THIRD WORLD TRAVELER
is an archive of articles and book excerpts
that seek to tell the truth
about American democracy, media, and foreign policy,
and about the impact of the actions of
the United States government, transnational corporations, global
trade and financial institutions, and the corporate media,
on democracy, social and economic justice, human rights, and war
and peace,
in the Third World, and in the developed world.
THIRD WORLD TRAVELER
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and to tell others about the wealth of information that these
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this much-needed information may not continue to be available.
"We become what
we think about all day long "
Ralph Waldo Emerson
"It takes little
in wartime to turn ordinary men into killers. Most give themselves
willingly to the seduction of unlimited power to destroy, and
all feel the peer pressure to conform. Few, once in battle, find
the strength to resist. Physical courage is common on a battlefield.
Moral courage is not."
Chris Hedges
"Why don't elite
economists ever want to reduce payroll, gasoline and sales taxes?
Why do they always want to cut income and corporate taxes? Why
do some Ivy League experts always want to slash tax rates on capital
gains and dividends? Why is their theory silent about the beneficial
effects of cuts for low-income people? The reason is simple: these
other rate cuts won't offer much benefit to the rich, so well-paid
economists working for the affluent see no investment and growth
benefits from such reductions. If the experts urged consideration
of tax cuts for the middle and lower classes, their colleges would
likely starve for donations from the CEOs."
economist Ravi Batra
"No one outside America any longer believes the US media
or the US government... You can't believe a word the American
media says. If they say anything correct, it's just an accident.
Paul Craig Roberts
a searchable database
of quotations - excerpted from hundreds of books and thousands
of articles - challenging conventional wisdom
"The greatest
myth concerning American foreign policies is the deeply-held belