. Cannistraro was in charge of the CIA's covert aid to Afghan guerrillas. In other words, Cannistraro has a long history of assisting terrorists—first, Contra soldiers who routinely killed Nicaraguan civilians; then, mujahedeen rebels in Afghanistan ... like Osama bin Laden. How can a longtime associate of terrorists now be credibly denouncing "terrorism?" It's easy. All that's required is for media coverage to remain in a kind of history-free zone that has no use for any facets of reality." —Norman Solomon, Creators Syndicate, September 13,
2001
"We are on the verge of a global transformation. All we need is the right major crisis and the nations will accept the New World Order. " --David Rockefeller
“The citizen who sees his society’s democratic clothes being worn out and does not cry it out, is not a patriot, but a traitor.” --Mark Twain
"The legal right of an individual to decrease or ALTOGETHER AVOID his/her taxes by means which the law permits cannot be doubted". --Gregory v. Helvering, 293 U.S. 465
"It does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority keen to set brush fires in people's minds." -- Samuel Adams
"I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies... if the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of currency...the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent that their fathers conquered." - --Thomas Jefferson
"War is the public agenda for the hidden desires of a private elite" --Bodazey
"If the New World Order agenda is not realized by the terrorist attacks on America and if American's don't agree to give up their weapons and relinquish their sovereignty to the New World Order, the next attack will be the use of chemical, biological and/or atomic warfare against the American people. The architects of the New World Order will not hesitate to use as a last resort an atomic or hydrogen bomb in a major American city." --Reference Op Ed page of the New York Times 9/24/01
"No matter what political reasons are given for war, the underlying reason is ALWAYS economic." -- A.J.P.Taylor, British Historian
“You see, when a nation threatens another nation the people of the latter forget their factionalism, their local antagonisms, their political differences, their suspicions of each other, their religious hostilities, and band together as one unit. Leaders know that, and that is why so many of them whip up wars during periods of national crisis, or when the people become discontented and angry. The leaders stigmatize the enemy with every vice they can think of, every evil and human depravity. They stimulate their people’s natural fear of all other men by channeling it into a defined fear of just certain men, or nations. Attacking another nation, then, acts as a sort of catharsis, temporarily, on men’s fear of their immediate neighbors. This is the explanation of all wars, all racial and religious hatreds, all massacres, and all attempts at genocide.” --Taylor Caldwell, "The Devil’s Advocate" (1952) - pg. 299
“Freedom, once so embedded in the hearts of all Americans, was surrendered by Americans who believed the sinister men who were determined to enslave them. It was to be for a limited time only, we were assured. But tyrants never relinquish the powers they have gained; they incorporate them into perpetual law. It was done so quietly, so skillfully. A nation will fight when its full liberty is threatened, and the full plot exposed. But if liberties are subdued, little by little, no provocation for a nationwide revolt is given. Like thieves in the night, who move stealthily and without sound, so did the evil men move in your former free government, robbing away the heart and the body of your liberty, denuding your homes of its treasures, slowly stifling your tongues, imperceptibly silencing your press. They invaded the schoolrooms of your children, poisoning and debasing their minds, twisting them to their purposes so that future generations would know nothing of honor or pride and the might of free men. But you were not guiltless. “Do not believe that this was just a plot in America. It started far back in history, in 1917, with the Bolshevik revolution. Like the black plague of the soul, it seeped into Germany, into Scandinavia, into Britain, into France, into South America and Asia and Africa. It was a nightmare and deathly disease with many names. It was called Fascism and Communism, People’s Democracies and Socialism, the Welfare State and totalitarianism and authoritarianism. In America, it was called Progressive Democracy. (NOTE: The most recent book I’ve read i.e., 1990 - calls it Democratic Socialism.) But it was the same foul disease that blinded and sickened a whole world, and made the whole world slave. It was the same abominable illness of the spirit, the same madness, that plunged an entire planet into endless wars and degradation and despair. It had for its object the unlimited power of a few men, working together in every nation even while they were ostensibly enemies, and even while their respective nations were engaged in combat against each other. “There was no quarrel among these arch-devils of death and ruin; there was only complete understanding. They knew that man cannot be enslaved in a peaceful society, prosperous and full of ambition and hope. So they plotted wars with each other; they blew away the natural resources of the earth, for their wars, which were not against each other, but against their own people. They outlawed God, for a people staunch in their faith will not renounce their liberties and they will not engage in wars. But you, the people of America, were not guiltless of all this. “We, in America, were not guiltless. For decades, we saw the disease spreading in Europe and Asia, and many of us knew when the infection had reached our own country. But too many of us were greedy; we saw opportunities for individual gain and profit if we supported the emerging tyrants in Washington. Tyrants are so full of pleasant promises; they are so skillful in false suspicions, false hatreds, false envies, and natural human greed. When we Americans should have stood together, defying with our votes and our voices and our anger each tyrant as he appeared, we turned our innate and instinctive jealousies and dislikes upon our neighbors. We betrayed each other. The disease entered our souls, and we sold our honor for a handful of silver, whether we were workingmen or capitalists, farmers or bankers, bureaucrats or clerks, industrialists or shopkeepers. “...In the first years of this century (now the last century) Americans were free and prideful and independent. We were an ambitious people, and any social injustices were being slowly but steadily eliminated. We were a kind and generous people, guardful of our liberties. But, after 1917, the black plague spread over Europe, and we were infected long before 1939, when a new and deliberately plotted war broke out. We were infected in the very halls of Congress, in the very inmost chambers of Washington. The disease was already in our flesh, and its foul breath was already in the mouths of our children, and its cries were ringing in every schoolroom, every college, decades before we were plunged into this series of wars which have lasted over twenty years. We were a diseased nation long before we were slaves. We were impotent before we knew we were impotent. “God has had mercy upon us, though we have committed monstrous sins against each other as well as against the world. God has brought us to this day, (in the story, America has just re-won its freedom after a long dictatorship) though we are not worthy of it. For many years, He has stimulated the hearts and the souls of a few free and just men, who have worked among you, unknown to you. He gave them a lash with which to arouse you. He gave them words to awaken you. He gave them courage to deliver up their lives for you, though you were not worthy of it. You betrayed them to your oppressors and your tyrants, but still they loved you. You called them ‘traitors’ and ‘subversives,’ when they cried out to you that the walls of your nation were tumbling into the seas of tyranny and death. When they warned you on the day religion was turned against religion, and race against race, in America, you laughed at them and denounced them as ‘dividers of the country.’ When they cried to you that States Rights were being abrogated, you shouted ‘Unity!’ at them, and beat them down, and silenced them. When they exposed the causes of wars to you, and the plot against you in those wars, you jeered at them with such epithets as ‘isolationists’ or ‘pacifists.’ While you still had a measure of liberty and could vote vile tyrants and corrupt men out of office, you listened, instead, to the promises of those men, and you voted honorable and decent men out of office. “But still, God had mercy on you, and did not abandon you. He gave you the Minute Men of the United States of America. They were your neighbors, and you did not know it. They spoke to you furtively, and you did not know who they were. You lifted yourselves in your chains, and heard the words of life and liberty and saw the glimmer of the sun again. You did not know who called to you in your despair and your agony. And you would not have listened had you not been reduced to hopeless slaves... “...I would not have you deceive yourselves. The battle is not entirely won. At least half of the Armed Forces are with us, and a portion of the Picked Guards. But the others will resist you. ‘Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered.’ Your courage and your faith must sustain you for many months. Attempts will be made to delude you, to lead you again into slavery, to confuse and divide you. Your enemies are still alive, and still full of hate for you. They have been momentarily silenced, at your command. They will speak again. “We are a free nation, tonight, and in the name of our freedom we cannot silence our enemies. The very opportunity we are giving them will damn them in your own ears. They will betray themselves to you with their own voices. Or, if they choose not to speak in this hour of peril for themselves, they will withdraw to plot against you again. But you are armed. You know who your enemies are. “Working together, we can restore this nation, and restore the peace and the liberties of all other nations. A whole world listens to us tonight. With patience and with justice, with mercy and with knowledge, we must work slowly and with enlightenment, for there is so much to be done. “...Tonight there will be issued by me a directive to the commanders of our Armed Forces on all battlefields to call an immediate truce, and to negotiate an armistice. Within a few hours all fighting will stop, and the guns will be silenced, and the war planes will retire. Your sons shall be returned to you as speedily as possible, and there shall be no more war. “As of tonight, all work on war orders shall cease. Plans will be made to convert all war plants to the making of civilian goods. All conscripted labor laws are abrogated at once. During the period of reconversion from war to peace your former employers will pay you full wages. When work is resumed, hours of labor shall not exceed forty hours a week, under any circumstances, unless by consent of the employed. All rationing ceases as of midnight... “All confiscated private property shall be restored to the former owners, and those who confiscated that property, with or without the consent of the State, shall pay back rentals for the periods the property has been at their disposal. “All labor camps shall be disbanded tomorrow, the inmates furnished with food and with transportation to their former homes. All children shall be returned to their parents. All political prisoners everywhere shall be freed. “Orders are being prepared at this moment to wrest power from the Military and return it to civilian authority. The Military, at midnight, shall be recalled from private homes where they have been quartered and payments shall be later adjudicated to those who gave the Military involuntary hospitality. “As of tonight, the Military has no authority whatsoever, no powers, no directives...Any officer or soldier attempting violence against the people of America shall be judged insubordinate, and shall be punished...I, the Commander-in-Chief of all the Armed Forces, now call upon all officers and all soldiers and all military men of any designation to retire to their barracks and lay down their arms... “We have so much work to do, my dear friends, my dear fellow-countrymen. The ruin of decades cannot be cleared away in a day, a month, a year, or years. It will be a long and slow and sometimes bitter progress and sometimes disheartening. But, we can do it. We can rebuild our cities and restore our streets and prepare good homes for all of us. This will take much time, and we shall need all the patience and faith we can summon up... “...You, the people of the United States of America are in command of your nation. Take that command. Restore your cities and your churches. Speak of God again, freely, and teach your children, and your children’s children, of His mercy. Never let them forget this day of their deliverance, and never let them forget the men who died and worked that they might be free, that peace might live with them again, and the promise of the centuries might be fulfilled in them. “Teach your children to be brave. This century of ours has been marked most conspicuously by cowardice of the people everywhere. It was by our cowardice that we were betrayed into the hands of corrupt men who promised to make life ‘safe’ for us and devoid of hazard, and robbed the adventurousness by which the spirits of men are strengthened. It was by our poltroonery that we lost our liberties. It was by our fears that we almost died. A brave people never become slaves. “If we, the people of the United States of America, again lose our freedom it will be by our own lack of courage and faith and manhood. “Tonight States’ Rights are restored. Guard those rights as you would guard your lives. They were intended for just that purpose. A centralized government is a centralized evil. “On the day when you again allow abominable men to confiscate your freedom, your money, your lives, your private property, your manhood and your sacred honor, in the name of ‘security’ or ‘national emergency’ you will die, and never again shall you be free. If plotters again destroy your Republic, they will do it by your greedy and ignorant assent, by your disregard of your neighbors’ rights, by your apathy and your stupidity. We were brought to the brink of universal death and darkness because we had become that most contemptible of people - an angerless one. Keep alive and vivid all your righteous anger against traitors, against those who would abrogate your Constitution, against those who would lead you to wars with false slogans and cunning appeals to your patriotism. “For, remember, if you die in prison, you will have built that prison. If your sons are again conscripted, you will have penned the writ. If a company of malignant men again assumes control of your lives, you will have given them that control... “Always, the people are responsible for wicked lawmakers, oppressors, exploiters, criminals in government, tyrants in power, thieves, liars, malefactors and murderers in the capitals of the world. You, the man in the street, the man in the factory and in the shop, the man on the farm, the man in the office, you, the man everywhere, are guilty of the creatures whose crimes against you have been so monstrous, and will be again, by your own consent - if you give it... “...A wise man distrusts his neighbor. A wiser man distrust both his neighbor and himself. The wisest man of all distrusts his government. Therefore, be watchful and sleepless; be brave, be strong; be without fear. This is not the end. Villains will try, again and again and again, to enslave you, until the end of time. It is in your hands to defeat them and to destroy them, whenever or however they appear. “If you do not, then may God have mercy on your souls!” --Taylor Caldwell, "The Devil’s Advocate" (1952) - pgs. 332 - 338
"It's really not a number I'm terribly interested in." --General Colin Powell [When asked about the number of Iraqi people who were slaughtered by Americans in the 1991 "Desert Storm" terror campaign (200,000 people!)]
"I will never apologize for the United States of America - I don't care what the facts are." --President George Bush 1988 [Bush was demonstrating his patriotism by excusing an act of cold-blooded mass-murder by the U.S. Navy. On July 3, 1988 the U.S. Navy warship Vincennes shot down an Iranian commercial airliner. All 290 civilian people in the aircraft were killed. The plane was on a routine flight in a commercial corridor in Iranian airspace. The targeting of it by the U.S. Navy was blatantly illegal. That it was grossly immoral is also obvious. Except to a patriot.]
"To maintain this position of disparity (U.S. economic-military supremacy)... we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming.... We should cease to talk about vague and... unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standard and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts.... The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better." --George Kennan [Director of Policy Planning U.S. State Department 1948]
"If they turn on the radars we're going to blow up their goddamn SAMs (surface-to-air missiles). They know we own their country. We own their airspace... We dictate the way they live and talk. And that's what's great about America right now. It's a good thing, especially when there's a lot of oil out there we need." --U.S. Brig. General William Looney (Interview Washington Post, August 30, 1999) [Referring, in reality, to the brutal mass-murder of hundreds of civilian Iraqi men, women and children during 10,000 sorties by American/British war criminals in the first eight months of 1999]
"The greatest crime since World War II has been U.S. foreign policy." --Ramsey Clark [Former U.S. Attorney General under President Lyndon Johnson]
"I believe that if we had and would keep our dirty, bloody, dollar soaked fingers out of the business of these [Third World] nations so full of depressed, exploited people, they will arrive at a solution of their own. And if unfortunately their revolution must be of the violent type because the "haves" refuse to share with the "have-nots" by any peaceful method, at least what they get will be their own, and not the American style, which they don't want and above all don't want crammed down their throats by Americans." --General David Sharp [Former United States Marine Commandant 1966]
"We have no honorable intentions in Vietnam. Our minimal expectation is to occupy it as an American colony and maintain social stability for our investments. This tells why American helicopters are being used against guerrillas in Colombia and Peru. Increasingly the role our nation has taken is the role of those who refuse to give up the privileges and pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investment." --Martin Luther King, Jr. ["A Time to Break the Silence" speech given at Riverside Church New York City April 4, 1967]
"Death squads have been created and used by the CIA around the world - particularly the Third World - since the late 1940s, a fact ignored by the elite-owned media." --Ralph McGehee [Former CIA analyst & Author] CIABASE; The Crisis of Democracy Deadly Deceits: My 25 years in the CIA
"The U.S.A. has supplied arms, security equipment and training to governments and armed groups that have committed torture, political killings and other human rights abuses in countries around the world." --Amnesty International ["United States of America - Rights for All" October 1998]
"We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated Governments in the world - no longer a Government of free opinion, no longer a Government by conviction and vote of the majority, but a Government by the opinion and duress of small groups of dominant men." --Woodrow Wilson [U.S. President during World War I]
"We must become the owners, or at any rate the controllers at the source, of at least a proportion of the oil which we require." -- British Royal Commission, agreeing with Winston Churchill's policy towards Iraq, 1913
"What we want to have in existence, what we ought to have been creating in this time is some administration with Arab institutions which we can safely leave while pulling the strings ourselves; something that won't cost very much, which the Labour government can swallow consistent with its' principles, but under which our economic and political interests will be secure. [.....] If the French remain in Syria we shall have to avoid giving them the excuse of setting up a protectorate. If they go, or if we appear to be reactionary in Mesopotamia, there is always the risk that [King] Faisal will encourage the Americans to take over both, and it should be borne in mind that the Standard Oil company is very anxious to take over Iraq." -- Sir Arthur Hirtzel, Head of the British government's 'India Office Political Department.' 1919
"Every time we do something you tell me America will do this and will do that . . . I want to tell you something very clear: Don't worry about American pressure on Israel. We, the Jewish people, control America, and the Americans know it." - Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, October 3, 2001.
"Israel controls the United States Senate." - Sen. William Fulbright "If war aims are stated which seem to be solely concerned with Anglo-American imperialism, they will offer little to people in the rest of the world. The interests of other peoples should be stressed. This would have a better propaganda effect." -- Private memo from The Council of Foreign Relations to the US State Department, 1941
"Our strategic and security interests throughout the world will be best safeguarded by the establishment in suitable spots of 'Police Stations', fully equipped to deal with emergencies within a large radius. Kuwait is one such spot from which Iraq, South Persia, Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf could be controlled. It will be worthwhile to go to considerable trouble and expense to establish and man a 'Police Station' there." -- British Foreign Office, policy memo, 1947
'We have about 60% of the world's wealth but only 6.3% of its' population. In this situation we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity. We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world benefaction. We should cease to talk about such vague and unreal objectives as human rights, the raising of living standards and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better." -- George Kennan, former Head of the US State Department Policy Planning Staff, Document PPS23, 24th February 1948
"I came to America because of the great, great freedom which I heard existed in this country. I made a mistake in selecting America as a land of freedom, a mistake I cannot repair in the balance of my lifetime." --Albert Einstein, 1947
"Strikes at population targets (per se) are likely not only to create a counterproductive wave of revulsion abroad and at home, but greatly to increase the risk of enlarging the war with China and the Soviet Union. Destruction of locks and dams, however - if handled right - might offer promise. It should be studied. Such destruction does not kill or drown people. By shallow-flooding the rice, it leads after time to widespread starvation (more than a million) unless food is provided - which we could offer to do 'at the conference table'." -- John McNaughton, US State Department Vietnam policy, as quoted in 'The Mentality of the Backroom Boys.' Article by Noam Chomsky, 1973
"The US must carry out some act somewhere in the world which shows its' determination to continue to be a world power." -- Henry Kissinger, post-Vietnam blues, as quoted in The Washington Post, April 1975
"It would not have been possible for a political party to be more committed to a national home for the Jews in Palestine than was Labour." -- Harold Wilson, former British Labour Party Prime Minister, 1981
"One hundred nations in the UN have not agreed with us on just about everything that's come before them, where we're involved, and it didn't upset my breakfast at all." -- Ronald Reagan, former US President, basking in the triumph that was the US invasion of Grenada, 1983
Q. "Mr. President, have you approved of covert
activity to destabilize the present government of Nicaragua?" -- Ronald Reagan, former US President, Washington press conference, February 13th, 1983, as quoted by John Pilger in 'Heroes'
"After seeing 'RAMBO' last night, I know what to do the next time this happens." -- Ronald Reagan, former US President, as reported by Daily Express, July 2nd, 1985
"Aerosol DU (Depleted Uranium) exposures to soldiers on the battlefield could be significant with potential radiological and toxicological effects. [...] Under combat conditions, the most exposed individuals are probably ground troops that re-enter a battlefield following the exchange of armour-piercing munitions. [...] We are simply highlighting the potential for levels of DU exposure to military personnel during combat that would be unacceptable during peacetime operations. [...DU is..]... a low level alpha radiation emitter which is linked to cancer when exposures are internal, [and] chemical toxicity causing kidney damage. [...] Short term effects of high doses can result in death, while long term effects of low doses have been linked to cancer. [...] Our conclusion regarding the health and environmental acceptability of DU penetrators assume both controlled use and the presence of excellent health physics management practices. Combat conditions will lead to the uncontrolled release of DU. [...] The conditions of the battlefield, and the long term health risks to natives and combat veterans may become issues in the acceptability of the continued use of DU kinetic penetrators for military applications." -- Excerpts from the July 1990 Science and Applications International Corporation report: ' Kinetic Energy Penetrator Environment and Health Considerations', as included in Appenix D - US Army Armaments, Munitions and Chemical Command report: 'Kinetic Energy Penetrator Long Term Strategy Study, July 1990' These documents state clearly and equivocally that the US army was well aware of the radioactive and toxic dangers of Depleted Uranium ammunition long before the first shots of the war were fired.
"We do not have any defence treaties with Kuwait, and there are no special defence or security commitments to Kuwait." -- Margaret Tutweiller, US State Department spokeswoman, 24th July 1990, nine days before Iraq's invasion of Kuwait
"The more individuals capable of watching the world theater calmly and critically, the less danger of monumental mass stupidities - first of all, wars." Hermann Hesse: Author (1877-1962)
"Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn't mean politics won't take an interest in you." -- Pericles, 430 BC
"If one acknowledges a group or a nation willing to commit atrocities, then one must also acknowledges the existance of a nation willing to commit atrocities to blame on the first nation." -- Michael Rivero
"War doesn't fall out of the clear sky. Like every other human undertaking, it requires preparation; to make it a possibility and then a reality, the care and cooperation of many are needed. It is desired, prepared for, and proposed by those men and powers who stand to gain by it. Either it brings them direct cash profit, as in the case of armaments industry (and as soon as war breaks out, how many previously harmless industries become war industries, and how automatically money flows their way!), or it brings them advantage in the form of prestige, respect, and power, as in the case of unemployed generals and colonels." Hermann Hesse: Author (1877-1962)
"Once a government resorts to terror against its own population to get what it wants, it must keep using terror against its own population to get what it wants. A government that terrorizes its own people can never stop. If such a government ever lets the fear subside and rational thought return to the populace, that government is finished." --Michael Rivero
"My instinct as an individualist and artist has always warned me most urgently against this capacity of men for becoming drunk on collective suffering, collective pride, collective hatred, and collective honor. When this morbid exaltation becomes perceptible in a room, a hall, a village, a city, or a country, I grow cold and distrustful; a shudder comes over me, for already, while most of my fellow men are still weeping with rapture and enthusiasm, still cheering and venting protestations of brotherhood, I see blood flowing and cities going up in flames." Hermann Hesse: Author (1877-1962)
--Secretary of Defense William Cohen at an April 1997 counterterrorism conference sponsored by former Senator Sam Nunn
-- 1975 Trilateral Commission Report on the Governability of Democracies
"There is a systematic plan to use the concepts of war to rearrange the chess pieces on the world playing board. It has to do with the New World Order, Globlism and the attack on national sovereignty we are seeing. Occasionally, the globalists who want One World Government have to turn to war to accelerate things." -- Joel Skousen
--former NBC news prez Rubin Frank
-- Richard Salent, Former President CBS News.
-- Michael Rivero
--Motto of the Mossad
-- Adolf Hitler ``The per capita income gap between the developed
and the developing countries is increasing, in large part the result of
higher birth rates in the poorer countries.... Famine in India, unwanted
babies in the United States, poverty that seemed to form an unbreakable
chain for millions of people--how should we tackle these problems?.... It
is quite clear that one of the major challenges of the 1970s ... will be
to curb the world's fertility.''
HISTORY is just new people making old mistakes...
-- General Douglas MacArthur
--Carl von Clausewitz
-- A Psychological Warfare Casebook Operations Research Office Johns Hopkins University Baltimore (1958)
--Abraham Lincoln
--Rudyard Kipling
-- Sun Tzu
Just as every dead soldier marks the eternal repetition of an error, so truth must eternally be repeated in a thousand forms. -- Hermann Hesse - Author (1877-1962)
"Weapons often turn upon the wielder,
We may have to resort to arms in the future, as we have in the past. We may have to use them to prevent atomic war from being launched against us. But let us have the wisdom to realize that the use of force is a sign of weakness on a higher plane, and that a policy based primarily on recourse to arms will sooner or later fail." -- Charles Lindbergh, Of Flight and Life, 1948
-- Michael Rivero
"Today Americans would be outraged if U.N. troops entered Los Angeles to restore order; tomorrow they will be grateful. This is especially true if they were told there was an outside threat from beyond, whether real or promulgated, that threatened our very existence. It is then that all peoples of the world will plead with world leaders to deliver them from this evil. The one thing every man fears is the unknown. When presented with this scenario, individual rights will be willingly relinquished for the guarantee of their well being granted to them by their world government." -- Henry Kissinger speaking at Evian, France, May 21, 1992 Bilderburgers meeting. Unbeknownst to Kissinger, his speech was taped by a Swiss delegate to the meeting.
"We tell the people what they need to know, what they want to know." -- Frank Sesno, CNN "News"
"Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear-kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor-with the cry of grave national emergency. Always there has been some terrible evil at home or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it ..." -- General Douglas MacArthur, 1957
"History is a joke played by the victors on the vanquished in front of an audience that dares not laugh." -- Michael Rivero
"I am strongly in favor of using poisoned gas against uncivilized tribes. The moral effect should be good...and it would spread a lively terror.... " -- Winston Churchill commenting on the British use of poison gas against the Iraqis after World War I
"... somehow we find it hard to sell our values, namely that the rich should plunder the poor." -- former Secretary of State John Foster Dulles
"The crimes of the U.S. throughout the world have been systematic, constant, clinical, remorseless, and fully documented but nobody talks about them. " -- Harold Pinter
"If there has to be a blood-bath [of our own youth], let's get it over with." -- Ronald Reagan, Governor of California during the Vietnam War
"History is the history of war -- of leaders of countries finding reasons and rationales to send the young people off to fight." -- John Stockwell, former CIA official and author
"Former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,
Adm. William J. Crowe Jr. was part of the crew that sold Saddam Hussein
the deadly means to wage war with anthrax germs. That's when the United
States wanted the 'Butcher of Baghdad' to use anthrax on Iran."
"There exists a shadowy Government with its own
Air Force, its own Navy, its own fundraising mechanism, and the ability to
pursue its own ideas of national interest, free from all checks and
balances, and free from the law itself."
I like to think of myself as a patriot, but even more so as a man. Where the two disagree, I say the man is right. -- Hermann Hesse - Author (1877-1962)
Confused? Having difficulty telling the good guys from the bad guys? Use this handy guide to differences between Terrorists and the U.S. Government: TERRORISTS: Supposed leader is the spoiled son of a powerful politician, from extremely wealthy oil family US GOVERNMENT: Supposed leader is the spoiled son of a powerful politician, from extremely wealthy oil family TERRORISTS: Leader has declared a holy war ('Jihad')
against his 'enemies'; believes any nation not with him is against him;
believes god is on his side, and that any means are justified. TERRORISTS: Supported by extreme fundamentalist
religious leaders who preach hatred, intolerance, subjugation of women,
and persecution of non-believers TERRORISTS: Leadership was not elected by a majority
of the people in a free and fair democratic election TERRORISTS: Kills thousands of innocent civilians,
some of them children, in cold blooded bombings TERRORISTS: Operates through clandestine
organization (al Qaeda) with agents in many countries; uses bombing,
assassination, other terrorist tactics TERRORISTS: Supposed leader has extensive financial
ties to Supposed leader of US GOVERNMENT TERRORISTS: Supposed leader invested heavily in US
bio-chemical companies TERRORISTS: Using war as pretext to clamp down on
dissent and undermine civil liberties Anon
"Americans don't need to lie to themselves.
That's what the government is for!"
"We [the U.S.] has over 200 incidents in which we have put our troops into other countries to force them to our will." -- John Stockwell, former CIA official and author
"Why of course the people don't want war. Why should some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally, the common people don't want war: neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But after all it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship ... Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger." -- Leading Nazi leader, Hermann Goering, at the Nuremberg Trials before he was sentenced to death
-- Michael Rivero
"Just who are these goddamn reds, anyway? A goddamn red is anyone who wants 30 cents when I am paying 25." -- John Steinbeck, "The Grapes of Wrath"
"The American oligarchy increasingly has less in common with the American people than it does with the equivalent oligarchies in Germany or Mexico or Japan." -- Lewis Lapham, editor of Harpers
"I can make careful use of the intelligence at Israel's disposal to identify, locate and kill...with minimal loss of innocent life, by such means as booby-trapping their telephones, rocketing their cars and offices, etc. In a word, assassinate them. Sounds good to me. "...hold a trial with the help of witnesses similarly abducted from the Palestinian territories. If necessary it (Israel) should apply physical pressure to these witnesses..." -- Israeli columnist Hillel Halkin, writing in the Wall Street Journal, August 28, 2001, p. A14. The term "physical pressure" means use of torture.
"If the world operates as one big market, every employee will compete with every person anywhere in the world who is capable of doing the same job. There are lots of them and many of them are hungry." -- Andrew Grove, president of Intel Corp., in his book "High Output Management"
"[Nationalism is] a set of beliefs taught to each generation in which the Motherland or the Fatherland is an object of veneration and becomes a burning cause for which one becomes willing to kill the children of other Motherlands or Fatherlands." -- Howard Zinn, historian
"The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them." -- George Orwell, writer
"Terrorists are just Freedom Fighters pointed
back at us."
"The agony and moral anguish that ought to accompany an act of mass killing -- yes, even in a war [the Gulf War against Iraq in 1991]-- seemed wholly absent from American culture." -- Ruth Rosen, history professor
"Indonesia plays a key role in maintaining regional stability. It is a leader in ASEAN and is a fundamental force for peace and prosperity ... We did not have a discussion about East Timor." -- Secretary of Defense William Cohen at a press conference, January 1998, after meeting with Indonesian President Suharto who is responsible for the deaths of 500,00 - 1,000,000 following his US-sanctioned coup against Indonesian President Sukarno in 1965, and the deaths of 200,000 during Indonesia's US-sanctioned invasion and occupation of East Timor in 1975
" Scare the hell out of the American people." -- Senator Arthur Vandenburg, telling President Truman what the he needed to do in order to tax the American people to pay for the weapons and covert activities of the US National Security State that was being planned, to destroy the Russian Communist State
"The men who possess real power in this country have no intention of ending the cold war." -- Albert Einstein
"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep
the populace alarmed and hence, clamorous to be led to safety - by
menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them
imaginary"
" Everyone likes to say Hitler did this" and "Hitler did that". But the truth is Hitler did very little. He was a world class asshole, but the evil actually done, from the death camps to WW2 was all done by citizens who were afraid to question if what they were told by their government was the truth or not, and who because they did not want to admit to themselves that they were afraid to question the government, refused to see the truth behind the Reichstag Fire, refused to see the invasion by Poland was a staged fake, and followed Hitler into national disaster. " It's easy to look back and realize what a jerk Hitler was. But at the time, Hitler looked pretty good to the world, with the help of the media. He was TIME Magazine's Man Of The Year in 1938. Stalin was TIME Man Of The Year for 1939 and 1942. The lesson is that it isn't easy to spot a genocidal tyrant when you live with one, especially one whom the press supports and promotes. Tyrants become obvious only when looking back, after what they have done becomes known. " It is the very nature of power that it attracts the very sort of people who should not have it. The United States, as the world's last superpower, is a prize that attracts men and women willing to do anything to win that power, and hence are willing to do anything with it once they have it. It is racist to assume that tyrants appear only in other nations and that somehow America is immune simply because we're Americans. America has escaped the clutches of a dictatorship only through the efforts of those citizens who, unlike the Germans and Russians of the 1930s, have the moral courage to stand up and point out where the government is lying to the people." -- Michael Rivero
-- Michael Rivero
"No triumph of peace can equal the armed triumph of war." "In strict confidence ...I should welcome almost any war, for I think this country needs one." -- Theodore Roosevelt
"There is no regime to reactionary for us provided it stands in Russia's expansionist path. There is no country too remote to serve as the scene of a contest which may widen until it becomes a world war." -- Henry Wallace, Vice-President under Franklin Roosevelt 1941-1945
"The only way to abolish war is to make peace heroic." -- John Dewey
"War is a quarrel between two thieves too cowardly to fight their own battle; therefore they take boys from one village and another village, stick them into uniforms, equip them with guns, and let them loose like wild beasts against each other." -- Thomas Carlyle
" Any dictator would admire the uniformity and obedience of the (U.S.) media." -- Noam Chomsky
"The U.S. will not permit constructive programs in its own domains, so it must ensure that they are destroyed elsewhere to terminate " the threat of a good example". -- Noam Chomsky
"Patriotism is the last resort of scoundrels." -- Samuel Johnson
"Patriotism is the principle that will justify the training of wholesale murderers." -- Leo Tolstoy
" We Americans claim to be a peace-loving people. We hate bloodshed; we are opposed to violence. Yet we go into spasms of joy over the possibility of projecting dynamite bombs from flying machines upon helpless citizens." " Conceit, arrogance, and egotism are the essentials of patriotism." " When a child has reached manhood, he is thoroughly saturated with the belief that he is chosen by the Lord himself to defend his country against the attack or invasion of any foreigner. It is for that purpose that we are clamoring for a greater army and navy, more battleships and ammunition." " The people are urged to be patriotic ... by sacrificing their own children. Patriotism requires allegiance to the flag, which means obedience and readiness to kill father, mother, brother, sister." " The experience of every-day life fully proves that the armed individual is invariably anxious to try his strength. The same is historically true of governments. Really peaceful countries do not waste life and energy in war preparations, with the result that peace is maintained." " The powers know that the people at large are like children whose despair, sorrow, and tears can be turned into joy with a little toy. ... An army and navy represents the people's toys." -- Emma Goldman
" ... the operative principles dictating U.S. support and hostility in the Third World have been business criteria first, military convenience second, and any humanistic considerations third and thus effectively irrelevant. In fact, they are less than irrelevant -- they are in conflict with the first two criteria, and therefore ... humanizing forces [become] "threats". " "The immiseration of the majority is an integral part of the Free World package for the Third World, the unsavory aspects of the package -- the terror, the direct spoilation of people and resources, and western complicity -- must be rationalized and, as far as possible, kept under the rug." " ... there is a system of terroristic states -- the real terror network -- that has spread throughout Latin America and elsewhere over the past several decades, and which is deeply rooted in the corporate interest and sustaining political-military-financial propaganda mechanisms of the United States and its allies in the Free World." -- Edward Herman
" What history truly records is the inherent irresponsibility of all despotisms and the almost inevitable corruption of all forms of government that are not subject to the control of the people ..." -- Brazilian church statement
" The economy is doing fine, but the people aren't." -- General Emelio Medici, head-of-state of Brazil, 1971
" We enjoy the economic stability that the Armed Forces guarantee us. This [economic] plan can be fulfilled despite its lack of popular support. It has sufficient political support .. that provided buy the Armed Forces." -- Martinez de Hoz, financial minister of the Argentina military government, 1976
Latin America -- quotes from survivors "For four months I was heavily tortured by the Army in Rio de Janeiro, and then in the Naval Information Center.... Near death, I was taken to the hospital for the sixth time. The beatings had been so severe that my body was one big bruise. The blood clotted under my skin and all the hair on my body fell out. They pulled out all my fingernails. They poked needles through my sexual organs and used a rope to drag me across the floor by my testicles. Right afterwards they hung me upside down. They hung me handcuffed from a grating, removed my artificial leg, and tied my penis so l could not urinate. They forced me to stand on my one leg for three days without food or drink. They gave me so many drugs that my eardrums burst and I am impotent. They nailed my penis to a table for 24 hours. They tied me up like a pig and threw me into a pool so that I nearly drowned. They put me in a completely dark cell where I remained for 30 days urinating and defecating in the same place where I had to sleep. They fed me only bread soaked in water. They put me in a rubber box and turned on a siren. For three days I neither ate nor slept and I nearly went mad...." -- Manuel de Conceicao, peasant leader in Brazil He was arrested in 1972 and brought before Brazilian security police who had been schooled at US army bases in the latest methods of counterinsurgency and interrogation. He was tortured by Brazilian army units -- trained and equipped by US military-aid programs.
A young Salvadoran deserted the Salvadoran army and fled to Mexico. His story was published in The Other Side magazine, 1982 Part of his training by eight American Green Berets consisted of "teaching how to torture." He witnessed a boy of about fifteen, suspected of supporting the guerrillas, being subjected to a demonstration torture by the Green Berets They tore out the youth's fingernails, broke his elbows, gouged out his eyes, and then burned him alive. The author reports that the torture sessions continued into the next day and included a thirteen year-old girl. Another victim had various parts of his body burned and was then taken up in a helicopter while still alive and thrown out at 14,000 feet. The defector noted that "often the army goes and throws people out over the sea." (The editors of The Other Side withheld the Salvadoran informant's name "for obvious reasons" but claimed that "the basic outline of his story has been corroborated by independent sources which we believe to be reliable.")
"They tell how the Chilean military -- trained and financed by the United States -- tortured people with electric shock, particularly on the genitals; forced victims to witness the torture of friends and relatives (including children); raped women in the presence of other family members; burned sex organs with acid or scalding water; placed rats in women's vaginas and into the mouths of other prisoners; mutilated, punctured, and cut off various parts of the body, including genitalia, eyes, and tongue; injected air into women's breasts and into veins (causing slow, painful death); shoved bayonets and clubs into the vagina or anus, causing rupture and death." --Victims and survivors of the fascist coup in Chile in 1973
'My name is Rigoberta Menchu Tum. l am a representative of the "Vincente Menchu" [her father] Revolutionary Christians ... On 9 December 1979, my 16-year-old brother Patrocino was captured and tortured for several days and then taken with twenty other young men to the square in Chajul ... An officer of [President] Lucas Garcia's army of murderers ordered the prisoners to be paraded in a line. Then he started to insult and threaten the inhabitants of the village who were forced to come out of their houses to witness the event. I was with my mother, and we saw Patrocino; he had had his tongue cut out and his toes cut off. The officer jackal made a speech. Every time he paused the soldiers beat the Indian prisoners. When he finished his ranting, the bodies of my brother and the other prisoners were swollen bloody, unrecognizable. It was monstrous, but they were still alive. They were thrown on the ground and drenched with gasoline. The soldiers set fire to the wretched bodies with torches and the captain laughed like a hyena and forced the inhabitants of Chajul to watch. This was his objective-that they should be terrified and witness the punishment given to the "guerrillas". -- Rigoberta Menchu Tum, awarded the 1992 Nobel Peace Prize
"Four men came in, bearing a cot with a sheet-covered figure. "Sit down," one ordered. "You're going to see a performance by a bad actor, an actor who has forgotten his part. Help him remember it." They uncovered a body entirely purple, missing a foot. "Come closer," another ordered. "Look at him. You'll know him." And she did. It was 27-year-old "El Gordo" Toledo, with whom she had been 20 days before. He could hardly speak, or scream, any more. When Elba maintained that she did not know him, they said, "Let's see"-they pulled out his nails, cut off his remaining ear, cut out his tongue, gouged out his eyes, and killed him slowly as she watched, thinking, "He could be my son." Then they brought another "actor," 26-year-old Eduard Munoz. It took them five hours to kill him, under her eyes. It was worse than any pain they could have inflicted on her, she said. Later she was forced to watch while her cellmates-aged 16, 17, and 40, nude and drugged, were directed to perform an erotic dance before they were raped. Another girl, back from a dreaded torture center, and pregnant, was so crazy that each time she awoke she screamed that her only desire was for her child to be born so she could kill it." -- Elba Vergara, secretary to President Allende (himself murdered by the Chilean generals),
"Rosa had her breasts cut off. Then they cut into her chest and took out her heart. The men had their arms broken, their testicles cut off, and their eyes poked out They were killed by slitting their throats and pulling the tongue out through the slit." -- A survivor of a raid by US-backed Contras in Nicaragua in the 1980s
The actor Richard Burton once wrote an article for the New York Times about his experience playing the role of Winston Churchill in a television drama: "In the course of preparing myself...I realized afresh that I hate Churchill and all of his kind. I hate them virulently. They have stalked down the corridors of endless power all through history.... What man of sanity would say on hearing of the atrocities committed by the Japanese against British and Anzac prisoners of war, 'We shall wipe them out, everyone of them, men, women, and children. There shall not be a Japanese left on the face of the earth? Such simple-minded cravings for revenge leave me with a horrified but reluctant awe for such single-minded and merciless ferocity."
"May the Holy Name visit retribution on the Arab heads, and cause their seed to be lost, and annihilate them. "It is forbidden to have pity on them. We must give them missiles with relish, annihilate them. Evil ones, damnable ones." Israeli Rabbi Ovadia Yosef , quoted in Ha'aretz April 12, 2001
" ... in pursuit of political objectives in the Nigerian Civil War, a number of great and small nations, including Britain and the United States, worked to prevent supplies of food and medicine from reaching the starving children of rebel Biafra. " -- A United Nations official
All around me, bitter tears are being shed over the fate of Holland, Belgium, France and England. I must confess to being a little dry around the eyes. I hear people shaking with shudders at the thought of Germany collecting taxes in Holland. I have not heard a word against Holland collecting one twelfth of poor people's wages in Asia. Hitler's crime is that he is actually doing a thing like that to his own kind... As I see it, the doctrines of democracy deal with the aspirations of men's souls, but the application deals with things. One hand in somebody else's pocket and one on your gun, and you are highly civilized.... Desire enough for your own use only, and you are a heathen. Civilized people have things to show to their neighbors."" -- Black writer Zora Neale Hurston at the start of World War II.
"I am amazed at the complacency of Negro press and public. Truman is a monster. l can think of him as nothing else but the Butcher of Asia. Of his grin of triumph on giving the order to drop the Atom bombs on Japan. Of his maintaining troops in China who are shooting the starving Chinese for stealing a handful of food." -- Black writer Zora Neale Hurston, 1946
"Whether the mask is labeled Fascism, Democracy, or Dictatorship or the Proletariat, our great adversary remains the Apparatus-the bureaucracy, the police, the military.... No matter what the circumstances, the worst betrayal will always be to subordinate ourselves to this Apparatus, and to trample underfoot, in its service, all human values in ourselves and in others." -- The French worker philosopher Simone Weil,1945
"It was a useless war, as every war is.... How gaddamn foolish it is, the war. They's no war in the world that's worth fighting for, I don't care where it is. They can't tell me any different. Money, money is the thing that causes it all. I wouldn't be a bit surprised that the people that start wars and promote 'em are the men that make the money, make the ammunition, make the clothing and so forth. Just think of the poor kids that are starvin' to death in Asia and so forth that could be fed with how much you make one big shell out of." -- Former GI Tommy Bridges
"I had been in thirteen battle engagements, had sunk a submarine, and was the first man ashore in the landing at Roi. In that four years, I thought, What a hell of a waste of a man's life. I lost a lot of friends. I had the task of telling my roommate's parents about our last days together. You lose limbs, sight, part of your life-for what? Old men send young men to war. Flag, banners, and patriotic sayings... We've institutionalized militarism. This came out of World War Two... It gave us the National Security Council. It gave us the CIA, that is able to spy on you and me this very moment. For the first time in the history of man, a country has divided up the world into military districts.... You could argue World War Two had to be fought. Hitler had to be stopped. Unfortunately, we translate it unchanged to the situation today... I hate it when they say, "He gave his life for his country." Nobody gives their life for anything. We steal the lives of these kids. We take it away from them. They don't die for the honor and glory of their country. We kill them." -- Admiral Gene LaRocque
"Ten military advisers are attached to the Sonsonate armed forces... The episode contains all the unchanging elements of the Salvadoran tragedy- uncontrolled military violence against civilians, the apparent ability of the wealthy to procure official violence...and the presence of United States military advisers, working with the Salvadoran military responsible for these monstrous practices... after 30,000 unpunished murders by security and military forces and over 10,000 "disappearances" of civilians in custody, the root causes of the killings remain in place, and the killing goes on." -- Two Americans who visited El Salvador in 1983 for the New York City Bar Association described for the New York Times a massacre of eighteen peasants by local troops in Sonsonate province
"Strike against war, for without you no battles can be fought! Strike against manufacturing shrapnel and gas bombs and all other tools of murder! Strike against preparedness that means death and misery to millions of human beings! Be not dumb, obedient slaves in an army of destruction! Be heroes in an army of construction." -- Helen Keller, 1940
"Problems cannot be solved at the same level of awareness that created them." -- Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955)
"The loud little handful will shout for war. The pulpit will warily and cautiously protest at first.... The great mass of the nation will rub its sleepy eyes, and will try to make out why there should be a war, and they will say earnestly and indignantly: "It is unjust and dishonorable and there is no need for war." Then the few will shout even louder.... Before long you will see a curious thing: anti-war speakers will be stoned from the platform, and free speech will be strangled by hordes of furious men who still agree with the speakers but dare not admit it... Next, the statesmen will invent cheap lies...and each man will be glad of these lies and will study them because they soothe his conscience; and thus he will bye and bye convince himself that the war is just and he will thank God for a better sleep he enjoys by his self-deception." -- Mark Twain
The U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, which interviewed 700 Japanese military and political officials after the war came to this conclusion: "Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey's opinion that certainly prior to 31 December 1945, and in all probability prior to I November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated."
"We have regularly played.a determining role in making and in unmaking governments, and we have defined what we have considered to be the acceptable behavior of governments." ... Right-wing governments will have to be given steady outside support, even, if necessary, by sending in American forces." -- Robert W. Tucker, political scientist, 1980
" The great object of American foreign policy ought to be the restoration of a more normal political world, a world in which those states possessing the elements of great power once again play the role their power entitles them to play." -- Robert W. Tucker, political scientist, 1980
"There is nothing more wicked, more disastrous, more widely destructive, more deeply tenacious, more loathsome." He said this was repugnant to nature: "Whoever heard of a hundred thousand animals rushing together to butcher each other, as men do everywhere? . . . once war has been declared, then all the affairs of the State are at the mercy of the appetites of a few." -- Erasmus
" Many more people in the world are concerned about sports than human rights." -- Samuel P. Huntington
" [Middle East oil is] a stupendous source of strategic power, and one of the greatest material prizes in world history." -- U.S. State Department, 1945
" The enormous gap between what US leaders do in the world and what Americans think their leaders are doing is one of the great propaganda accomplishments of the dominant political mythology. " -- Michael Parenti, political scientist and author
Patriotism subordinates the individual to something bigger. But it is not really prized as a virtue until the shooting starts. -- Hermann Hesse - Author (1877-1962)
"Power lies in the growth of awareness." -- Herbert de Souza, Brazilian human rights activist
"As long as people are marginalized and distracted [they] have no way to organize or articulate their sentiments, or even know that others have these sentiments. People assume that they are the only people with a crazy idea in their heads. They never hear it from anywhere else. Nobody's supposed to think that. ... Since there's no way to get together with other people who share or reinforce that view and help you articulate it, you feel like an oddity, an oddball. So you just stay on the side and you don't pay any attention to what's going on. You look at something else, like the Superbowl." -- Noam Chomsky, American linguist and US media and foreign policy critic
" The people can have anything they want. The trouble is, they do not want anything. At least they vote that way on election day." -- Eugene Debs, American socialist leader, 1855-1926
"A people that wants to be free must arm itself with a free press." -- George Seldes, journalist
"We declare openly that the Arabs have no right to settle on even one centimeter of Eretz Israel...Force is all they do or ever will understand. We shall use the ultimate force until the Palestinians come crawling to us on all fours." --Rafael Eitan, chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces, quoted in Yediot Ahronot, April 13, 1983, and The New York Times, April 14, 1983.
" Many Americans want to nurture an image of innocence and decency and yet most Americans want most of all to stay on top and continue to applaud clear victories in the Third World however achieved. " -- Richard Falk, professor
" If an American is concerned only about his nation, he will not be concerned about the peoples of Asia, Africa, or South America. Is this not why nations engage in the madness of war without the slightest sense of penitence? Is this not why the murder of a citizen of your own nation is a crime, but the murder of citizens of another nation in war is an act of heroic virtue? " -- Martin Luther King, Jr.
"When you give food to the poor, they call you a saint. When you ask why the poor have no food, they call you a communist." -- Archbishop Helder Camara, Brazilian liberation theologist
"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." -- Howard Zinn, historian and author
"Humans are complex creatures. We have a demonstrated capacity for hatred, violence, competition, and greed. We have as well a demonstrated capacity for love, tenderness, cooperation, and compassion. Healthy societies nurture the latter and in so doing create an abundance of those things that are most important to the quality of our living. Dysfunctional societies nurture the former and in so doing create scarcity and deprivation. A healthy society makes it easy to live in balance with the environment, whereas a dysfunctional society makes it nearly impossible. Whether we organize our societies for social and environmental health or for dysfunction is a choice that is ours to make." -- David Korten, economist and internationalist
"Today the United States has, by far, the most unequal distribution of wealth and income in the industrialized world. " -- Vermont Congressman Bernie Sanders
"Nothing appears more surprising to those who consider human affairs with a philosophical eye than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few, and the implicit submission with which men resign their own sentiments and passions to those of their rulers. When we inquire by what means this wonder is effected, we shall find that, as force is always on the side of the governed, the governors have nothing to support them but opinion. It is, therefore, on opinion only that government is founded, and this maxim extends to the most despotic and most military governments as well as to the most free and most popular." -- David Hume, Scottish philosopher and historian, "Of the First Principles of Government" 1758
" The only way to abolish war is to make peace heroic." -- John Dewey, American philosopher and educator, 1859-1952
" ... the NSS [National Security State] is an instrument of class warfare, organized and designed to permit an elite, local and multinational, to operate without any constraint from democratic processes. This allows the bulk of the population to be treated as a mere cost of production." -- Edward Herman, economist and media analyst
" [The Third World War] is a war that has been fought by the United States against the Third World. It might also be called the Forty-Year War, like the Thirty-Year and Hundred-Year Wars in Europe, for this one began when the CIA was founded in 1947 and continues today. As wars go, it has been the second or third most destructive of human life in all of history, after World War I and World War II. " -- John Stockwell, former CIA official and author
"We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world-benefaction.... We should cease to talk about vague and unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better." -- George Kennan head of U.S. State Department Policy Planning Staff, 1948
" Where is the outrage? ... If we are moved merely by greed, and there's no longer any respect for decent or honest government, then we will suffer the results. " -- Barbara Tuchman, historian and author
" The most effective way to restrict democracy is to transfer decision-making from the public arena to unaccountable institutions: kings and princes, priestly castes, military juntas, party dictatorships, or modern corporations." -- Noam Chomsky, American linguist and US media and foreign policy critic
"It's a hard decision, but we think the price ... is worth it." -- Secretary of State Madelaine Albright talking about Iraqi children starving and dying as a result of the US embargo of food and medicine
"... the only way to fully comprehend U.S. policies toward the third world is to posit ... "the threat of a good example." Insurgencies in the third world do not challenge U.S. military security or even, ultimately, investments by U.S. corporations.... What they represent is the possibility that emerging nations may demonstrate by example that the United States may not be the last word in democracy, freedom, and opportunity. That threat is much greater if weighed from the perspective of those who see it in their interest to preserve unchanged the present U.S. economic and political order." -- Frances Moore Lappe', Rachel Shuman, and Kevin Danaher, authors
" It is no longer a question of controlling a military-industrial complex, but rather, of keeping the United States from becoming a totally military culture. " -- Jerome Weisner, president emeritus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
" I am a firm believer in the people. If given the truth, they can be depended upon to meet any national crisis. The great point is to bring them the real facts. " -- Abraham Lincoln, American president, 1861-1865
" We must use our vast resources of wealth to aid the undeveloped countries of the world. We have spent far too much of our national budget in establishing military bases around the world and far too little in establishing bases of genuine concern and understanding. " -- Martin Luther King, Jr.
" Many more people in the world are concerned about sports than human rights." -- Samuel P. Huntington, Harvard professor and political scientist
"Whoever heard of a hundred thousand animals rushing together to butcher each other, as men do everywhere [during war]?" -- Desiderius Erasmus, Dutch humanist, 1466-1536
" ... experience requires that we free ourselves from the narrowness of being related only to those familiar to us, either by the fact that they are blood relations or, in a larger sense, that we eat the same food, speak the same language, and have the same 'common sense.' Knowing men in the sense of compassionate and empathetic knowledge requires that we get rid of the narrowing ties of a given society, race, or culture and penetrate to the depth of that human reality in which we are all nothing but human." -- Erich From, 1900-1980, American psychoanalyst and author
"When you think of the long and gloomy history of man, you will find more hideous crimes have been committed in the name of obedience than have ever been committed in the name of rebellion." -- C.P. Snow, English author, physicist, and statesman, 1905-1980
" In the Middle Ages, the sewage wasn't properly disposed of, but people didn't pay attention to it until the waters of the rivers and the filth rose over the doorsteps. Then they had to. That's what is beginning to happen [in American politics]. It is beginning to rise over the doorsteps. " -- Barbara Tuchman, historian and author
"As nightfall does not come at once, neither does oppression.... There is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged. And it is in such a twilight that we must be most aware of change in the air -- however slight -- lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness." -- William O. Douglas, US Supreme Court Justice from 1939-1975
" Scare the hell out of the American people." -- Senator Arthur Vandenburg, telling President Truman what the he needed to do in order to to tax the American people to pay for the weapons and covert activities of the US National Security State
" Resistance to tyranny is man's highest ideal. " -- Emma Goldman, American anarchist and feminist, 1869-1940
" We in the West must bear in mind that the poor countries are poor primarily because we have exploited them through political or economic colonialism. " -- Martin Luther King, Jr.
"I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people. The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves." -- Henry Kissinger, Secretary of State under Richard Nixon, about Chile prior to the CIA overthrow of the democratically elected government of socialist President Salvadore Allende in 1973
"Charity is no substitute for justice withheld." -- Saint Augustine, bishop of Hippo and one of the founders of Christianity, 354-430
" We have come to accomodate ourselves to a model of society that has to be unjust, with inherent inequalities, where a great percentage of the population has to be in misery, has to die of hunger, has to live with their basic needs unsatisfied. This is the neo-liberal mentality and every day it seems more normal." -- Father Javier Giraldo, Colombia
"Americans have been taught that their nation is civilized and humane. But, too often, U.S. actions have been uncivilized and inhumane." -- Howard Zinn, historian and author
" In the councils of government, we must guard against unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist." -- President Dwight D. Eisenhower in his Farewell Address, 1961
" Law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice . . . when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress. " -- Martin Luther King, Jr.
" In a world of increasing inequality, the legitimacy of institutions that give precedence to the property rights of "the Haves" over the human rights of "the Have Nots" is inevitably called into serious question. " -- David Korten, economist and internationalist
" Don't Treat Us Like Americans! " -- Posters carried by German auto workers protesting reductions in sick pay and the failure of German auto manufacturers to consult with the unions, Summer 1996
" It isn't only Gestapo maniacs who do inhuman things to people. We [the CIA] are responsible for doing inhuman things on a massive scale to people all over the world." -- John Stockwell, former CIA official
"[U.S.] political considerations take precedence over any regard for the plight of the people [in Third World countries]." -- Michael Parenti, political scientist and author
" The two-war strategy is just a marketing device to justify a high [military] budget. " -- Retired Air Force Chief of Staff Merrill McPeak
--Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, speech to the Knesset, quoted in Amnon Kapeliouk, "Begin and the 'Beasts,"' New Statesman, June 25,1982.
"Patriotism is the principle that will justify the training of wholesale murderers." -- Leo Tolstoy, Russian novelist and philosopher, 1828-1910
"For the last fifty years we've been supporting right-wing governments, and that is a puzzlement to me...I don't understand what there is in the American character... that almost automatically, even when we have a liberal President, we support fascist dictatorships or are tolerant towards them." -- William Shirer, writer
" In the post-Cold War era, the United States needs to promote the development of democracy and human rights, not militaries that view their own citizens as the enemy. " -- U.S. Senator Richard Durbin
" Some of the problems of governance in the United States stem from an excess of democracy ... " -- Samuel Huntington, Harvard professor and political scientist
"Democracy was being saved from Communism by getting rid of democracy." -- Newsweek magazine about the Dominican Republic prior to the overthrow of elected President Juan Bosch in 1963 in a US-supported coup
" Most high officials leave office with the perceptions and insights with which they entered ..." -- Henry Kissinger
"I believe there are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations." -- James Madison, American president from 1809-1817, helped draft the Constitution
" ... buy the top academic reputations of the country to add credibility to corporate studies and give business a stronger voice on the campus. " -- Lewis Powell, prior to becoming a Supreme Court Justice, on how corporations can gain influence in academic circles
"I suspect that a great power needs an elite, a class of self-confident and more or less disinterested people who are accustomed to running things.'' -- Stewart Alsop, syndicated newspaper columnist
" Foreign aid is when the poor people of a rich country give money to the rich people of a poor country." -- author unknown
"... the United States, for generations, has sustained two parallel but opposed states of mind about military atrocities and human rights: one of U.S. benevolence, generally held by the public, and the other of ends-justify-the-means brutality sponsored by counterinsurgency specialists. Normally the specialists carry out their actions in remote locations with little notice in the national press. That allows the public to sustain its faith in a just America, while hard-nosed security and economic interests are still protected in secret." -- Peter Dale Scott, author
" By the later years of the Reagan regime, a preferred nomenclature suited to U.S. interests became standardized for the Third World. In the case of nations to be rolled back (e.g., Nicaragua), governments were called terrorist and the insurgents were labeled democratic. In the case of countries to be supported against "communist" insurgencies (e.g., El Salvador and the Philippines), the governments were called democratic and the insurgents were labeled terrorists. " -- from the book Rollback by Thomas Bodenheimer and Robert Gould
" Enemies are necessary for the wheels of the U.S. military machine to turn. " -- John Stockwell, former CIA official and author
"... the United States has given frequent and enthusiastic support to the overthrow of democracy in favor of "investor friendly" regimes. The World Bank, IMF, and private banks have consistently lavished huge sums on terror regimes, following their displacement of democratic governments, and a number of quantitative studies have shown a systematic positive relationship between U.S. and IMF / World Bank aid to countries and their violations of human rights." -- Edward S. Herman, economist and media analyst
" One may well ask: How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others? The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. " -- Martin Luther King, Jr.
--David Ben-Gurion, in his diary, July 18, 1948, quoted in Michael Bar Zohar's "Ben-Gurion: the Armed Prophet," Prentice-Hall, 1967, p. 157.
" I ask you, what is the difference between 30 million people dead and 130 million people dead? ... With 30 million dead, the United States can survive ..." -- Edward Teller, nuclear physicist and 'father' of the H-Bomb, describing how the "Star Wars" space-based weapons system might allow the United States to fight and "survive" a nuclear war
"Sometimes to be Silent is to Lie." -- Spanish philosopher Miguel Unamuno
" Democracy, as Americans understand it, is not necessarily the future of all mankind, nor is it the duty of the U.S. government to assure that it becomes that. " -- George Kennan, head of U.S. State Department Policy Planning Staff, 1948
"One million Arabs are not worth a Jewish fingernail." -- Rabbi Yaacov Perrin, Feb. 27, 1994 [Source: N.Y. Times, Feb. 28, 1994, p. 1]
"I want to scare the hell out of the rest of the world." -- US General Colin Powell talking about US military power prior to the Gulf War in 1991
" It is a sad fact that because of comfort, complacency, a morbid fear of communism, and our proneness to adjust to injustice, the Western nations that initiated so much of the revolutionary spirit of the modern world have now become the arch-anti-revolutionaries. " -- Martin Luther King, Jr.
"The 1964 military takeover [in Brazil] was "totally democratic" and "the single most decisive victory for freedom in the mid-twentieth century." -- Lincoln Gordon, Ambassador to Brazil under John Kennedy describing the overthrow of Brazil's parliamentary democracy by generals backed by the United States
"If justice requires the consent of the governed, then our [U.S.] whole past record of expansion is a crime." -- Henry Cabot Lodge,1850-1924, US senator
"Fifty years of lies, fifty years of injustice, fifty years of frustration. This is a history of people starving to death, living in misery. For fifty years the same people had all the power, all the money, all the jobs, all the education, all the opportunities." -- El Salvadoran President Jose Nepolean Duarte about the injustice in El Salvador that led to a guerrilla insurgency against the government in the 1970s and 1980s
"To the extent that the United States was governed by anyone during the decades after World War Il, it was governed by the President acting with the support and cooperation of key individuals and groups in the executive office, the federal bureaucracy, Congress, and the more important businesses, banks, law firms, foundations, and media, which constitute the private sector's 'Establishment'." -- Samuel Huntington, Harvard profeesor and political scientist
" Every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of authority." -- Thomas Huxley, English biologist and educator, 1825-1895
" The whole fabric of society will go to wrack if we really lay hands of reform on our rotten institutions. From top to bottom the whole system is a fraud, all of us know it, laborers and capitalists alike, and all of us are consenting parties to it." -- Henry Adams, American historian, 1838-1918
" ...sectors of the business community attempted to solve the economic crisis [of the 1970s and 1980s] through increased military power abroad to allow multinational businesses to penetrate more vigorously into the Third World and increased military spending at home to stimulate the economy. ... In the 1970s and 1980s, when business was less booming, global rollback became a more attractive foreign policy goal. " -- from the book Rollback by Thomas Bodenheimer and Robert Gould
" The most effective way to restrict democracy is to transfer decision-making from the public arena to unaccountable institutions: kings and princes, priestly castes, military juntas, party dictatorships, or modern corporations." -- Noam Chomsky, American linguist and US media and foreign policy critic
" America's inability to come to terms with revolutionary change in the The Third World...has created our biggest international problems in the postwar era. But the root of the problem is not, as many Americans persist in believing, the relentless spread of communism. Rather, it is our own difficulty in understanding that Third World revolutions are primarily nationalist, not communist. Nationalism, not capitalism or communism, is the dominant political force in the modern world. You might think that revolutionary nationalism and the desire for self-determination would be relatively easy for Americans - the first successful revolutionaries to win their independence - to understand. But instead we have been dumbfounded when other peoples have tried to pursue the goals of our own revolution two centuries ago.... " -- Former U.S. Senator Frank Church, on the shortsightedness of 'rollback' as our foreign policy doctrine
" [The] American thirst for victory, his scorn for defeat, gives the militarist line great leverage over political debate, although its degree of dominance ebbs and flows with the nature of the issue and the public mood, the latter itself significantly shaped by a media that defers to the state on national security policy in most matters. " -- Richard Falk, professor
"If we love this country, we'd better change it." -- Ramsey Clark, former United States Attorney General and human rights activist
"The big lie about capitalism is that everyone can be rich. That's impossible. Capitalism works only if the vast majority of the population are kept poor enough to never quit working, are kept poor enough to accept distasteful jobs society cannot function without. If everyone were a millionaire, who would empty the trash or repair the sewers? It follows that the poorer the general population is made, the greater the worth of the money held by the wealthy, in terms of the lives which may be bought and sold with it. "Capitalism requires an impoverishment mechanism that must absorb increases in productivity to keep the working classes with as little surplus capital as possible. Taxes (followed by wasteful spending) are the major impoverishment mechanism and this is why taxes increase to absorb the extra revenues flowing from increased productivity. Government does not want to pay off the national debt because that interest makes a great cash sink. "There are two reasons for the decline in living standards, both tied to the push for a one world government. Before national barriers may be brought down between two economies the economies have to be made equal, and since it is easier to pull the top down than the bottom up, the prosperity and standard of living our parents and grandparents worked hard to create must be destroyed. "Finally, history has shown that all opposition to entrenched oligarchy arises from the middle classes, who have the surplus of funds needed to challenge the ruling classes. Communism survived for as long as it did because their system designed the middle class out of existence at the very start. The New World Order will have to, indeed already is, following the same model. If the general population only has enough to pay for the next day's rent and food, they will do as they are told." -- Michael Rivero
" [Nearly 70% of the military budget] is to provide men and weapons to fight in foreign countries in support of our allies and friends and for offensive operations in Third World countries .. Another big chunk of the defense budget is the 20% allocated for our offensive nuclear force of bombers, missles, and submarines whose job it is to carry nuclear weapons to the Soviet Union... Actual defense of the United States costs about 10% of the military budget and is the least expensive function performed by the Pentagon... " -- Rear Admiral Gene LaRoque, U.S. Navy retired
" It is not possible to be in favor of justice for some people and not be in favor of justice for all people. " -- Martin Luther King, Jr.
"The agony and moral anguish that ought to accompany an act of mass killing -- yes, even in a war [the Gulf War against Iraq in 1991] -- seemed wholly absent from American culture." -- Ruth Rosen, history professor
" Since the modern world recognizes only wage earners as "productive" members of society -- housewives, traditional farmers and the elderly suddenly become identified as "unproductive."" -- Helena Norberg-Hodge, anthropologist, speaking about the changes in traditional societies as they modernize
"Conceit, arrogance and egotism are the essentials of patriotism.... Patriotism assumes that our globe is divided into little spots, each one surrounded by an iron gate. Those who had the fortune of being born on some particular spot, consider themselves better, nobler, grander, more intelligent than the living beings inhabiting any other spot. It is, therefore, the duty of everyone living on that chosen spot to fight, kill, and die in the attempt to impose his superiority upon all others." -- Emma Goldman, American anarchist and feminist, 1869-1940
" I can teach you about torture, but sooner or later you'll have to get involved. You'll have to lay on your hands and try it yourselves ... The precise pain, in the precise place, in the precise amount, for the desired effect.'' -- Head of the US Office of Public Safety (OPS) mission in Uruguay in 1981, teaching classes in the art of torture
"I was nineteen years old, and I'd always been told to do what the grown-ups told me to do.... But now I tell my sons, if the government calls, ... to use their own judgment, ... to forget about authority ... to use their own conscience. I wish somebody had told me that before I went to Vietnam." -- a U.S. soldier who had participated in the My Lai massacre, in which a company of American soldiers shot to death women and children by the hundreds in a tiny Vietnamese village
"Why should we be worried about the death squads? They're bumping off the commies, our enemies ...There's no question we can't wait until Reagan gets in ... We all feel that he is our savior.' -- CIA pilot in Guatemala, 1980
"All that is necessary for the forces of evil to win in the world is for enough good men to do nothing." -- Edmund Burke, British political writer, 1729-1797
" From 1928 to 1932, the German National Socialist (Nazi) Party's share of the vote skyrocketed from 2.6 percent to 37.3 percent. While many commentators have attributed the Nazis' success to its appeal to the lower middle class ... the facts unequivocally reveal that it was the upper middle class that most strongly voted for Hitler... The Nazis were seen as patriotic, anti-communist, and religious. The people who voted Nazi were not so much people who had fallen economically, but people who feared falling and wanted to stay on top. " -- from the book Rollback by Thomas Bodenheimer and Robert Gould
" He who recognizes no humanity in others, loses it in himself." -- author unknown
" Short, successful military adventures are as effective as the Super Bowl in diverting people's attention from unpleasant truths." -- John Stockwell, former CIA official
" I have the greatest admiration for your propaganda. Propaganda in the West is carried out by experts who have had the best training in the world -- in the field of advertizing -- and have mastered the techniques with exceptional proficiency ... Yours are subtle and persuasive; ours are crude and obvious ... I think that the fundamental difference between our worlds, with respect to propaganda, is quite simple. You tend to believe yours ... and we tend to disbelieve ours. " -- a Soviet correspondent based five years in the U.S.
" Any dictator would admire the uniformity and obedience of the [U.S.] media." -- Noam Chomsky, American linguist and US media and foreign policy critic
"Newspapers are unable, seemingly, to discriminate between a bicycle accident and the collapse of civilization." -- George Bernard Shaw, Irish playwight and critic, 1856-1950
"The opinion of 10,000 men is of no value if none of them know anything about the subject." -- Marcus Aurelius, Roman Emperor from 121-180 A.D. and Stoic philosopher
" ... the media in the United States effectively represents the interests of corporate America, and ... the media elite are the watchdogs of what constitutes acceptable ideological messages, the parameters of news and information content, and the general use of media resources. -- Peter Phillips, Project Censored, 1998
" The most dangerous criminal may be the man gifted with reason, but with no morals." -- Martin Luther King, Jr.
No one is guilty. The world is bombed and burned and devastated and those who do it are perfectly innocent. They are "exponents" or "factors" or something equally clever, not men, not moral, responsible beings under God. I wouldn't give a red cent for such talk. -- Hermann Hesse - Author (1877-1962)
" Martin Luther King is the most notorious liar in the country." -- J. Edgar Hoover, Director of the FBI 1924-1972
"Basic civil liberties including the right to life, liberty and the freedom of personal and political expression, suffered a drastic setback in 1981. In more than a dozen regional nations, even the most fundamental rights -- life and the inviolability of the person -- were transgressed by the government-condoned practice of harassing, torturing and murdering political opponents of those in power ... These reverses can be linked to policies adopted by the Reagan administration ... [which] has allied the U.S. with the most violent regimes in the hemispere. He [Reagan] has sanctioned atrocities and human rights abuses by providing those governments with essentially unconditioned U.S. support." -- Council on Hemispheric Affairs, 1982
"We have never interfered in the internal government of a country and have no intention of doing so, never have had any thought of that kind." -- Ronald Reagan, 1982
" Governments lie." -- I.F. Stone, journalist and author
" The notion that journalism can regularly produce a product that violates the fundamental interests of media owners and advertisers ... is absurd." -- Robert McChesney, journalist and author
" [The Laos operation] is something of which we can be proud as Americans. It has involved virtually no American casualties. What we are getting for our money there ... is, I think, to use the old phrase, very cost effective." -- U. Alexis Johnson, US Under Secretary of State in 1971 about American carpet-bombing of Laos which killed hundreds-of-thousands of civilians
" The corporate grip on opinion in the United States is one of the wonders of the Western world. No First World country has ever managed to eliminate so entirely from its media all objectivity - much less dissent. " -- Gore Vidal, novelist and critic
"The 'corporatization of America' during the past century [has been] an attack on democracy." -- Noam Chomsky, American linguist and US media and foreign policy critic
" Good journalism is being criminalized or otherwise rendered perilous to its best practitioners. Attack a government agency like the CIA, or a Fortune 500 member ..., or the conduct of the military in Southeast Asia and you find yourself in deep trouble, naked and often alone. " -- Daniel Schorr, journalist
" There's a whole journalistic-industrial complex dedicated to keeping newsprint, TV screens and radio waves clean of destabilizing scoops damaging to corporations or the state." -- Alexander Cockburn, journalist
" The owners of the Washington Post long ago acknowledged that the Post is the government's voice to the people. In 1981, Katherine Graham, who owns the Post and Newsweek announced that her editors would "cooperate with the national security interests." National security in this context means "CIA."" -- John Stockwell, former CIA official and author
"We must use terror, assassination, intimidation, land confiscation, and the cutting of all social services to rid the Galilee of its Arab population." --Israel Koenig, "The Koenig Memorandum."
" The news and truth are not the same thing. " -- Walter Lippmann, American journalist, 1889-1974
"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." -- Howard Zinn, historian and author
"History is an account mostly false, of events mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers, mostly knaves, and soldiers, mostly fools." -- Ambrose Bierce, American writer, 1842-1914
" Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men. " -- Martin Luther King, Jr.
"It is the function of the CIA to keep the world unstable, and to propagandize and teach the American people to hate, so we will let the Establishment spend any amount of money on arms." -- John Stockwell, former CIA official and author
"Just between you and me, shouldn't the World Bank be encouraging more migration of the dirty industries to the LDCs (lesser developed countries)? I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that.... I've always thought that underpopulated countries in Africa are vastly under polluted; their air quality is vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City." -- Lawrence Summers World Bank economist and Deputy Secretary of Treasury, in a 1991 internal memorandum
"We love your adherence to democratic principle." -- Vice President George Bush to Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos
"Communism is an enormously serviceable tool for achieving morally dubious goals under a morally acceptable cover. It is not acceptable to destabilize a country, overthrow its democratically elected government, and institute a reign of terror in order to lower taxes and wages for one's own multinational firms. It is necessary to put forward a higher moral imperative." -- Edward Herman, economist and media analyst
" As the mainstream media has become increasingly dependent on advertising revenues for support, it has become an anti-democratic force in society." -- Robert McChesney, journalist and author
" ... the United States, for generations, has sustained two parallel but opposed states of mind about military atrocities and human rights: one of U.S. benevolence, generally held by the public, and the other of ends-justify-the-means brutality sponsored by counterinsurgency specialists. Normally the specialists carry out their actions in remote locations with little notice in the national press. That allows the public to sustain its faith in a just America, while hard-nosed security and economic interests are still protected in secret. " -- Robert Parry, investigative reporter and author
"History is written by those who win and those who dominate." -- Edward Said, literary critic
"Our men . . . have killed to exterminate men, women, children, prisoners and captives, active insurgents and suspected people from lads of 10 up.... Our soldiers have pumped salt water into men to "make them talk," and have taken prisoners people who held up their hands and peacefully surrendered, and an hour later. . . stood them on a bridge and shot them down one by one, to drop into the water below and float down, as examples to those who found their bullet-loaded corpses." -- Philadelphia Ledger newspaper in 1901, carrying a dispatch from its Manila [Philippines] correspondent during the US war with Spain for the control of the Philippines
"The corporation is a true Frankenstein's monster - an artificial person run amok, responsible only to its own soulless self. " -- William Dugger, management analyst
"[Nationalism is] a set of beliefs taught to each generation in which the Motherland or the Fatherland is an object of veneration and becomes a burning cause for which one becomes willing to kill the children of other Motherlands or Fatherlands." -- Howard Zinn, historian and author
" In the post-Cold War era, the United States needs to promote the development of democracy and human rights, not militaries that view their own citizens as the enemy." -- U.S. Senator Richard Durbin
"All over the world, people need change. The change? Getting control over the power and resources they need to solve their problems." -- Jeremy Brecher, historian and author
"Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear-kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor-with the cry of grave national emergency. Always there has been some terrible evil at home or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it ..." -- US General Douglas MacArthur, 1957
" A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual doom. " -- Martin Luther King, Jr.
" The more you can increase fear of drugs and crime, welfare mothers, immigrants and aliens, the more you control all the people. " -- Noam Chomsky, American linguist and US media and foreign policy critic
" Rollback as a foreign policy ... causes untold devastation and misery for millions overseas, and hinders any potential positive U.S. influence in world affairs... To the extent the U.S. public backs rollback, this support is rooted in a misguided sense of patriotism. Patriotism itself - love of one's country and one's people - is a natural and reasonable human feeling. But patriotism which measures one's country by military superiority over all rivals regardless of consequence is irrational... There is surely a more rational form of patriotism that searches for excellence in social, economic and moral spheres rather than in weapon systems. " -- from the book Rollback by Thomas Bodenheimer and Robert Gould
" If we have to use force, it is because we are America. We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall. We see further into the future. " -- Secretary of State Madelaine Albright describing her vision of America's role in the world
" ... the United States [is] cast in the role of Praetorian Guard, protecting the interests of the global financial order against fractious elements in the Third World. " -- John Stockwell, former CIA official and author
" America must prevent other states "from challenging our leadership or seeking to overturn the established political and economic order....We must maintain the mechanisms for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role. " -- Pentagon's Defense Planning Guide for 1994-1999
" Why should we flagellate ourselves for what the Cambodians did to each other?" -- Henry Kissinger - who (with Richard Nixon) was responsible for the massive bombing of Cambodia in 1973, which killed three-quarters of a million peasants and disrupted Cambodian society, setting the stage for Pol Pot to come to power and ultimately kill another one-and-a-half million people
"Was there ever any domination that did not appear natural to those who possessed it?" -- John Stuart Mill, British philosopher and economist, 1806-1873
"The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them." -- George Orwell, English writer, 1903-1950
"Those who own the country ought to govern it." -- John Jay, American statesman and first Chief Justice of US Supreme Court, 1745-1829
" ... there is a system of terroristic states -- the real terror network -- that has spread throughout Latin America and elsewhere over the past several decades, and which is deeply rooted in the corporate interest and sustaining political-military-financial propaganda mechanisms of the United States and its allies in the Free World." -- Edward Herman, economist and media analyst
"That men should not be equal, is the primitive belief of primitive people." -- author unknown
"We shall reduce the Arab population to a community of woodcutters and waiters." --Uri Lubrani, Israeli Prime Minister Ben-Gurion's special adviser on Arab Affairs. Source: "The Arabs in Israel" by Sabri Jiryas.
" Coming to grips with ... U.S./CIA activities in broad numbers and figuring out how many people have been killed in the jungles of Laos or the hills of Nicaragua is very difficult. But, adding them up as best we can, we come up with a figure of six million people killed-and this is a minimum figure. Included are: one million killed in the Korean War, two million killed in the Vietnam War, 800,000 killed in Indonesia, one million in Cambodia, 20,000 killed in Angola ... and 22,000 killed in Nicaragua. These people would not have died if U.S. tax dollars had not been spent by the CIA to inflame tensions, finance covert political and military activities and destabilize societies. " -- John Stockwell, former CIA official and author
"We routinely had Latin American students at the School of the Americas (SOA) who were known human rights abusers, and it didn't make any difference to us." -- Instructor at the School of the Americas in Georgia
" The foreign policies of nation-states, particularly economic and monetary policies, have always been a highly elitist matter. Policy options are proposed, reviewed, and executed within the context of a broad bipartisan consensus that is painstakingly managed by very small circles of public and private elites.... Where necessary, a consensus is engineered on issues which must get congressional / parliamentary approval, but wherever possible executive agreements between governments are used to avoid the democratic process altogether. " -- Peter Thomson
" The first casualty when war comes is the truth." -- U.S. Senator Hiram Johnson, 1917
" ... the CIA had been running thousands of operations over the years... there have been about 3,000 major covert operations and over 10,000 minor operations... all designed to disrupt, destabilize, or modify the activities of other countries... But they are all illegal and they all disrupt the normal functioning, often the democratic functioning, of other societies. They raise serious questions about the moral responsibility of the United States in the international society of nations. " -- John Stockwell, former CIA official and author
"What the United States has done to the country [Cambodia] is greater evil than we have done to any country in the world..." -- California Congressman Pete McClosky following a visit to Cambodia in the 1970s
" ... neoconservative Jeane Kirkpatrick ... argued in 1979 that Third World revolutions are illegitimate, the products of Soviet expansion rather than of local historical forces opposed to repressive dictatorships. ... Kirkpatrick had solved the moral problem of the rollbackers: why it is fine to overthrow left-wing governments and make friends with rightist dictators. The Kirkpatrick Doctrine held that right-wing dictatorships can evolve into democratic governments while left-wing nations cannot. Under this Doctrine, Marcos, Pinochet, and P.W. Botha were leading their countries down the path of democracy. " -- from the book Rollback by Thomas Bodenheimer and Robert Gould
"How dare Americans allow their government to cause such misery [in the world]." -- Ramsey Clark, former United States Attorney General and human rights activist
"The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy: that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness." -- John Kenneth Galbraith, economist and author
" Democracy is based on the principle of one person, one vote. The market functions on the principle of one dollar, one vote. Consequently, under conditions of unequal economic power, a society ruled by the market is a society ruled by those who have the most money -- the antithesis of democracy. " -- David Korten, economist and internationalist
" Americans cannot teach democracy to the world until they restore their own." -- William Greider, journalist and author
" People with advantages are loath to believe that they just happen to be people with advantages. " -- C. Wright Mills - The Power Elite
" You can say anything you want in a debate, and 80 million people hear it. If reporters then document that a candidate spoke untruthfully, so what ? Maybe 200 people read it, or 2000 or 20,000. " -- George Bush's press secretary to reporters following the 1980 vice-presidential debate
" [The] social forces that have been near the center of power ever since 1945 are so well entrenched in the national security bureaucracy as to be constants in the political setting within which foreign policy takes shape... [as a result] the formal procedures of political democracy (political parties, elections) give virtually no voice to principled criticism of interventionary deplomacy in the Third World. " -- Richard Falk, professor
" History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people. " -- Martin Luther King, Jr.
"The modern liberal state ... often uses deception to gain its ends -- not so much deception of the foreign enemy, but of its own citizens,who have been taught to trust their leaders." -- Howard Zinn, historian and author
" The women of the United States are nothing but brood sows, having sons to be put into the army and made into fertilizer. " -- Kate Richards O"Hare, 1915, feminist
" The U.S. taxpayer is now carrying a gigantic burden. Nearly one-third of the nation's budget goes to the military. ... 53 cents of every tax dollar goes to the military to pay for arms, salaries, facilities, overhead, and debts from Vietnam and other wars. " -- John Stockwell, former CIA official and author
"This focus on money and power may do wonders in the marketplace, but it creates a tremendous crisis in our society. People who have spent all day learning how to sell themselves and to manipulate others are in no position to form lasting friendships or intimate relationships... Many Americans hunger for a different kind of society -- one based on principles of caring, ethical and spiritual sensitivity, and communal solidarity. Their need for meaning is just as intense as their need for economic security." -- Michael Lerner, journalist
" We are potentially the most dangerous agency in the country. " -- FBI Director Louis Freeh, to the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime, 1997
" We must rapidly begin the shift from a "thing"-oriented society to a "person"-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism and militarism are incapable to being conquered. " -- Martin Luther King, Jr.
" The United States is supposed to be in favor of human rights and democracy, so that a show of concern by our leaders is required to demonstrate our high moral character. This display of concern is not necessary if there is little public interest in or knowledge about the abusing country and its victims. Whether the public is informed on these matters is, of course, affected by what government, business, and the media choose to publicize, and these conjointly tend to play down abuses by regimes that serve U. S. business and strategic interests." -- Edward S. Herman, economist and media analyst
"An economic system can remain viable only so long as societyO has meahanisms to counter abuses of either state or market power and the erosion of the natural, social, and moral capital that such abuses commonly exacerbate." -- David Korten, economist and internationalist
" Success, recognition, and conformity are the bywords of the modern world where everyone seems to crave the anesthetizing security of being identified with the majority. " -- Martin Luther King, Jr.
" The most unpardonable sin in society is independence of thought." -- Emma Goldman, American anarchist and feminist, 1869-1940
" The economy is doing fine, but the people aren't." -- General Emelio Medici, head-of-state of Brazil's U.S.-supported military dictatorship, 1971
" We enjoy the economic stability that the Armed Forces guarantee us. This [economic] plan can be fulfilled dispite its lack of popular support. It has sufficient political support ... that provided buy the Armed Forces." -- Martinez de Hoz, top financial minister of the U.S.-supported Argentine military government, 1976, on the government's proposed economic plan
"...the need to sustain the character of the state which will henceforth be Jewish...with a non-Jewish minority limited to 15 percent. I had already reached this fundamental position as early as 1940 [and] it is entered in my diary." --Joseph Weitz, head of the Jewish Agency's Colonization Department. From "Israel: an Apartheid State" by Uri Davis, p. 5.
"History is fables agreed upon." -- Francois Voltaire, French philosopher and author, 1694-1778
" We are a nation that worships the frontier tradition, and our heroes are those who champion justice through violent retaliation against injustice. It is not simple to adopt a credo that moral force has as much strength and virtue as the capacity to return a physical blow; or that to refrain from hitting back requires more will and bravery than the automatic reflexes of defense. " -- Martin Luther King, Jr.
" Today in America [is]... the development of a permanent war establishment by a privately incorporated economy inside a political vacuum. " -- C. Wright Mills - The Power Elite
"I believe that if we had and would keep our dirty, bloody, dollar-soaked fingers out of the business of these [Third World] nations so full of depressed, exploited people, they will arrive at a solution of their own.... And if unfortunately their revolution must be of the violent type because the "haves" refuse to share with the "have-nots" by any peaceful method, at least what they get will be their own, and not the American style, which they don't want and above all don't want crammed down their throats by Americans." -- General David Sharp, former US Marine Commandant,1966
" If they do it it's terrorism, if we do it, it's fighting for freedom. " -- a U.S. Ambassador in Central America in the 1980s, asked to explain how such U.S. actions as the mining of Nicaragua's harbors and bombing of airports differed from the acts of terrorism that the U.S. condemned around the world
" The major function of secrecy in Washington is to keep the U.S. people ... from knowing what the nation's leaders are doing. " -- John Stockwell, former CIA official and author
" Never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was legal. " -- Martin Luther King, Jr.
" There is no regime too reactionary for us provided it stands in Russia's expansionist path. There is no country too remote to serve as the scene of a contest which may widen until it becomes a world war." -- Henry Wallace, Vice-President under Franklin Roosevelt 1941-1945
" It should never be forgotten that the people must have priority. " -- Ho Chi Minh, Vietnamese nationalist leader, president of North Vietnam-1954-1969
" The people of the world genuinely want peace. Some day the leaders of the world are going to have to give in and give it to them. " -- Dwight Eisenhower, U.S. president 1953-1961
"When great changes occur in history, when great principles are involved, as a rule the majority are wrong." -- Eugene V. Debs, American socialist leader, 1855-1926
"The American oligarchy increasingly has less in common with the American people than it does with the equivalent oligarchies in Germany or Mexico or Japan." -- Lewis Lapham, journalist
" The United States has to realize it does not own Central America or any other part of the world, and that people have a right to shape their own destiny, to choose the type of government they want. We don't lose Cuba, we don't lose Nicaragua, because they were never ours to lose." -- Sister Ita Ford, one of four U.S. churchwomen slain by Salvadoran soldiers in 1980
" ...the CIA has overthrown functioning democracies in over 20 countries." -- John Stockwell, former CIA official and author
" ... the operative principles dictating U.S. support and hostility in the Third World have been business criteria first, military convenience second, and any humanistic considerations third and thus effectively irrelevant. In fact, they are less than irrelevant -- they are in conflict with the first two criteria, and therefore ... humanizing forces [become] 'threats'. " -- Edward Herman, economist and media analyst
"The torturers from the start had said that the United States supported them and that was what counted." -- Amnesty International report on Greece in the 1960s under US-supported dictator George Papadoupolus
"We, the people of the world, will mobilize the forces of transnational civil society behind a widely shared agenda that bonds our many social movements in pursuit of just, sustainable, and participatory human societies. In so doing we are forging our own instruments and processes for redefining the nature and meaning of human progress and for transforming those institutions that no longer respond to our needs." -- "The People's Earth Declaration, UNCED NGO Forum
"History is the history of war -- of leaders of countries finding reasons and rationals to send the young people off to fight." -- John Stockwell, former CIA official and author
"The dream of the corporate empire builders is being realized. The global system is harmonizing standards across country after country - down toward the lowest common denominator. Although a few socially responsible businesses are standing against the tide with some limited success, theirs is not an easy struggle. We must not kid ourselves. Social responsibility is inefficient in a global free market, and the market will not long abide those who do not avail of the opportunities to shed the inefficient. And we must be clear as to the meaning of efficiency. To the global economy, people are not only increasingly unnecessary, but they and their demands for a living wage are a major source of economic inefficiency. Global corporations are acting to purge themselves of this unwanted burden. We are creating a system that has fewer places for people." -- David Korten, economist and internationalist
"Just who are these goddamn reds, anyway? A goddamn red is anyone who wants 30 cents when I am paying 25." -- John Steinbeck, American writer, 1902-1968, and author of "The Grapes of Wrath"
" The NSS [National Security State] represents and serves the interests of a tiny elite. Its economic policies of "trickling-up", enforced by the machine gun, are rationalized on the ground that growth in the long run will trickle down to the lower orders. This is a self-serving ideology designed mainly to allow the western public to think well of themselves and their own country." -- Edward Herman, economist and media analyst
"The greatest purveyor of violence on earth is my own government." -- Martin Luther King, Jr.
"... the establishment can't admit [that] it is human rights violations that make ... countries attractive to business -- so history has to be fudged, including denial of our support of regimes of terror and the practices that provide favorable climates of investment, and our destabilization of democracies that [don't] meet [the] standard of service to the transnational corporation..." -- Edward Herman, economist and media analyst
" The Darwinian concept of the survival of the fittest has been substituted by a philosophy of the survival of the slickest. " -- Martin Luther King, Jr.
" The so-called "defense" corporations are multinational conglomerates that have no great loyalty to the United States; they are in fact no longer U.S. corporations but transnational entities loyal only to themselves. " -- John Stockwell, former CIA official and author
"A criminal is a person with predatory instincts who has not sufficient capital to form a corporation." -- Howard Scott
"True, the white man brought great change. But the varied fruits of his civilization, though highly colored and inviting, are sickening and deadening. And if it be the part of civilization to maim, rob, and thwart, then what is progress?" -- Chief Luther Standing Bear, 1933
"The United States does not have an automatic call on our resources. There is no mind-set that puts this country first." -- Cyrill Stewert, Chief Financial Officer of Colgate-Palmolive Corporation
"I spent thirty-three years in the Marines, most of my time being a hlgh class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism." -- General Smedley Butler, former US Marine Corps Commandant,1935
" There is ...a huge tacit conspiracy between the U.S. government, its agencies and its multinational corporations, on the one hand, and local business and military cliques in the Third World, on the other, to assume complete control of these countries and "develop" them on a joint venture basis. The military leaders of the Third World were carefully nurtured by the U.S. security establishment to serve as the "enforcers" of this joint venture partnership, and they have been duly supplied with machine guns and the latest data on methods of interrogation of subversives." -- Edward Herman, economist and media analyst
" As an economy measures performance in terms of the creation of money, people become a major source of inefficiency. " -- David Korten, economist and internationalist
"This use of the government of all for the enrichment and aggrandizement of few is a revolution.... These sovereign powers ... have been given by you and me, all of us, to our government to be used only for the common and equal benefit. Given by all to be used by all, it is a revolution to have made them the perquisite of a few." -- Henry Demarest Lloyd,1847 - 1903, US journalist
"We are entering a new phase in human history -- one in which fewer and fewer workers will be needed to produce the goods and services for the global population." -- Jeremy Rifkin, economist
"The achievements of past struggles and the aspirations of an entire nation are [being] undone and erased.... No Agent Orange or steel pellet bombs, no napalm, no toxic chemicals: a new phase of economic and social (rather than' physical) destruction has unfolded. The seemingly neutral and scientific tools of macro-economic policy constitute a non-violent instrument of recolonization and impoverishment." -- Michel Chossudovsky, economist
"Corporations have been enthroned .... An era of corruption in high places will follow and the money power will endeavor to prolong its reign by working on the prejudices of the people... until wealth is aggregated in a few hands ... and the Republic is destroyed." -- Abraham Lincoln, American president, 1861-1865
"Everybody has to move, run and grab as many (Palestinian) hilltops as they can to enlarge the (Jewish) settlements because everything we take now will stay ours...Everything we don't grab will go to them." --Ariel Sharon, Israeli Foreign Minister, addressing a meeting of the Tsomet Party, Agence France Presse, Nov. 15, 1998.
"We must find new lands from which we can easily obtain raw materials and at the same time exploit the cheap slave labor that is available from the natives of the colonies. The colonies would also provide a dumping ground for the surplus goods produced in our factories." -- Cecil Rhodes, "founder" of Rhodesia
"The immiseration of the majority is an integral part of the Free World package for the Third World, the unsavory aspects of the package -- the terror, the direct spoilation of people and resources, and western complicity -- must be rationalized and, as far as possible, kept under the rug." -- Edward Herman, economist and media analyst
"The recent quantum leap in the ability of transnational corporations to relocate their facilities around the world in effect makes all workers, communities and countries competitors for these corporations' favor. The consequence is a "race to the bottom" in which wages and social conditions tend to fall to the level of the most desperate." -- Jeremy Brecher, historian and author
"Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has, and it never will." -- Frederick Douglass, 1817-1895, escaped slave, abolitionist, author, orator, statesman
" It doesn't take a genius to pump up the GNP [of a developing country] by burning down rainforests, using slave labor and social repression to keep things in place. " -- Hazel Henderson, economist
"We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both." -- Louis Brandeis, Supreme Court justice from 1916-1939
" Often the oppressor goes along unaware of the evil involved in his oppression so long as the oppressed accepts it. " -- Martin Luther King, Jr.
"President Rios Montt [is] a man of great personal integrity and commitment who wants to improve the quality of life for all Guatemalans, and [is] getting a "bum rap" on human rights." -- President Ronald Reagan praising Guatemala's military dictator in 1982; during the 17 months of Rios Montt's "Christian" campaign (1982-83), 400 villages were destroyed, 10,000-20,000 Indians were killed, and over 100,000 were forced to flee to Mexico
" Justice too long delayed is justice denied. " -- author unknown
" Among Latin American elites, a peasant asking for a higher wage or a priest helping organize a peasant cooperative is a communist. And someone going so far as to suggest land reform or a more equitable tax system is a communist fanatic. There is no word or act suggesting the desirability of elite generosity toward the poor, or the need for education, organization or material advance for the majority, that has not been branded communistic in Latin America in recent decades. ... Since communism is the enemy and peasants trying to improve themselves, priests with the slightest humanistic proclivity, and naturally anyone seriously challenging the status quo, are communists, they are also, by definition, enemies." -- Edward Herman, economist and media analyst
" The human race has improved everything except the human race." -- Adlai Stevenson, 1900-1965, governor of Illinois and candidate for president
" In the United States today, the Declaration of Independence hangs on schoolroom walls, but foreign policy follows Machiavelli." -- Howard Zinn, historian and author
"The world knows nothing of its greatest men." -- Henry Taylor
"One of the great attractions of patriotism -- it fulfills our worst wishes. In the person of our nation we are able, vicariously, to bully and cheat. Bully and cheat, what's more, with a feeling that we are profoundly virtuous." -- Aldous Huxley, English author, 1894-1963
"The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive. It will often be exercised when wrong, but better so than not to be exercised at all." -- Thomas Jefferson, drafter of the Declaration of Independence and president of US from 1801-1809
"The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons." -- Feodor Dostoevski, Russian novelist, 1821-1881
"There is no reason to accept the doctrines crafted to sustain power and privilege, or to believe that we are constrained by mysterious and unknown social laws. These are simply decisions made within institutions that are subject to human will and that must face the test of legitimacy. And if they do not meet the test, they can be replaced by other institutions that are more free and more just, as has happened often in the past." -- Noam Chomsky, American linguist and US media and foreign policy critic
"The U.S. can destroy Iraq's highways, but not build its own; create the conditions for epidemic in Iraq, but not offer health care to millions of Americans. It can excoriate Iraqi treatment of the Kurdish minority, but not deal with domestic race relations; create homelessness abroad but not solve it here; keep a half million troops drug free as part of a war, but refuse to fund the treatment of millions of drug addicts at home.... We shall lose the war after we have won it." -- Marilyn Young, historian, talking about US government values and priorities
"A small group of people acting in concert for justice and peace throw into motion invisible questions held by a lot of people. They challenge that notion that "we can't make a difference." -- Bernadine Dorn, Irish democracy activist
" ... so long as the media are in corporate hands, the task of social change will be vastly more difficult, if not impossible ... " -- Robert McChesney, journalist and author
" I have come to the conclusion that the actual state of violence, composed of the malnutrition, ignorance, sickness, and hunger of the vast majority of the Guatemalan population, is the direct result of a capitalist system that makes the defenseless Indian compete against the powerful and well-armed landowner ." -- Father Thomas Melville, Guatemala 1968
"We who have a voice should speak for the voiceless" -- Archbishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador
" You do things again and again, and nothing happens. You have to do things, do things, do things,. You have to light that match, light that match, light that match, not knowing how often it's going to sputter and go out and at what point it's going to take hold. Things take a long time. It requires patience, but not a passive patience -- the patience of activism." -- Howard Zinn, historian and author
" Every man of humane convictions must decide on the protest that best suits his convictions, but we must all protest. " -- Martin Luther King, Jr.
"... U. S. business wants a "favorable climate of investment" abroad, and ... military regimes that will crush labor unions and otherwise serve foreign business meet that demand." -- Edward Herman, economist and media analyst
"They are going to arrest us all and execute us for Shell." -- Ken Saro-Wiwa, Nigerian democracy activist, after reading a secret Nigerian military memo in May 1994. He was executed by the Nigerian military dictatorship in 1995.
" It is the job of thinking people, not to be on the side of the executioners." -- Albert Camus, French writer and thinker, 1913-1960
"Social and economic well-being will become a reality only through the zeal, courage, the non-compromising determination of intelligent minorities, and not through the mass." -- Emma Goldman, American anarchist and feminist, 1869-1940
"Spirit the penniless population across the frontier by denying it employment... Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly." --Theodore Herzl, founder of the World Zionist Organization, speaking of the Arabs of Palestine, "Complete Diaries," June 12, 1895 entry.
" Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable ... Every step toward the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering, and struggle; the tireless exertions and passionate concern of dedicated individuals. " -- Martin Luther King, Jr.
" When small steps are taken by large numbers of people momentous things can happen." -- Vandana Shiva, environmental activist
" Today enormous effort goes into convincing the American public that we're just consumers of media manipulation and sound-bites and spin doctors. That we care only about ourselves, money, and "stuff". That acting out of passion and conviction "doesn't make a difference". But all history shows that it does." -- Bernadine Dorn, Irish democracy activist
" If development was measured not by gross national product, but a society's success in meeting the basic needs of its people, Vietnam would have been a model. That was its real "threat." From the defeat of the French at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 to 1972, primary and secondary school enrollment in the North increased sevenfold, from 700,000 to almost five million. In 1980, UNESCO estimated a literacy rate of 90 percent and school enrollment among the highest in Asia and throughout the Third World. " -- John Pilger, author
"The time is past when good men can remain silent, when obedience can segregate men from public risk, when the poor can die without defense." -- Catholic priest and human rights activist Daniel Berrigan
" We may not be strong enough to stop wars when the powers that be want them, but at least we are wise and humane enough to take political and moral stands as publicly as possible. This is, after all, the foundation we must build from." -- Leslie Cagan, anti-war activist
"Never doubt that a small group of committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has." -- Margaret Mead. anthropologist
"The tragedy of life is what dies inside a man while he lives." -- Albert Schweitzer
"Our loyalties must transend our race, our tribe, our class, and our nation; and this means we must develop a world perspective." -- Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.
" Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness." -- Mark Twain
In my opinion we owe the present state of mankind to two mental disorders: the megalomania of technology and the megalomania of nationalism. It is they that have given the present-day world its face and its view of itself; they have given us two world wars and their aftermaths and before their frenzy is spent they will have other, similar consequences. Resistance to these two world diseases is today the most important task and justification of the human spirit. In this resistance my own life has played a part, a ripple in the stream. -- Hermann Hesse - Author (1877-1962)
"It is not power that corrupts but fear. The fear of losing power corrupts those who wield it, and fear of the scourge of power corrupts those who are subject to it." -- Aung San Suu Kyi
"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." -- George Orwell
"Indifference will not wreck a man's life at any one turn, but it will destroy him with a kind of dry-rot in the long run." -- Bliss Carman
"History is fables agreed upon." -- Voltaire
"The human race has improved everything except the human race." -- Adlai Stevenson
"The forces in a capitalist society, if left unchecked, tend to make the rich richer and the poor poorer." -- Jawaharlal Nehru
"If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away." -- Henry David Thoreau
"The world knows nothing of its greatest men." -- Henry Taylor
'Everyone is a prisoner of his own experiences. No one can eliminate prejudices -- just recognize them." -- Edward R. Murrow
"Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world." -- Arthur Schopenhauer
"An economic system can remain viable only so long as society has mechanisms to counter abuses of either state or market power and the erosion of the natural, social, and moral capital that such abuses commonly exacerbate." -- David Korten
"Freedom of the Press belongs to the man who owns one" -- A.J. Liebling
'In any society the dominant groups are the ones with the most to hide about the way society works." -- Barrington Moore, 20th century philosopher
"True, the white man brought great change. But the varied fruits of his civilization, though highly colored and inviting, are sickening and deadening. And if it be the part of civilization to maim, rob, and thwart, then what is progress? I am going to venture that the man who sat on the ground in his tipi meditating on life and its meaning, accepting the kinship of all creatures, and acknowledging unity with the universe of things, was infusing into his being the true essence of civilization.... " -- Chief Luther Standing Bear, in his 1933 autobiography
"When the people clamor to be shielded from reality, when they praise their government for keeping things from them, when they choose to conduct their lives within the limits of whatever fantasy the government supplies, then they are no longer consenting to be governed, they are begging to be ruled." -- Michael Ventura
"The nation, like the church, has its visible symbols and insignia, its parchments engrossed with the revealed word, its dogmas, hymns, liturgy, holy day celebrations, its early Fathers, prophets and martyrs, its priesthood and its lay sodality, its myths of sacred genesis and apocalyptic crises, its world-saving mission and its missionaries." -- Michael Parenti, writer
"Nowhere is it easier to become rich and privileged, but the price of failure is steeper than elsewhere. Nowhere is there more equality of opportunity or less equality of outcome. Nowhere is the medicine or the higher education better, but the nation that preened itself on evading the sickening rigidities of the European class system has pioneered the new social stratification of the underclass." -- Martin Walker, Washington correspondent for The Guardian of London, writing about the United States
"I find it incomprehensible why a country as rich as the U.S. can allow a whole generation of young people in the inner city to slide into despair in such a degree that they go out in the streets and burn down and loot their own neighborhoods." -- Helmut Voss, German correspondent, commenting on the Los Angeles race riots in 1965 and 1992
"This focus on money and power may do wonders in the marketplace, but it creates a tremendous crisis in our society. People who have spent all day learning how to sell themselves and to manipulate others are in no position to form lasting friendships or intimate relationships... Many Americans hunger for a different kind of society -- one based on principles of caring, ethical and spiritual sensitivity, and communal solidarity. Their need for meaning is just as intense as their need for economic security." -- Michael Lerner, editor of Tikkun magazine
"The American political system is essentially a contract between the Republican and Democratic parties, enforced by federal and state two-party laws, all designed to guarantee the survival of both no matter how many people despise or ignore them." -- Richard Reeves
" We have a single system, and in that system the only question is the price at which the proletariat is to be bought and sold, the bread and circuses." " The whole fabric of society will go to wrack if we really lay hands of reform on our rotten institutions. From top to bottom the whole system is a fraud, all of us know it, laborers and capitalists alike, and all of us are consenting parties to it." -- Henry Adams
"I believe there are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations." -- James Madison
"Freedom is about authority. Freedom is about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do." -- NYC Mayor Rudolph Giuliani
"When we got organized as a country and we wrote a fairly radical constitution with a radical bill of rights, giving a radical amount of individual freedom to Americans, it was assumed that the Americans who had that freedom would use it responsibly.... What's happened in America today is too many people live in areas where there's no family structure, no community structure and no work structure. And so there's a lot of irresponsibility. And so a lot of people say there's too much personal freedom. When personal freedom's being abused, you have to move to limit it...." -- President Bill Clinton
"This use of the government of all for the enrichment and aggrandizement of few is a revolution.... These sovereign powers ... have been given by you and me, all of us, to our government to be used only for the common and equal benefit. Given by all to be used by all, it is a revolution to have made them the perquisite of a few." -- Henry Demarest Lloyd. 1890s
'Public school - where the human mind is drilled and
manupulated into submission to various social and moral spooks, and thus
fitted to continue our system of exploitation and oppression." -- Emma Goldman
"The blood of the Jewish people is loved by the Lord; it is therefore redder and their life is preferable." -- Rabbi Yitzhak Ginsburg, head of the Kever Yossev Yeshiva (school of Talmud talmudtruth.html) in Nablus
"Those who own the country ought to govern it." -- John Jay
"The unexamined - life is not worth living." -- Socrates
"I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and willingly accepts the penalty by staying in jail to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustices is in reality expressing the very highest respect for law." -- (The "law" that King respected ... was not man-made law. He meant respect for the higher law, the law of morality, of justice.) Martin Luther King, Jr.In his "Letter from Birmingham City Jail," written in the spring of 1963:
"Liberties are not given; they are taken." -- Aldous Huxley
" Still and all, why bother? Here's my answer. Many people need desperately to receive this message: " I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people do not care about them. You are not alone." -- Kurt Vonnegut
"The corporation has evolved to serve the interests of whoever controls it, at the expense of whomever does not." -- William Dugger
" The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them." -- George Orwell, English writer, 1903-1950
" The most unpardonable sin in society is independence of thought." -- Emma Goldman, American anarchist and feminist, 1869-1940
" Where, after all, do universal human rights begin? In small places, close to home - so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any maps of the world. Yet they are the world of the individual person; the neighborhood he lives in; the school or college he attends; the factory, farm, or office where he works. Such are the places where every man, woman, and child seeks equal justice, equal opportunity, equal dignity without discrimination. Unless these rights have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere. Without concerted citizen action to uphold them close to home, we shall look in vain for progress in the larger world. " -- Eleanor Roosevelt
" Question authority " -- author unkown
" What would have happened if millions of American and British people, struggling with coupons and lines at the gas stations, had learned that in 1942 Standard Oil of New Jersey [part of the Rockefeller empire] managers shipped the enemy's fuel through neutral Switzerland and that the enemy was shipping Allied fuel? Suppose the public had discovered that the Chase Bank in Nazi-occupied Paris after Pearl Harbor was doing millions of dollars' worth of business with the enemy with the full knowledge of the head office in Manhattan [the Rockefeller family among others?] Or that Ford trucks were being built for the German occupation troops in France with authorization from Dearborn, Michigan? Or that Colonel Sosthenes Behn, the head of the international American telephone conglomerate ITT, flew from New York to Madrid to Berne during the war to help improve Hitler's communications systems and improve the robot bombs that devastated London? Or that ITT built the FockeWulfs that dropped bombs on British and American troops? Or that crucial ball bearings were shipped to Nazi-associated customers in Latin America with the collusion of the vice-chairman of the U.S. War Production Board in partnership with Goering's cousin in Philadelphia when American forces were desperately short of them? Or that such arrangements were known about in Washington and either sanctioned or deliberately ignored?" -- Charles Higham, researcher, about U.S.-Nazi collaboration during WWII
" We may not be strong enough to stop wars when the powers that be want them, but at least we are wise and humane enough to take political and moral stands as publicly as possible. This is, after all, the foundation we must build from." -- Leslie Cagan, anti-war activist
"... the establishment can't admit [that] it is human rights violations that make ... countries attractive to business -- so history has to be fudged, including denial of our support of regimes of terror and the practices that provide favorable climates of investment, and our destabilization of democracies that [don't] meet [the] standard of service to the transnational corporation..." -- Edward S. Herman, economist, author, and US media and foreign policy critic
" The corporate grip on opinion in the United States is one of the wonders of the Western world. No First World country has ever managed to eliminate so entirely from its media all objectivity - much less dissent. " -- Gore Vidal, novelist and critic
" [Nearly 70% of the military budget] is to provide men and weapons to fight in foreign countries in support of our allies and friends and for offensive operations in Third World countries .. Another big chunk of the defense budget is the 20% allocated for our offensive nuclear force of bombers, missles, and submarines whose job it is to carry nuclear weapons to the Soviet Union... Actual defense of the United States costs about 10% of the military budget and is the least expensive function performed by the Pentagon... " -- Rear Admiral Gene LaRoque, U.S. Navy retired
" History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people. " -- Martin Luther King, Jr.
" The dream of capitalism is to co-opt people with higher living standards without redistributing any wealth. Without co-optation, widespread repression is the only guarantor of gross inequality." -- Holly Sklar, from her book Trilateralism
"There is no reason to accept the doctrines crafted to sustain power and privilege, or to believe that we are constrained by mysterious and unknown social laws. These are simply decisions made within institutions that are subject to human will and that must face the test of legitimacy. And if they do not meet the test, they can be replaced by other institutions that are more free and more just, as has happened often in the past." Noam Chomsky, American linguist and US media and foreign policy critic " Rollback as a foreign policy ... causes untold devastation and misery for millions overseas, and hinders any potential positive U.S. influence in world affairs... To the extent the U.S. public backs rollback, this support is rooted in a misguided sense of patriotism. Patriotism itself - love of one's country and one's people - is a natural and reasonable human feeling. But patriotism which measures one's country by military superiority over all rivals regardless of consequence is irrational... There is surely a more rational form of patriotism that searches for excellence in social, economic and moral spheres rather than in weapon systems. " -- from the book Rollback by Thomas Bodenheimer and Robert Gould
" If the business community and political elite want to go to war they find it easy to mobilize domestic consent." -- Edward S. Herman, economist, author, and US media and foreign policy critic, Z magazine June, 1999
" With unfailing consistancy, U.S. intervention has been on the side of the rich and powerful of various nations at the expense of the poor and needy. Rather than strengthening democracies, U.S. leaders have overthrown numerous democratically elected governments or other populist regimes in dozens of countries ... whenever these nations give evidence of putting the interests of their people ahead of the interests of multinational corporate interests. " -- Michael Parenti, political scientist and author
"This focus on money and power may do wonders in the marketplace, but it creates a tremendous crisis in our society. People who have spent all day learning how to sell themselves and to manipulate others are in no position to form lasting friendships or intimate relationships... Many Americans hunger for a different kind of society -- one based on principles of caring, ethical and spiritual sensitivity, and communal solidarity. Their need for meaning is just as intense as their need for economic security." -- Michael Lerner, journalist
" We must teach our children ... to resolve their conflicts with words, not weapons. " -- President Clinton (after the Colorado school shootings) urging young people not to resort to violence, while he continued NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, killing thousands of innocent civilians, including children.
" The greatest crime since World War II has been U.S. foreign policy." -- Ramsey Clark, former U.S. Attorney General
" One may well ask: How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others? The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws." -- Martin Luther King, Jr.
"Bringing democratic control to the conduct of foreign policy requires a struggle merely to force the issue onto the public agenda." -- Eric Alterman, author
" It doesn't take a genius to pump up the GNP [of a developing country] by burning down rainforests, using slave labor and social repression to keep things in place. " -- Hazel Henderson, economist
"Increases in prison spending [in the U.S.] average twice as high as increases in education spending." -- National Criminal Justice Commission, February, 1996
"From 1984 to 1994, Califomia built 21 prisons, and only one state university...the prison system realized a 209% increase in funding, compared to a 15% increase in state university funding." -- The Justice Policy Institute (1996)
"In many cities, about half of young African-American men are under the control of the criminal justice system." -- National Criminal Justice Commission, February 1996
"More than I00 countries have now abolished the death penalty in law or practice. . .Against the global trend towards abolition, however, the U.S.A. has relentlessly increased its rate of executions and the number of crimes punishable by death." -- Amnesty International "United States of America- Rights for All," October 1998
"It is a paradox that the nation that did so much to articulate and codify human rights in its foundation documents has so consistently resisted the effective functioning of an international framework to protect these principles and values." -- Amnesty International - "United States of America-Rights for All", October 1998
"No other democratic country in the world denies as many people - in absolute or proportional terms - the right to vote because of felony convictions." -- Human Rights Watch - "World Report 1999, United States"
" How fortunate for governments that the people they administer don't think." -- Adolph Hitler
"You know the one thing that is wrong in this country? Everyone gets a chance to have their fair say." -- President Bill Clinton
"The U.S.A. has been quick to voice its condemnation of human rights violations in some other countries and to stress, by contrast, the wealth of civil and political rights which it guarantees within its borders ... however, it has failed to deliver these rights to many of its people and there are signs that, unless urgent steps are taken, these rights will be further eroded." -- Amnesty International
"We stand for the maintenance of private property... We shall protect free enterprise as the most expedient, or rather the sole possible economic order." -- Adolph Hitler
"The corporations of America today effectively oversee the Congress, and the regulatory agencies and indeed the presidency itself." -- E.L. Doctorow, The Nation magazine, August 7/14, 2000, p13
"War is the biggest business in America." -- Jim Garrison, New Orleans District Attorney, prosecutor in the 1967 JFK assassination conspiracy trial - from his jury summation in the Oliver Stone movie JFK
" When do these corporations begin to lose their credibility? They fought Social Security, Medicare, auto safety. They fought every social justice movement in this country." -- Ralph Nader, The Nation magazine, July 17, 2000, p14
"His forces executed or "disappeared" 3,197 people. Tens of thousands were tortured, hundreds of thousands were forced into exile. Pinochet destroyed the constitution, the parliament, the political parties, the trade unions, and the free universities. " -- Saul Landau, author, about US-backed Augusto Pinochet's impact on Chile, The Progressive, May 2000, p24
" The state is the executive committee of the ruling class." -- Karl Marx
" If there are men in this country big enough to own the government of the United States, they are going to own it." -- Woodrow Wilson, presidential candidate,1912 -The Nation magazine, July 3, 2000, p5
" The U.S. President has been largely refashioned as a high-level trade representative for the transnationals." -- The Nation magazine, July 17, 2000, p26
"War is caused by elites acting in what they take to be their own interests, institutional violence promulgated by ruling groups for personal gain." -- The Nation magazine, May 15, 2000, p20
"Around the world, the messaage received is that, whoever wins [the U.S. election], expect only more of the same - national narcissism disguised as altruism, corporate appeasement, and the arbitrary use of U.S. military and economic might." -- Greg Guma, Toward Freedom magazine, June / July 2000, p2
"Each party [Democratic and Republican] has assumed the mantle of fiscal responsibility while accusing the other of reckless spending. Yet both parties have proposed irresponsibly high levels of military spending at the expense of programs that meet the needs of society's most vulnerable members." -- Friends Committee on National Legislation newsletter, December 1999. p1
"Pinochet is the most despised figure in Chile with polls showing that upwards of 70% want to see him stand trial." -- Z magazine, May 2000, p3
"War is caused by elites acting in what they take to be their own interests, institutional violence promulgated by ruling groups for personal gain." -- The Nation magazine, May 15, 2000, p20
" We lack a Nuremberg to judge the economic order imposed upon us, where every three years more men, women and children die of hunger and preventable diseases than died in the Second World War. " -- Fidel Castro, at a summit of Third World countries in Havana, April 12, 2000
"In the absence of a coherent alternative, the transnational corporations carry on inexorably. Increasingly flagless and stateless, they weave global webs of production, commerce, culture and finance virtually unopposed. They expand, invest and grow, concentrating ever more wealth in a limited number of hands. They work in coalition to influence local, national and international institutions and laws. And together with the governments of their home countries in Europe, North America and Japan, as well as international institutions such as the World Trade Organization, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and increasingly, the United Nations, they are molding an international system in which they can trade and invest even more freely--a world where they are less and less accountable to the cultures, communities and nation-states in which they operate. Underpinning this effort is not the historical inevitability of an evolving, enlightened civilization, but rather the unavoidable reality of the overriding corporate purpose: the maximization of profits." -- The Corporate Planet, Ecology and Politics in the Age of Globalization (Sierra Club Books, 1997)
" The problem in defense is how far you can go [in military spending] without destroying from within what you are trying to defend from without. " -- President Dwight Eisenhower, January 18, 1953
" Corporations have taken over the government and turned it against its own people." -- Ralph Nader, The Progressive magazine, April 2000, p39
"In many respects, we now live in a society that is only formally democratic, as the great mass of citizens have minimal say on the major public issues of the day, and such issues are scarcely debated at all in any meaningful sense in the electoral arena. In our society, corporations and the wealthy enjoy a power every bit as immense as that assumed to have been enjoyed by the lords and royalty of feudal times." -- Robert W. McChesney, author - Rich Media, Poor Democracy
"Hitherto acceptable norms of human conduct do not apply. If the United States is to survive, long-standing American concepts of 'fair play' must be reconsidered. We must develop effective espionage and counterespionage services and must learn to subvert, sabotage and destroy our enemies by more clever, more sophisticated, and more effective methods than those used against us. It may become necessary that the American people be made acquainted with, understand and support this fundamentally repugnant philosophy." -- World War II Gen. James Doolittle explaining in a secret 1954 report to President Eisenhower why CIA covert operations were needed and what they entailed. From Katherine S. Olmstead's book - Challenging the Secret Government, 1996
" Government exists for one purpose: to make things better for all people." -- Eleanor Roosevelt (from her 1992 biography by Blance Wiesen Cook)
" On November 1, the General Assembly of the United Nations voted to reaffirm the Outer Space Treaty-the fundamental international law that establishes that space should be reserved for peaceful uses... Only two nations declined to support this bill-the United States and Israel. " -- The Progressive magazine, January 2000, p27
" Society exists to serve the social needs of people, not the productivity needs of capital. Those two needs are in basic conflict - a conflict of class interest." -- David Bacon, Z magazine January 2000. p36
" Fewer and fewer members of Congress today have any real interest in national security issues..." -- Senator John McCain October 1999, National Journal (from The Defense Monitor - Center for Defense Information newsletter 1999, p6)
"Since it was created in 1995, the WTO has ruled that every environmental, health, or safety policy it has reviewed is an illegal trade barrier." -- Public Citizen report, titled 'Whose Trade Organization? Corporate Globalization and the Erosion of Democracy." (from The Progressive magazine, January 2000, p 8
"The rules of the world economy serve the interests of the multinational companies; they do not serve the interests of the vast majority of the people on this planet." -- The Progressive magazine, January 2000, p10
"True there were no flashing guns, no bombs, no killings. Revolution . . . doesn't need violence. The general strike, as practiced in Seattle, is of itself the weapon of revolution, all the more dangerous because quiet. To succeed, it must suspend everything, stop the entire life stream of a community....That is to say, it puts the government out of operation. And that is all there is to revolt-no matter how achieved." -- Mayor of Seattle, Washington, during the city's general strike in 1919 (from an article by Howard Zinn in The Progressive magazine, January 2000, p20)
"... the most formidable military machine depends ultimately on the obedience of its soldiers, ... the most powerful corporation becomes helpless when its workers stop working, when its customers refuse to buy its products. The strike, the boycott, the refusal to serve, the ability to paralyze the functioning of a complex social structure-these remain potent weapons against the most fearsome state or corporate power." -- Howard Zinn in The Progressive magazine, January 2000, p20
"There are buried truths in our history which continue to insist themselves back into the light, perhaps, because they hold within them the nearly dead embers of what we were once intended to be as a nation." -- from a fund-raising letter by Rev. James M. Lawson and actor Mike Farrell seeking support for a fuller investigation of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., from American Dispatches magazine, Feb 2000, p17
" There is a great deal of money to be made by wrecking the Canadian system of Medicare (universal health care). All the excess costs of an American-style payment system represent higher incomes for both the insurance industry and providers of care. " -- Public Citizen's Health Research Group newsletter, December 1999, p8
"To provide its happy people with perpetual fun is now the deepest purpose of Western civilization." -- Jeremy Seabrook, Third World Network Features, Penang, Malaysia, May 1999
" Everyone's values are defined by what they will tolerate when it is done to others. " -- William Greider, One World Ready or Not, p336
" A society unwilling to confront its social reality in a timely manner is doomed to experience the consequences in later generations and possibly forever." -- William Greider, One World Ready or Not, p383
" The nation-state is not going to disappear anytime soon for the good reason that citizens need some way to assert control over multinational corporations and capital. " -- William Greider, One World Ready or Not, p471
"One result of U.S. political and economic leadership at the end of the millennium is a society of superfluous consumption that is reaching levels that seem not only immoral but absurd as well." -- Lorenzo Meyer, journalist, Reforma (Mexico City), Aug 5, 1999
"In a dictatorship, censorship in used; in a democracy, manipulation." -- Ryszard Kapuscinski, journalist, Le Monde diplomatique (Paris), August 1999
" The power of money in elections, the increased concentration and conservative bias of the media, the resurgent strength and aggressiveness of capital and finance in a globalizing economy, and the weakening of labor, provide the structural background .. for the abandonment of the rudiments of social deocracy [in America]." -- Edward S. Herman, Z magazine, Nov 1999, p44
" The range of debate between the dominant U.S. [political] parties tends to closely resemble the range of debate within the business class. " -- Robert McChesney, author and media critic, from the book Corporate Media and the Threat to Democracy, published by Seven Stories Press First Addition and Open Media
" ... no democratically achieved environmental, health or food safety law challenged at tht WTO has ever been upheld. All have been declared barriers to trade. " -- Lori Wallach / Michelle Sforza, Public Citizen - In These Times, Nov. 1999, p22
... stopping the WTO is at best, a first step toward creating rules for the gobal economy that tame corporate power and protect popular aims and democratic processes. " -- David Moberg - In These Times magazine, November 1999, p22
" One of every three black men in America today is in prison, in jail, on probation or on parole. " -- In These Times magazine, November 1999, p9
" In 1995 ... African-Americans made up 13 percent of the [U.S.] population and 15 percent of all drug users, yet they comprised 33 percent of people arrested, 53 percent of those convicted and 74 percent of those sentenced to prison for drug possession. " -- Marc Mauer - book Race to Incarcerate, In These Times, November 1999, p9
"Colombia is now the third largest recipient of U.S. military aid after Israel and Egypt. Direct U.S. military intervention looms on the horizon for this region (Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru), which exports more oil to the U.S. than the entire Middle East. " -- CovertAction Quarterly magazine, Fall/Winter 1999, p16
"In the media, the world is turned upside down. The contras and the KLA are "democratizers"; the lethal sanctions against Iraq exist to deliver its people from their dictator; the destruction of Yugoslavia through aerial bombardment of civilians and their infrastructure is a "humanitarian intervention." -- CovertAction Quarterly magazine, Fall/Winter 1999, p65
" Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel. " -- Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) English author, literary scholar and social critic
" Sports plays a societal role in engendering jingoist and chauvinist attitudes. They're designed to organize a community to be committed to their gladiators." -- Noam Chomsky (The Progressive magazine, September 1999, p34)
" If you liked El Salvador, you're going to love Colombia. It's the same death squads, the same military aid, and the same whitewash from Washington. " -- Carlos Salinas, Amnesty International's advocacy director for Latin America and the Caribbean (The Progressive magazine, September 1999, p8)
"The major media are large corporations, owned by and interlinked with even larger conglomerates. Like other corporations, they sell a product to a market. The market is advertisers - that is, other businesses. The product is audiences, [and] for the elite media, [they're] relatively privileged audiences. So we have major corporations selling fairly wealthy and privileged audiences to other businesses. Not surprisingly, the picture of the world presented reflects the narrow and biased interests and values of the sellers, the buyers and the product." -- Noam Chomsky (from Take the Rich Off Welfare - Odonian Press, p133)
" Suharto was given a green light by the United States to do what we did [in East Timor]. We sent the Indonesian generals everything they needed to fight a major war against somebody who doesn't have any guns ... " -- Philip Liechty, CIA desk officer in Jakarta, Indonesia in 1975 - told to Australian journalist John Pilger - Covert Action Quarterly, Fall / Winter 1999
" The propaganda system allows the U.S. Ieadership to commit crimes without limit and with no suggestion of misbehavior or criminality; in fact, major war criminals like Henry Kissinger appear regularly on TV to comment on the crimes of the derivative butchers. " Edward Herman, Z magazine Dec 1999 p38
" Because of its power and global interests U.S. leaders have committed crimes as a matter of course and structural necessity. A strict application of international law would ... have given every U.S. president of the past 50 years Nuremberg treatment. " -- Edward Herman, Z magazine Dec 1999 p38
" When the IMF and the World Bank force a country to cut wages, lay off workers, produce for export instead of their own people, and sell off public property to cronies for less than its value, that's called "economic reform." -- Robert Naiman, Toward Freedom magazine, November 1999, p2
" U.S. Ieaders commit war crimes as a matter of institutional necessity, as their imperial role calls for keeping subordinate peoples in their proper place and assuring a "favorable climate of investment" everywhere. They do this by using their economic power, but also (by means of "bombs bursting in the air" and) by supporting Diem, Mobutu, Pinochet, Suharto, Savimbi, Marcos, Fujimori, Salinas, and scores of similar leaders. War crimes also come easily because U.S. Ieaders consider themselves to be the vehicles of a higher morality and truth and can operate in violation of law without cost. It is also immensely helpful that their mainstream media agree that their country is above the law and will support and rationalize each and every venture and the commission of war crimes. " -- Edward Herman, Z magazine Dec 1999 p41
"Imperialism today is taking place in the context of...the 'universalization' of capitalism. It is not now primarily a matter of territorial conquest or direct military or colonial control. It is not now a matter of capitalist powers invading non-capitalist powers in order to bleed them dry directly and by brute force. Now it is more a matter of ensuring that the forces of the capitalist market prevail in every corner of the world (even if this means marginalizing and impoverishing parts of it), and of manipulating those market forces to the advantage of the most powerful capitalist economies and the United States in particular." ... "Military force is still central to the imperialist project, in some ways more than ever." -- Political scientist Ellen Meiksins-Wood, Z magazine Nov 1999, p26
" The Clinton administration is revamping NATO and redefining its mission in order to make it an instrument of American world engagement as peacekeeper, peacemaker, and policeman... " -- William Pfaff, columnist, Z magazine, Nov 1999, p 29
" The U.S. public is depoliticized, poorly informed on foreign affairs ... and strongly patriotic in the face of a struggle with "another Hitler". Even though the public is normally averse to war, even with modest propaganda efforts ... the public can be quickly transformed into enthusiastic supporters of war." -- Edward S. Herman, economist, author, and US media and foreign policy critic, Z magazine June, 1999
" I am astonished each time I come to the U.S. by the ignorance of a high percentage of the population, which knows almost nothing about Latin America or about the world. It's quite blind and deaf to anything that may happen outside the frontiers of the U.S." -- Eduardo Galeano, Latin American writer and historian - The Progressive, July 1999
" [T]here seems to be nothing to prevent the transnational corporations taking possession of the planet and subjecting humanity to the dictatorship of capital.... In order to crush any thought of organized resistance to the supporters of the new world order, tremendous police and military forces are being used to establish a doctrine of repression...." -- Christian la Brie, Le Monde Diplomatique (Paris) May 1999, (Transatlantic Wheeling and Dealing)
" It is only when a society shares caring values that its people can feel secure. " -- Michael Lerner, from the book The Politics of Meaning, 1997, p90
" The cost of being presented as a " responsible and serious candidate" by the media [is] usually to show fundamental agreement with the existing distribution of wealth and power. " -- Michael Lerner, from the book The Politics of Meaning, 1997, p99
" Corporations care very much about maintaining the myth that government is necessarily ineffective, except when it is spending money on the military-industrial complex, building prisons, or providing infrastructural support for the business sector." -- Michael Lerner, from the book The Politics of Meaning, 1997, p315
Every human being is a unique individual. Any attempt to replace the personal conscience by a collective conscience does violence to the individual and is the first step toward totalitarianism. -- Hermann Hesse - Author (1877-1962)
" The purpose of MAI-type agreements is to remove virtually all barriers to investment by corporations. Foreign investors would be required to be treated the same as domestic investors... So while the MAI-and now its clones-would threaten nearly every public sector of national economies such as health care, education, and culture, government spending for the military weapons development and production, and direct support for weapons corporations are excluded from the liberalizing demands of such an agreement. NAFTA mechanisms, as well as the WTO, IMF, and World Bank are totally / undemocratic, with no access by the people. They are run by the nations with the greatest wealth, the U.S. in the first place-with the corporations and banks pulling the strings... So it is clear that the new world order of the free market promises further erosion of the U.N., more wars, destruction of sovereignty, elimination of social programs for the people, increasing poverty and joblessness, and the demise of democracy. " -- Karen Talbot, CovertAction Quarterly, Fall / Winter, 1999, p37
" When people feel themselves powerless to change fundamental aspects of their world, they begin to make accommadations with "reallities" that they actually detest." -- Michael Lerner, from the book The Politics of Meaning, 1997, p311
" Society's dominant discourse shapes not only its politics but the way people think about their personal lives and choices. Just as John F. Kennedy helped legitimize a discourse of idealism that gave impetus to the social movements of the 1960s, so Ronald Reagan managed to legitimize a discourse of selfishness and insensitivity that has had profound social consequences ... Shifting society's discourse - from one of selfishness and cynicism to one of idealism and caring - is the first and most important political goal ... in the next several decades. " -- Michael Lerner, from the book The Politics of Meaning, 1997, p66
" Few trends could so thoroughly undermine the very foundations of our free society as the acceptance by corporate officials of a social responsibility other than to make as much money for their stockholders as possible. " -- Neo-liberal economist Milton Friedman in his 1962 book Capitalism and Freedom (Public Citizen's Health Research newsletter, December 1999, p12)
" There is a great deal of money to be made by wrecking the Canadian system of Medicare (universal health care). All the excess costs of an American-style payment system represent higher incomes for both the insurance industry and providers of care. " -- Public Citizen's Health Research Group newsletter, December 1999, p8
" We're going to fight in space, we're going to fight from space and we're going to fight into space... We'll expand into these two missions - space control and space force application - because they will become increasingly important. We will engage terrestrial targets someday - ships, airplanes, land targets - from space. We will engage targets in space from space. " -- General Joseph Ashy, US Space Command's commander-in-chief, 1996 (The Nation magazine, Dec 27, 1999, p8)
" The purpose of commercial [media] is to induce mass sales. For mass sales there must be a mass norm ... By suppressing the individual, the unique, the industry ... assures itself a standard product for mass consumption." -- John Whiting, KPFA/Pacifica Folio (North Bay), December 1999
" Like blackbirds in flight, packs of reporters darken the sky, moving in swarms at the same speed and in predictable trajectory. When one lands, they all land. When one leaves, they all leave. The programmers and channel controllers from all the stations are part of the same well-paid elite, steeped in the same values, committed to the mission of maximizing audience share and profits. They are chosen for their ability to play the game and not challenge the audience with too many controversial ideas or critical perspectives. It's no surprise that they circulate easily within the commanding heights of media power, moving from company to company and job to job. A kind of group think corporate consensus, steeped in market logic and deeply inbred by an un-brave news culture, breeds conscience-free conformity and self-censorship. This makes frightening sense in a globalized economy where consumerism is more desired than active citizenship, where power is increasingly concentrated and the public is increasingly unwelcome in a public discourse defined by the powerful. If your goal is to numb people and drive them away from active participation, then TV as "weapon of mass distraction" and wall to wall entertainment makes sense. Shut up and shop is the now the message, one that makes sense to advertiser dominated media outlets... " -- Danny Schechter, Dung on all their Houses, Toward Freedom magazine, December / January 2000
"There isn't a trick in the racketeering bag that the military gang is blind to. It has its 'finger men" (to point out enemies), its "muscle men" (to destroy enemies), its "brain guys" (to plan war preparations), and a "Big Boss" (supernationalistic capitalism). "It may seem odd for me, a military man to adopt such a comparison. Truthfulness compels me to do so. I spent 33 years and four months in active military service as a memeber of our country's most agile military force -- the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from second lieutenant to Major General. And during that period I spent more of my time being a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for captialism. "I suspected I was just a part of a racket at the time. Now I am sure of it. Like all members of the military profession I never had an original thought until I left the service. My mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of the higher-ups. This is typical with everyone in the military service. Thus I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and CUba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-12. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that the Standard Oil went its way unmolested. "During those years, I had, as the boys in the back room would say, a swell racket. I was rewarded with honors, medals and promotion. Looking back on it, I feel I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three city districts. I operated on three continents." -- General Smedley Butler, former US Marine Corps
Commandant,1935
"I believe that if we had and would keep our dirty, bloody, dollar-soaked fingers out of the business of these nations so full of depressed, exploited people, they will arrive at a solution of their own.... And if unfortunately their revolution must be of the violent type because the "haves" refuse to share with the "have-nots" by any peaceful method, at least what they get will be their own, and not the American style, which they don't want and above all don't want crammed down their throats by Americans." -- General David Sharp, former US Marine
Commandant,1966
"For the last fifty years we've been supporting right-wing governments, and that is a puzzlement to me...I don't understand what there is in the American character...that almost automatically, even when we have a liberal President, we support fascist dictatorships or are tolerant towards them." -- William Shirer, writer
"I dream that someday the United States will be on the side of the peasants in some civil war. I dream that we will be the ones who will help the poor overthrow the rich, who will talk about land reform and education and health facilities for everyone, and that when the Red Cross or Amnesty International comes to count the bodies and take the testimony of women raped, that our side won't be the heavies." -- Richard Cohen, columnist
"The killing by a Jew of a non-Jew, i.e. a Palestinian, is considered essentially a good deed, and Jews should therefore have no compunction about it. --Yitzhak Ginsburg,
"We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world-benefaction.... We should cease to talk about vague and unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better." -- George Keenan, head of U.S. State Department
Policy Planning Staff, 1948
"One of the great attractions of patriotism -- it fulfills our worst wishes. In the person of our nation we are able, vicariously, to bully and cheat. Bully and cheat, what's more, with a feeling that we are profoundly virtuous." -- Aldous Huxley, writer
"As human rights conditions deteriorate, factors affecting the "climate of investment," like the tax laws and labor repression, improve from the viewpoint of the multinational corporation. This suggests an important line of causation -- military dictatorships tend to improve the investment climate.... The multinational corporate community and the U.S. government are very sensitive to this factor. Military dictators enter into a tacit joint venture arrangement with Free World leaders: They will keep the masses quiet, maintain an open door to multinational investment, and provide bases and otherwise serve as loyal clients. In exchange, they will be aided and protected against their own people, and allowed to loot public property. -- Edward Herman, author
"Our men . . . have killed to exterminate men, women, children, prisoners and captives, active insurgents and suspected people from lads of 10 up.... Our soldiers have pumped salt water into men to "make them talk," and have taken prisoners people who held up their hands and peacefully surrendered, and an hour later. . . stood them on a bridge and shot them down one by one, to drop into the water below and float down, as examples to those who found their bullet-loaded corpses." -- Philadelphia Ledger newspaper, 1901 in a dispatch
from its Manila [Philippines] correspondent during the US war with Spain
"You never hear of any disturbances in Northern Luzon [Philippines]... because there isn't anybody there to rebel. That country was marched over and cleared out.... The good lord in Heaven only knows the number of Filipinos that were put under the ground; our soldiers took no prisoners; they kept no records; they simply swept the country and wherever or however they could get hold of a Filipino they killed him." -- A Republican member of Congress in an eyewitness
report on the US invasion of the Philippines, 1899.
"Many members of her family were killed. She personally saw children around the age of eight being raped, and then [the soldiers] would take their bayonets and make mincemeat out of them. With their guns they would shoot at their faces...." The Army would cut people up and put soap and coffee in their stomachs as a mocking, [the woman said]. They would slit the stomach of a pregnant woman and take the child out, as if they were taking eggs out of an iguana. That is what I saw." -- Representative Barbara Mikulski (now a US
Senator) relating the story of a peasant woman, a victim of the Mazote
massacre in El Salvador in 1981, where a US trained elite battalion killed
more than 1,000 people.
"He may be a son-of-a-bitch, but at least he's our son-of-a-bitch." -- President Franklin Roosevelt -- justifying
support for Nicaragua's dictator Anastasio Somoza:
"Was there ever any domination that did not appear natural to those who possessed it?" -- John Stuart Mill, 19th century philosopher
"History is written by those who win and those who dominate." -- Edward Said, literary critic
"Fifty years of lies, fifty years of injustice, fifty years of frustration. This is a history of people starving to death, living in misery. For fifty years the same people had all the power, all the money, all the jobs all the education, all the opportunities." -- Jose Napoleon Duarte, President of El Salvador
1980, on why guerrillas were fighting the government
"Tortures range from simple but brutal blows from a truncheon to electric shocks. Often the torture is more refined: the end of a reed is placed in the anus of a naked man hanging suspended downwards on the pau de arara [parrot's perch] and a piece of cotton soaked in petrol is lit at the other end of the reed. Pregnant women have been forced to watch their husbands being tortured. Other wives have been hung naked beside their husbands and given electric shocks on the sexual parts of their body, while subjected to the worst kind of obscenities. Children have been tortured before their parents and vice versa. The length of sessions depends upon the resistance capacity of the victims and have sometimes continued for days at a time." -- Amnesty International, describing the torture
suffered by Brazilians at the hands of the military and the US-run Office
of Public Safety (OPS) in the 1960s
"What the United States has done to the country [Cambodia] is greater evil than we have done to any country in the world, and wholly without reason, except for our own benefit to fight against the Vietnamese." -- California Congressman Pete McClosky following a
visit to Cambodia in the 1970s
" One in 10 chance perhaps, but save Chile! ... not concerned with risks involved ... $10,000,000 available, more if necessary ... make the economy scream." -- CIA Director Richard Helms, discussing plan to
destabilize government of Chile under democractically-elected President
Salvador Allende
"The level of pesticide spraying is the highest in the world, and little concern is shown for the people who live near the cotton fields ... 30 or 40 people a day are treated for pesticide poisoning, death can come within hours, or a longer lasting liver malfunction ... the amounts of DDT in mothers' milk in Guatemala are the highest in the Western world. "It's very simple," explained a cotton planter, "more insecticide means more cotton, fewer insects mean higher profits." In an attack, guerrillas destroyed 22 crop-duster planes; the planes were quickly replaced thanks to the genius of American industry ... and all the pesticide you could ever want, from Monsanto Chemical Company of St. Louis." -- New York Times, 1977, describing pesticide use in
Guatemala under US-supported military dictatoship
"Fuck your Parliament and your Constitution. We pay a lot of good American dollars to the Greeks, Mr. Ambassador. If your Prime Minister gives me talk about Democracy, Parliament and Constitutions, he, his Parliament, and his Constitution may not last very long." -- President Lyndon Johnson to Greek Ambassador,
1970s
"People had been mercilessly tortured simply for being in possession of a leaflet criticizing the regime. Brutality and cruelty on one side, frustration and helplessness on the other. They were being tortured and there was nothing to be done. It was like listening to a friend who has cancer. What comfort, what wise reflection can someone who is comfortable give. Torture might last a short time, but the person will never be the same." -- James Becket, American attorney, in Greece for
Amnesty International, describing the torture suffered by Greeks under
US-supported dictator Papdopoulos in the 1960s
"You make yourself ridiculous by thinking you can do anything. The world is divided in two. There are the communists on that side and on this side the free world. The Russians and the Americans, no one else. What are we. Americans. Behind me there is the government, behind the government is NATO, behind NATO is the U.S. You can't fight us, we are Americans." -- Athens [Greece] inspector Basil Lambrou, 1960s,
speaking to prisoners before torturing them, during the US-supported
Papadopoulos dictatorship
"We love your adherence to democratic principle." -- V.P. George Bush to Philippine dictator Ferdinand
Marcos
"If justice requires the consent of the governed, then our [U.S.] whole past record of expansion is a crime." -- Henry Cabot Lodge
"Why should we be worried about the death squads? They're bumping off the commies, our enemies. I'd give them more power. Hell, l'd get some cartridges if I could, and everyone else would too ... Why should we criticize them? The death squad-I'm for it ... Shit! There's no question we can't wait until Reagan gets in. We hope Carter falls in the ocean real quick ... We all feel that he [Reagan] is our savior. " -- Testimony of Fred Sherwood (CIA pilot during the
overthrow of the Arbenz government in 1954 who settled in Guatemala and
became president of the American Chamber of Commerce), speaking in
Guatemala, September 1980
"The Guatemalan revolution is entering its third decade. Ever since the government of Jacobo Arbenz was overthrown in 1954, the majority of the Guatemalan people have been seeking a way to move the country towards solving the same problems which were present then and have only worsened over time. The counterrevolution, put in motion by the U.S. Government and those domestic sectors committed to retaining every single one of their privileges, dispersed and disorganized the popular and democratic forces. However, it did not resolve any of the problems which had first given rise to demands for economic, social and political change. These demands have been raised again and again in the last quarter century, by any means that seemed appropriate at the time, and have received each time the same repressive response as in 1954." -- Statement by the Guatemalan Army of the
Poor, 1981
"The actual state of violence composed of the malnutrition, ignorance, sickness and hunger of the vast majority of the Guatemalan population, is the direct result of a capitalist system that makes the defenseless Indian compete against the powerful and well-armed landowner." -- Statement by Father Thomas Melville, in
Guateamala, 1968
"A world in which others controlled the course of their own development ... would be a world in which the American system would be seriously endangered." -- Benjamin Cohen
"The national interest is not to protect individual American firms but to preserve a system of business ... The American empire expresses its presence and exercises its influence through the capitalist mode of operation for which it keeps as much of the world "open" a possible." -- Henry Pachter
"Americans cannot teach democracy to the world until they restore their own." -- William Greider
"Democracy was being saved from Communism by getting rid of democracy." -- Newsweek magazine about the Dominican Republic
prior to overthrow of elected President Juan Bosch in1963
"It's a hard decision, but we think the price ... is worth it." -- Secretary of State Madelaine Albright talking
about Iraqi children starving and dying as a result of the US embargo of
food and medicine
"They are going to arrest us all and execute us for Shell." **** Major Paul Okuntimo, Rivers State Internal Security Task Force, Nigeria* "Shell's operations are impossible unless ruthless military operations are undertaken for smooth economic activities to commence." -- Ken Saro-Wiwa, after reading a secret Nigerian
military memo - May 1994. He was executed in 1995.
"No one cared, as long as they were Communists, that they were being butchered. No one was getting very worked up about it." -- Howard Federspiel, the Indonesia expert at the
State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, describing the US
supported overthrow of Sukarno in 1965 and the associated genocide of
500,000 - 1,000,000 Indonesians
"It really was a big help to the army. They probably killed a lot of people, and I probably have a lot of blood on my hands, but that's not all bad." -- Robert Martens, former member of the US
Embassy's political section in Jakarta, in 1990, discussing the 1965
US-backed coup in Indonesia
"Do you know what the head of the Iranian Army told one of our people? He said the Army was in good shape, thanks to U.S. aid -- it was now capable of coping with the civilian population. That Army isn't going to fight the Russians. It's planning to fight the Iranian people." -- Senator Hubert Humphrey
"We always obeyed the law. Isn't that what you do in America? Even if you don't agree with a law personally, you still obey it. Otherwise life would be chaos." -- Gertrude Scholtz-Klink, chief of the Women's
Bureau under Hitler explaining the Jewish policy of the Nazis
"Whenever any form of government becomes destructive of ... [Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness], it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government." -- Thomas Jefferson (and signed by one of my
ancestors, Dr. Josiah Bartlett).
"Conceit, arrogance and egotism are the essentials of patriotism.... Patriotism assumes that our globe is divided into little spots, each one surrounded by an iron gate. Those who had the fortune of being born on some particular spot, consider themselves better, nobler, grander, more intelligent than the living beings inhabiting any other spot. It is, therefore, the duty of everyone living on that chosen spot to fight, kill, and die in the attempt to impose his superiority upon all others." -- Socialist and feminist Emma Goldman lecturing on
patriotism
"The time is past when good men can remain silent, when obedience can segregate men from public risk, when the poor can die without defense." -- Catholic priest-poet Daniel Berrigan
"A common and natural result of an undue respect for law is, that you may see a file of soldiers, colonels, captains, corporals, privates, powder-monkeys, and all, marching in admirable order over hill and dale to the wars, against their wills, ay, against their common sense and consciences, which makes it very steep marching indeed, and produces a palpitation of the heart." -- Henry David Thoreau, in his famous essay
"Civil Disobedience"
"The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive. It will often be exercised when wrong, but better so than not to be exercised at all." -- Thomas Jefferson
"... what the Agency [CIA] does is ordered by the President and the NSC [National Security Council]. The Agency neither makes decisions on policy nor acts on its own account. It is an instrument of the President." -- Philip Agee, CIA Diary, p37
"... Secret CIA operations constitute the usually unseen efforts to shore up unjust, unpopular, minority governments, always with the hope that overt military intervention ... will not be necessary. The more successful CIA operations are, the more remote overt intervention becomes, and the more remote become reforms. Latin America in the 1960s is all the proof one needs." -- Philip Agee, CIA Diary, p561
"But what counter-insurgency really comes down to is the protection of the capitalists back in America, their property and their privileges. US national security, as preached by US leaders, is the security of the capitalist class in the US, not the security of the rest of the people." -- Philip Agee, CIA Diary, p562
"A considerable proportion of the developed world's prosperity rests on paying the lowest possible prices for the poor countries' primary products and on exporting high-cost capital and finished goods to those countries. Continuation of this kind of prosperity requires continuation of the relative gap between developed and underdeveloped countries - it means keeping poor people poor. Increasingly, the impoverished masses are understanding that the prosperity of the developed countries and of the privileged minorities in their own countries is founded on their poverty." -- Philip Agee, CIA Diary, p595
I do not believe that man will be "better" in the future; I do not believe that man is ever better or worse; he is always the same. But at certain times the demonic erupts into mankind not only secretly, among criminals and psychopaths, but openly and on a large scale; it takes on a political life and sweeps whole nations off their feet. -- Hermann Hesse - Author (1877-1962)
"American capitalism, based as it is on exploitation of the poor, with its fundamental motivation in personal greed, simply cannot survive without force - without a secret police force. Now, more than ever, each of us is forced to make a conscious choice whether to support the system of minority comfort and privilege with all its security apparatus and repression, or whether to struggle for real equality of opportunity and fair distribution of benefits for all of society, in the domestic as well as the international order. It's harder now not to realize that there are two sides, harder not to understand each, and harder not to recognize that like it or not we contribute day in and day out either to the one side or to the other." -- Philip Agee, CIA Diary, p597
"The immiseration of the majority is an integral part of the Free World package for the Third World, the unsavory aspects of the package -- the terror, the direct spoilation of people and resources, and western complicity -- must be rationalized and, as far as possible, kept under the rug." -- Edward S. Herman, economist, author, and US media and foreign policy critic
" Americans cannot teach democracy to the world until they restore their own." -- William Greider, journalist and author
"The achievements of past struggles and the aspirations of an entire nation are [being] undone and erased.... No Agent Orange or steel pellet bombs, no napalm, no toxic chemicals: a new phase of economic and social (rather than physical) destruction has unfolded. The seemingly neutral and scientific tools of macro-economic policy constitute a non-violent instrument of recolonization and impoverishment." Michel Chossudovsky, economist
"The crimes of the U.S. throughout the world have been systematic, constant, clinical, remorseless, and fully documented but nobody talks about them." -- Harold Pinter, English dramatist
" America's inability to come to terms with revolutionary change in the The Third World...has created our biggest international problems in the postwar era. But the root of the problem is not, as many Americans persist in believing, the relentless spread of communism. Rather, it is our own difficulty in understanding that Third World revolutions are primarily nationalist, not communist. Nationalism, not capitalism or communism, is the dominant political force in the modern world. You might think that revolutionary nationalism and the desire for self-determination would be relatively easy for Americans - the first successful revolutionaries to win their independence - to understand. But instead we have been dumbfounded when other peoples have tried to pursue the goals of our own revolution two centuries ago.... " -- Former U.S. Senator Frank Church, on the shortsightedness of 'rollback' as our foreign policy doctrine
" People with advantages are loath to believe that they just happen to be people with advantages. " -- C. Wright Mills - The Power Elite (book)
" In the United States today, the Declaration of Independence hangs on schoolroom walls, but foreign policy follows Machiavelli." -- Howard Zinn, historian and author
"When you give food to the poor, they call you a saint. When you ask why the poor have no food, they call you a communist." -- Archbishop Helder Camara, Brazilian liberation theologist
" Enemies are necessary for the wheels of the U.S. military machine to turn. " -- John Stockwell, former CIA official and author
" Today, the United States and Somalia are the only two countries in the world which haven't ratified the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. And since Somalia is a country with no internationally recognized government, the United States essentially stands alone as the last holdout to legally guarantee children the same full range of human rights ... agreed to by 191 other sovereign states. " -- Catherine Langevin-Falcon, executive director of UNICEF (Humanist magazine, Nov/Dec1998, p11)
"Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear-kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor-with the cry of grave national emergency. Always there has been some terrible evil at home or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it ..." -- US General Douglas MacArthur, 1957
" Never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was legal. " -- Martin Luther King, Jr.
"We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both." -- Louis Brandeis, Supreme Court justice from 1916-1939
" We live amidst massive inequality. We don't really care that most people have little power to alter the conditions of their lives. We refuse to acknowledge that the earth is dying and that we are killing it. ... Our unthinking celebration of individual achievement and upward mobility works to damage the life-giving ties of kinship and the bonds of community. ...We pretend not to understand the linkages between our comfortable standard of living and the dictatorships we impose and protect through an international military presence. " -- Jerry Fresia, author of Toward an American Revolution
" A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual doom. " -- Martin Luther King, Jr.
" The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. " -- Edward Bernays, "father" of modern public relations (PR), on government propaganda
" In a world of increasing inequality, the legitimacy of institutions that give precedence to the property rights of "the Haves" over the human rights of "the Have Nots" is inevitably called into serious question. " -- David Korten, economist and internationalist
" It is legal to purchase a fully assembled Uzi machine gun in this country [United States] but it's not legal to purchase a fully assembled low-watt radio transmitter. " -- Greg Ruggerio, editor and media activist
" States are not moral agents, people are, and can impose moral standards on powerful institutions." -- Noam Chomsky, American linguist and US media and foreign policy critic
"Conceit, arrogance and egotism are the essentials of patriotism.... Patriotism assumes that our globe is divided into little spots, each one surrounded by an iron gate. Those who had the fortune of being born on some particular spot, consider themselves better, nobler, grander, more intelligent than the living beings inhabiting any other spot. It is, therefore, the duty of everyone living on that chosen spot to fight, kill, and die in the attempt to impose his superiority upon all others." -- Emma Goldman, American anarchist and feminist, 1869-1940
"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." -- Howard Zinn, historian and author
" Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable ... Every step toward the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering, and struggle; the tireless exertions and passionate concern of dedicated individuals. " -- Martin Luther King, Jr.
" There is ...a huge tacit conspiracy between the U.S. government, its agencies and its multinational corporations, on the one hand, and local business and military cliques in the Third World, on the other, to assume complete control of these countries and "develop" them on a joint venture basis. The military leaders of the Third World were carefully nurtured by the U.S. security establishment to serve as the "enforcers" of this joint venture partnership, and they have been duly supplied with machine guns and the latest data on methods of interrogation of subversives." -- Edward S. Herman, economist, author, and US media and foreign policy critic
" The government of the United States does not, in its policies, express the decency of its people. " -- Jerry Fresia, author of Toward an American Revolution
"... the United States has given frequent and enthusiastic support to the overthrow of democracy in favor of "investor friendly" regimes. The World Bank, IMF, and private banks have consistently lavished huge sums on terror regimes, following their displacement of democratic governments, and a number of quantitative studies have shown a systematic positive relationship between U.S. and IMF / World Bank aid to countries and their violations of human rights." -- Edward S. Herman, economist, author, and US media and foreign policy critic
" Not a nut or bolt shall reach Chile under Allende. Once Allende comes to power we shall do all within our power to condemn Chile and all Chileans to utmost deprivation and poverty..." -- U.S. Ambassador to Chile, three years before the coup against Chile's elected President Allende in 1973
"What a man believes upon grossly insufficient evidence is an index into his desires - desires of which he himself is often unconscious. If a man is offered a fact which goes against his instincts, hewill scrutinize it closely, and unless the evidence is overwhelming, he will refuse to believe it. If, on the other hand, he is offered something which affords a reason for acting in accordance to his instincts, he will accept it even on the slightest evidence. The origin of myths is explained in this way." -- Bertrand Russell, philosopher - "Roads to Freedom"
" Few of us can easily surrender our belief that society must somehow make sense. The thought that the state has lost its mind and is punishing so many innocent people is intolerable. And so the evidence has to be internally denied. " -- Arthur Miller playwrite
" People with advantages are loath to believe that they just happen to be people with advantages. " -- C. Wright Mills - from the book The Power Elite
"Progress is measured in part by the courageous people who put their careers and often their lives at risk by challenging the parameters of what is acceptable in society, even though these parameters may be damaging to the quality of life. Heroes are created from ordinary people who are willing to take risks to their personal security and safety for the benefit of the larger community." -- author unknown
" As the mainstream media has become increasingly dependent on advertising revenues for support, it has become an anti-democratic force in society." -- Robert McChesney, journalist and media critic
" The enormous gap between what US leaders do in the world and what Americans think their leaders are doing is one of the great propaganda accomplishments of the dominant political mythology. " -- Michael Parenti, political scientist and author
" The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy: that is the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness." -- John Kenneth Galbraith, economist and author
" History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people. " Martin Luther King, Jr.
" Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. " -- George Orwell, author of the book "1984"
" I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America. " -- Alexis de Tocqueville, 1805 - 1859, French political thinker and author of Democracy in America
" If an American is concerned only about his nation, he will not be concerned about the peoples of Asia, Africa, or South America. Is this not why nations engage in the madness of war without the slightest sense of penitence? Is this not why the murder of a citizen of your own nation is a crime, but the murder of citizens of another nation in war is an act of heroic virtue? " -- Martin Luther King, Jr.
"One of the intentions of corporate-controlled media is to instill in people a sense of disempowerment, of immobilization and paralysis. Its outcome is to turn you into good consumers. It is to keep people isolated, to feel that there is no possibility for social change." -- David Barsamian, journalist and publisher
" Many of us regard ourselves as mildly liberal or centrist politically, voice fairly pleasant sentiments about our poor children, contribute money to send poor kids to summer camp, feel benevolent. We're not nazis; we're nice people. We read sophisticated books. We go to church. We go to synagogue. Meanwhile, we put other people's children into an economic and environmental death zone. We make it hard for them to get out. We strip the place bare of amenities. And we sit back and say to ourselves, "Well, I hope that they don't kill each other off. But if they do, it's not my fault." -- Jonathan Kozol, educator and author
" The only way to abolish war is to make peace heroic." -- John Dewey, American philosopher and educator, 1859-1952
" [U.S. aid] has tended to flow disproportionately to Latin American governments which torture their citizens..." -- Lars Schoultz, leading academic specialist on human rights in Latin America
"Americans have been taught that their nation is civilized and humane. But, too often, U.S. actions have been uncivilized and inhumane." -- Howard Zinn, historian and author
" In the post-Cold War era, the United States needs to promote the development of democracy and human rights, not militaries that view their own citizens as the enemy." -- U.S. Senator Richard Durbin
"The American oligarchy increasingly has less in common with the American people than it does with the equivalent oligarchies in Germany or Mexico or Japan." -- Lewis Lapham, journalist
" When I visited Auschwitz I was horrified. And when I visited Iraq, I thought to myself, 'What will we tell our children in fifty years when they ask what we did when the people in Iraq were dying.'" -- Mairead McGuire, Nobel Peace Prize Winner, Northern Ireland
" If we who have the time and money to take to the streets don't do so, then the people are going to think that everything is OK." -- Peruvian university student protesting Alberto Fujimori's illegal election victory, April 2000 - World Press Review, August 2000, p11
" Can it be believed that the democracy which overthrew the feudal system and vanquished kings will retreat before tradesmen and capitalists." -- Alex de Tocqueville
"If a baseball player slides into home plate and, right before the umpire rules if he is safe or out, the player says to the umpire-"Here is $1,000." What would we call that? We would call that a bribe. If a lawyer was arguing a case before a judge and said, "Your honor before you decide on the guilt or innocence of my client, here is $1,000." What would we call that? We would call that a bribe. But if an industry lobbyist walks into the office of a key legislator and hands her or him a check for $1,000, we call that a campaign contribution. We should call it a bribe." -- Janice Fine, Dollars and Sense magazine, July / August 2000, p21
" We believe that the government and the police have embarked on a strategy of repression to stop, crush or marginalize the burgeoning progressive movement that gained world attention in the protest against the WTO in Seattle last year." -- International Action Center attorneys announcing the filing of a class-action lawsuit on behalf of protestors at the WTO Ministerial meeting in Seattle, Washington, April 1999
" Throughout the world, on any given day, a man, woman or child is likely to be displaced, tortured, killed or "disappeared", at the hands of governments or armed political groups. More often than not, the United States shares the blame." -- Amnesty International, in its annual report on U.S. military aid and human rights
Every politician in the world is all for revolution, reason, and disarmament--but only in enemy countries, not in his own. -- Hermann Hesse - Author (1877-1962)
"How dare Americans allow their government to cause such misery [in the world]." -- Ramsey Clark, former United States Attorney General and human rights activist
"One of the great attractions of patriotism -- it fulfills our worst wishes. In the person of our nation we are able, vicariously, to bully and cheat. Bully and cheat, what's more, with a feeling that we are profoundly virtuous." -- Aldous Huxley, English author, 1894-1963
" Does it sound outrageous to you that military spending for fiscal year 2000 will be almost $290 billion and all other domestic discretionary spending, such as education, job training, housing, Amtrak, medical research, environment, Head Start and many other worthwhile programs will total $246 billion, the biggest disparity in modern times ? " -- Dale Bumpers, former US Senator and present Director of the Center for Defense Information
" Every man of humane convictions must decide on the protest that best suits his convictions, but we must all protest. " -- Martin Luther King, Jr.
" To accept opinions is to gain the good solid feeling of being correct without having to think. " C. Wright Mills - The Power Elite (book) " It is no longer a question of controlling a military-industrial complex, but rather, of keeping the United States from becoming a totally military culture. " -- Jerome Weisner, president emeritus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
" The NSS [National Security State] represents and serves the interests of a tiny elite. Its economic policies of "trickling-up", enforced by the machine gun, are rationalized on the ground that growth in the long run will trickle down to the lower orders. This is a self-serving ideology designed mainly to allow the western public to think well of themselves and their own country." -- Edward S. Herman, economist, author, and US media and foreign policy critic
" Patriotism, like religion, meets people's need for something greater to which their individual lives can be anchored ... America's state religion, [is] patriotism, a phenomenon which has convinced many of the citizenry that "treason" is morally worse than murder or rape " -- William Blum, author of Killing Hope
"The recent quantum leap in the ability of transnational corporations to relocate their facilities around the world in effect makes all workers, communities and countries competitors for these corporations' favor. The consequence is a "race to the bottom" in which wages and social conditions tend to fall to the level of the most desperate." -- Jeremy Brecher, historian and author
" In the councils of government, we must guard against unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist." -- President Dwight D. Eisenhower in his Farewell Address, 1961
"For the last fifty years we've been supporting right-wing governments, and that is a puzzlement to me...I don't understand what there is in the American character... that almost automatically, even when we have a liberal President, we support fascist dictatorships or are tolerant towards them." -- William Shirer, author
"First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win." -- Gandhi
"Propaganda is to a democracy what violence is to a dictatorship." -- William Blum, Rogue State
"America is today the leader of a world-wide anti-revolutionary movement in the defense of vested interests. She now stands for what Rome stood for. Rome consistently supported the rich against the poor in all foreign communities that fell under her sway; and, since the poor, so far, have always and everywhere been far more numerous than the rich, Rome's policy made for inequality, for injustice, and for the least happiness of the greatest number." -- Arnold Toynbee, historian, 1961
"A terrorist is someone who has a bomb but doesn't have an air force." -- William Blum, Rogue State, p93
"There are too many things that embarrass Americans in that report. ... they are asked to believe that their country has been evil. And nobody wants to believe that." -- Congressman Otis Pike, 1975, on why a congressional report about US covert actions around the world should not be revealed to Americans - from the book Rogue State by William Blum, p9
"... our leaders are cruel because only those willing to be inordinately cruel and remorseless can hold positions of leadership in the foreign policy establishmen ... People capable of expressing a full human measure of compassion and empathy toward faraway powerless strangers ... do not become president of the United States, or vice president, or secretary of state, or national security adviser or secretary of the treasury. Nor do they want to." -- William Blum, from the book Rogue State, p7
We spend over $4,000 per capita on personal health care, about twice as much as Canada and the European countries (which cover all their citizens), and the gap is growing. Why is our system such a money sink? Not because our population is older or sicker. All the Western countries have aging populations vulnerable to nearly the same illnesses at roughly the same rates, and ours is actually younger than most. Nor is the reason that we get better outcomes. By all the usual measures of health-life expectancy, infant mortality, childhood immunization rate- we do worse than most Western countries. The only plausible explanation is how health care is financed and delivered. The American health care system is staggeringly wasteful and inflationary. The United States is unique in treating health care as a market commodity distributed according to the ability to pay instead of as a social good distributed according to medical need." -- American Prospect magazine, Nov 6, 2000, p25
"First, do no harm." -- Hippocrites
"They made a wasteland and called it peace." -- Tacitus, Roman historian. - 1st century AD
"Much of our foreign policy is driven by insatiable corporate pressures to sell military hardware to both the Defense Department and directly to foreign dictators. This happens even if it goes against the interests of our country, taxpayers and the principle of prudently allocated public budgets" "Fifty years after World War II, tens of thousands of our troops are still in Europe and East Asia, defending prosperous nation allies who are fully capable of defending themselves against non-existent enemies. Yet, useless massive weapons systems remain on the drawing boards to further mortgage our fiscal future and drain money and talent from long overdue civilian projects." "President Bush declared the end of the Cold War 10 years ago and we still have a Cold War budget. We still have a budget that's going over $300 billion as if we still have enemies called the Soviet Union. When are we going to demobilize? What about the peace dividend?" -- Ralph Nader, Friends Committee on National Legislation newsletter, September 2000
"The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist. McDonald's cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas." -- Thomas Friedman, NY Times columnist - RESIST newsletter, September 2000, p4
"[Genocide] certainly is a valid word in my view, when you have a situation where we see thousands of deaths per month, a possible total of I million to 1.5 million over the last nine years. If that is not genocide, then I don't know quite what is." -- Denis Halliday, former UN humanitarian coordinator - on effect of US sanctions on Iraqi people
"We are in the process of destroying an entire nation. It is as simple and terrifying as that. It is illegal and immoral." -- Denis Halliday, former UN humanitarian coordinator - on effect of US sanctions on Iraqi people
Why is it that only those who hope to profit by it come out for the self-determination of nations? -- Hermann Hesse - Author (1877-1962)
"We now live in a state of permanent war - a global arms industry, apparently the largest single international business, must have its products used up so more can be sold. There must be profits for the capitalists and jobs for the proles... Are we not still in Caligula's Rome? " -- David Watson, New Internationalist magazine, May 2000, p35
"The Wall Street Journal is read by the people who run the country. The New York Times is read by people who think they run the country. The Washington Post is read by people who think they ought to run the country. USA Today is read by people who think they ought to run the country but don't understand the Washington Post. The Los Angeles Times is read by people who wouldn't mind running the country if they could spare the time. The Boston Globe is read by people whose parents used to run the country." -- The Nation magazine
No one was thinking of war; they were all arming just in case, because rich people like to see iron walls around their money. -- Hermann Hesse - Author (1877-1962)
"Get some new lawyers" -- US Secretary of State Madeline Albright to British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook when he told her he was informed that the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia was illegal under international law
"This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing Goverment, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it." -- Abraham Lincoln, 1861
"We are not hated because we practice democracy, value freedom, or uphold human rights. We are hated because our government denies these things to people in Third World countries whose resources are coveted by our multinational corporations. That hatred we have sown has come back to haunt us in the form of terrorism and in the future, nuclear terrorism." -- Robert Bowman, Vietnam Veteran, presently bishop of the United Catholic Church in Melbourne Beach, FL., from The National Catholic Reporter, Oct. 2, 1998
"Terrorism has become a sort of screen created since the end of the Cold War by policymakers in Washington ... It is fabricated to keep the population afraid and insecure, and to justify what the United States wishes to do globally." -- Edward Said, Palestinian activist and author, International Socialist Review, Aug/Sep 2001, p30
"Military intervention to maintain the global status quo will become a constant feature of international relations, whether this is justified in terms of fighting drugs, fighting terrorism, containing "rogue states," opposing "Islamic fundamentalism," or containing China" -- . Walden Bello, sociologist and author, International Socialist Review, Aug/Sep 2001, p8
"Peace cannot exist without equality." -- Edward Said, author, The Nation magazine, Sept 17/24, 2001, p28
'Bribes given to Third World officials most likely find their resting place in the banks of First World countries, which makes us accessories to the crimes." -- Toronto Star newspaper, July 18, 2001
"There is never any justification for acts of terror against innocent civilians." -- Rabbi Michael Lerner, Tikkun magazine,
"If we'd been born where they were born and taught what they were taught, we would believe what they believe." -- A sign inside a church in Northern Ireland, explaining the origin of intolerance and hate
"The United States is not only number one in military power but also in the effectiveness of its propaganda system." -- Edward S. Herman, Z magazine, September 2001, p42
"The corporation is not a person and it does not live. It is a lifeless bundle of legally protected financial rights and relationships brilliantly designed to serve money and its imperatives. It is money that flows in its veins, not blood. The corporation has neither soul nor conscience." -- David Korten, The Post-Corporate World, p75
" We are witnessing an unprecedented transfer of power from people and their governments to global institutions whose allegiance is to abstract free-market principle, and whose favored citizens are soulless corporate entities that have the power to shape and break nations." -- Joel Bleifuss, In These Times magazine, September 2001, p1
" The revolutions of the 18th and l9th centuries ushered in an era of constitutional democracies. Today's world citizens ... are starting to realize that unaccountable global institutions threaten their hard-won political freedoms. " -- Joel Bleifuss, In These Times magazine, September 2001, p1
" In feudal times, kings and lords held power through divine right. To challenge their authority was to oppose God, a heresy worthy of death. Now enlightened, we view such notions as foolish. Yet the divine right of yore has been replaced by a pantheon of free market verities whose lock on popular thought is so strong that heresy can be kept in check through ridicule." -- Joel Bleifuss, In These Times magazine, September 2001, p1
" Justice is the great work of humans on earth. " -- Daniel Webster
" In the 1980s capitalism triumphed over communism. In the l990s it triumphed over democracy. " -- David Korten, The Post-Corporate World, p1
" Rogue states that are internally free - and the U.S. is at the outer limits in this respect - must rely on the willingness of the educated classes to produce accolades and tolerate or deny terrible crimes." -- Noam Chomsky, Rogue States, p11
"Powerful people in the American ruling class fear democracy." -- Tim Robbins, actor and progressive activist, The Nation, August 6/13, 2001, p25
"Since 1945 this country ... has sought not the delicate balance of power but a position of commanding superiority in weapons technology, in the regulation of the international economy, and in the manipulation of the internal politics of other countries." -- Richard Barnet, Intervention and Revolution, p25
"The United States supports right-wing dictatorships in Latin America, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East ... because these are the rulers who have tied their personal political destiny to the fortunes of the American corporations in their countries... Revolutionary or nationalist leaders have radically different political constituencies and interests. For them creating "a good investment climate" for the United States and developing their own country are fundamentally conflicting goals. Therefore, the United States has a strong economic interest in keeping such men from coming to power or arranging for their removal if they do." -- Richard Barnet, Intervention and Revolution, p15
"America, like Britain before her, is now the great defender of the Status Quo. She has committed herself against revolution and radical change in the underdeveloped world because independent governments would destroy the world economic and political system, which assures the United States its disproportionate share of economic and political power. ... America's preeminent wealth depends upon keeping things in the underdeveloped world much as they are, allowing change and modernization to proceed only in a controlled, orderly, and nonthreatening way." -- Richard Barnet, Intervention and Revolution, p15
"The fundamental assumption that the United States retains the right and obligation to intervene in the Third World in any way it ultimately deems necessary, including military, remains an article of faith among the people who guide both political parties." -- Gabriel Kolko, Confronting the Third World, p296
"We live constantly with the tensions and costs of the United States' aggressive foreign policy, which not only affects profoundly the likelihood of war or peace throughout the world but also imposes monumental constraints on urgently needed social and economic changes in the Third World today." -- Gabriel Kolko, Confronting the Third World, p298
"A brutally repressive regime was essential to America's interests because there was no civilian political option for it to turn to, and Washington had no hesitation in immediately endorsing the new order and aiding it, revealing again its two-decades-long preference for dictators and repressive regimes in the hemisphere. Chile also proved once more that the United States could never gracefully accept the verdict of democratic politics in any nation, where anti-Yankee sentiment was overwhelming for fear of seeing not only its local investments lost but also encouraging anti-United States economic legislation elsewhere in the hemisphere." -- Gabriel Kolko, Confronting the Third World, p221
"If we continue these policies, to rob ourselves in order to feed this national security monster, we are going to continue to degrade American life." -- Roger Wilkins
"As U.S. involvement in Colombia escalates, the situation looks more and more like Vietnam ..." -- The Progressive magazine, July 2001, p8
"...a number of financial and industrial figures of World War II and several members of the government served the cause of money before the cause of patriotism. While aiding the United States' war effort, they also aided Nazi Germany's. " -- Charles Higham, Trading with the Enemy, 1983, pxiii
"... several of the greatest American corporate leaders were in league with Nazi corporations before and after Pearl Harbor, including I.G. Farben, the colossal Nazi industrial trust that created Auschwitz." -- Charles Higham, Trading with the Enemy, 1983, pxiv
"The tycoons were linked by an ideology: the ideology of Business as Usual. Bound by identical reactionary ideas, the members sought a common future in fascist domination regardless of which world leader might further that ambition." -- Charles Higham, Trading with the Enemy, 1983, pxiv
"If democracy is ever to be threatened, it will not be by revolutionary groups burning government offices and occupying the broadcasting and newspaper offices of the world. It will come from disenchantment, cynicism and despair caused by the realization that the New World Order, means we are all to be managed and not represented." -- Tony Benn, British Labour Party member of Parliament - CovertAction Quarterly, April / June 2001, p43
"All the emphasis on crime and drugs and pornography used to justify the suppression of the internet is really aimed at suppressing knowledge of the radical politic alternatives that are now available." -- Tony Benn, British Labour Party member of Parliament - CovertAction Quarterly, April / June 2001, p43
"The Seattle movement will have to turn its mind to political action that makes use of the ballot box and the voting machine to secure a change at the top." -- Tony Benn, British Labour Party member of Parliament - CovertAction Quarterly, April / June 2001, p43
"The press ... traditionally sides with authority and the establishment." -- Sam Donaldson, ABC correspondent
" They just don't come in contact with people not in their [income] bracket. They've lost touch with their community." -- Stan Opotowsky of ABC News, about the journalistic elite - On Bended Knee, p81
"The whole thing was PR. This was a PR outfit that became President and took over the country. And to the degree then to which the Constitution forced them to do things like make a budget, run foreign policy and all that, they sort of did. But their first, last, and overarching activity was public relations." -- Leslie Janka, White House press secretary - book On Bended Knee, page 6
"The search of the young today is more specific than the ancient search for the Holy Grail. The search of the youth today is for ways and means to make the machine-and the vast bureaucracy of the corporation state and of government that runs that machine - the servant of man. That is the revolution that is coming. It could be a revolution in the nature of an explosive political regeneration. It depends on how wise the Establishment is. If, with its stockpile of arms, it resolves to suppress the dissenters, America will face, I fear, an awful ordeal." -- William O. Douglas, Points of Rebellion, 1969, p96
"Our upside down welfare state is "socialism for the rich, free enterprise for the poor." The great welfare scandal of the age concerns the dole we give rich people." -- William O. Douglas, Points of Rebellion, 1969, p68
"Those in power are blind devotees to private enterprise. They accept that degree of socialism implicit in the vast subsidies to the military-industrial-complex, but not that type of socialism which maintains public projects for the disemployed and the unemployed alike." -- William O. Douglas, Points of Rebellion, 1969, p68
"The Pentagon has a fantastic budget that enables it to dream of putting down the much-needed revolutions which will arise in Peru, in the Philippines, and in other benighted countries." William O. Douglas, Points of Rebellion, 1969, p41 "The interests of the corporation state are to convert all the riches of the earth into dollars." -- William O. Douglas, Points of Rebellion, 1969, p10
"Free trade is not leading to freedom. It is leading to slavery. Diverse life forms are being enslaved through patents on life, farmers are being enslaved into high-tech slavery, and countries are being enslaved into debt and dependence and destruction of their domestic economies." -- Vandana Shiva, The Progressive magazine, April 2001, p44
"The only thing worth globalizing is dissent." -- Arundhati Roy, author, The Progressive magazine, April 2001, p38
"Once you have seen certain things, you can't un-see them, and seeing nothing is as political an act as seeing something." -- Arundhati Roy, author, The Progressive magazine, April 2001, p39
"We no longer have senators and congressmen who represent our interests. The great project of America has been hijacked by big corporations and the super rich." -- Doris "Granny D" Haddock
The greatest threat to our world and its peace comes from those who want war, who prepare for it, and who, by holding out vague promises of future peace or by instilling fear of foreign aggression, try to make us accomplices to their plans. -- Hermann Hesse - Author (1877-1962)
"The cold war provided the perfect excuse for Western governments to plunder and exploit the Third World in the name of freedom; to rig its elections, bribe its politicians, appoint its tyrants and, by every sophisticated means of persuasion and interference, stunt the emergence of young democracies in the name of democracy." -- John le Carre', The Nation magazine, April 9, 2001, p11
"Multi-billion-dollar multinational corporations view the exploitation of the world's sick and dying as a sacred duty to their shareholders." -- John le Carre', The Nation magazine, April 9, 2001, p13
"It is money, money, money! Not ideas, not principles, but money that reigns supreme in American politics." -- Senator Robert Byrd, West Virginia
"The U.S. government officials lie when they talk about human rights. They're a bunch of hypocrites and liars. You can't take it seriously." -- Eqbal Ahmad, Confronting Empire- interviews, p51
"Although the privileged of this world can accept the existence of poverty on a massive scale and not be overawed by it, problems begin when the causes of this poverty are pointed out to them. Once causes are determined, then there is talk of 'social injustice,' and the privileged begin to resist. This is especially true when to structural analysis there is added a concrete historical perspective in which personal responsibilities come to light. But it is the consientization and resultant organization of poor sectors that rouse the greatest fears and the strongest resistance." -- Gustavo Gutierrez, A Theology of Liberation
"Why should we worry about the death squads? They're bumping off the commies, our enemies. I'd give them more power. Hell, I'd give them some cartridges if I could, and everyone else would too...Why should we criticize them? The death squad - I'm for it." -- Fred Sherwood, the former president of the American Chamber of Commerce in Guatemala, September 1980
"... the media serve the interests of state and corporate power, which are closely interlinked, framing their reporting and analysis in a manner supportive of established privilege and limiting debate and discussion accordingly." -- Noam Chomsky
"Our country ... when right, to be kept right. When wrong, to be put right." -- Carl Shurz
"As corruption becomes routine in Washington in both parties, it trickles down as a corrupting influence in everyone's lives. Democracy is the ultimate casualty ... As democracy ebbs, Americans retreat into private cocoons, feeling helpless to make a difference... In a democracy, civic participation and the belief in one's ability to contribute to the common good is the most important guarantor of public morality. When that belief fades, so too does the vision of the common good itself. " -- Charles Derber, Corporation Nation, p316
"Quite simply, there can be no popular sovereignty without a real belief in the value of government. If government does not assume and carry out public responsibilities, less accountable institutions such as the corporation will do the job in their own self-interest." -- Charles Derber, Corporation Nation, p250
"There is no free lunch for the creature comforts delivered by the corporation. The ravaging of nature, the erosion of economic security, the destabilization of the family, the commercialization of all human relationships, the corruption of democracy, and the dissipation of spiritual meaning in the face of rampant materialism - these are all part of the cost of the corporate system as we know it. And they add up to a very high price to pay for the bounty of the great American shopping mall." -- Charles Derber, Corporation Nation, p178
"Today, as in the Gilded Age, we live in a world where a morality of personal responsibility rubs shoulders with a culture of greed and of flagrant social irresponsibility. Now as then, business has shed its collective responsibility for employees - just as government has for its citizens." -- Charles Derber, Corporation Nation, p28
"Leaders symbolize what the country stands for. As corruption becomes routine in Washington in both parties, it trickles down as a corrupting influence in everyone's lives... Democracy is the ultimate casualty, and the sapping of democratic life is the most serious contribution of corporate ascendancy to our spiritual decline. As democracy ebbs, Americans retreat into private cocoons, feeling helpless to make a difference... In a democracy, civic participation and the belief in one's ability to contribute to the common good is the most important guarantor of public morality. When that belief fades, so too does the vision of the common good itself." -- Charles Derber, Corporation Nation, p317
"Societies characterized by enduring deep divisions of income and wealth, such as most third-world societies, are wounded societies with little sense of the common good... As America drifts in this direction, ending poverty and redistributing income should be at the top of the national agenda." -- Charles Derber, Corporation Nation, p203
... "the United States is slipping into a category of countries - among them Brazil, Britain, and Guatemala - where the gap [between rich and poor] is the worst around the globe." -- United Nations Human Development Report, 1966 - Corporation Nation, p12
"Whoever controls the media, controls the peoples' minds." -- author unknown
"The stakes are too high for government to be a spectator sport." -- Barbara Jordan, former U.S. Congresswoman
"A visitor can make a big difference after arriving in [an undemocratic Third World] country. People under threat cannot help but be buoyed by contact with a sympathetic outside world." -- William F. Schulz is the executive director of Amnesty International USA.
"Over breakfast coffee we read of 40,000 American dead in Vietnam. Instead of vomiting, we reach for the toast. Our morning rush through crowded streets is not to cry murder but to hit that trough before somebody else gobbles our share." -- Dalton Trumbo, author of 'Johnny Got His Gun', in the introduction to the reissue of his book, 1970.
"The two major parties have abdicated their responsibility to lead, to advocate solutions, and to promote true democracy..." -- Ralph Nader, November 8, 2000 - The Progressive, Dec 2000, p9
"... what the Agency [CIA] does is ordered by the President and the NSC [National Security Council]. The Agency neither makes decisions on policy nor acts on its own account. It is an instrument of the President." -- Philip Agee, CIA Diary, p37
"We should tax things we don't like. We should tax pollution ... And we should lighten the taxes on things we do like, like honest lobor, like food." -- Ralph Nader, Dollars and Sense magazine, Nov/Dec 2000, p12
"Th[e] modern susceptibility to conformity and obedience to authority indicates that the truth endorsed by authority is likely to be accepted as such by a majority of people, who are innately obedient to authority. This obedience-truth will then become a consensus truth accepted by many individuals unable to stand alone against the majority. In this way, the truth promulgated by the propaganda system-however irrational-stands a good chance of becoming the consensus, and may come to seem self-evident common sense. " -- Edwards, David Burning All Illusions, p203
"We will have a world government whether you like it or not. The only question is whether that government will be achieved by conquest or consent." (Jewish Banker Paul Warburg, February 17, 1950, as he testified before the U.S. Senate).
"The great ideal of Judaism is that the whole world shall be imbued with Jewish teachings, and that in a Universal Brotherhood of Nations a greater Judaism in fact all the separate races and religions shall disappear." (Jewish World, February 9, 1933)
"The League of Nations is a Jewish idea. We created it after a fight of 25 years. Jerusalem will one day become the Capital of World Peace." (Nahum Sokolow, During the Zionist Congress at Carlsbad in 1922)
"The Nations will exhort to tranquility. They will be ready to sacrifice everything for peace, but WE WILL NOT GIVE THEM PEACE until they openly acknowledge our International Super-Government, and with SUBMISSIVENESS." (Zionist Congress at Basle in 1897)
"One of the major reasons for my visit to the United States is to interest Americans in the beautification of Jerusalem, the Capital of the World, no less than the Capital of Israeli." (Mayor of Jerusalem, South African Jewish Times of 14th March, 1952)
"As for the final result of the Messianic revolution it will always be the same...the nations will be converted to Judaism and will obey the law, or else they will be destroyed, and the Jews will be the masters of the world." (G. Batault, Le probleme juif, p. 135; The Secret Powers Behind Revolution, by Vicomte Leon de Poncins, pp. 203204)
"The right place for the League of Nations is not Geneva or the Hague, Ascher Ginsberg has dreamed of a Temple on Mount Zion where the representatives of all nations should dedicate a Temple of Eternal Peace. Only when all peoples of the earth shall go to THIS temple as pilgrims is eternal peace to become a fact." (Ascher Ginsberg, in The German Jewish paper Judisch Rundschu, No. 83, 1921) Ascher Ginsberg is stated to have rewritten the "Protocols of Zion," in "Waters Flowing Eastwards," page 38.
"We, the Jews, are a people - one people. When we sink, we become revolutionary proletariat, the subordinate officers of a revolutionary party; when we rise, there arises also our terrible power of the purse." (Theodor Herzl, 'The Jewish State', 1896)
"The image of the world in 1987 as traced in my imagination - the increasing influence of the farmers and workers, and the rising political influence of men of science, may transform the United States into a welfare state with a planned economy. Western and Eastern Europe will become a federation of autonomous states having a socialist and democratic regime. With the exception of the USSR as a federated Eurasian state, all other continents will become united in a world alliance, at whose disposal will be an international police force. All armies will be abolished, and there will be no more wars. In Jerusalem, the United Nations (a truly United Nations) will build a shrine of the Prophets to serve the federated union of all continents; this will be the seat of the Supreme Court of Mankind, to settle all controversies among the federated continents." (David Ben Gurion)
"The two Internationals of Finance and Revolution work with ardour, they are the two fronts of the Jewish Internationale. There is a Jewish conspiracy against all nations." (Rene Groos, 'Le Nouveau Mercure, Paris, May, 1927)
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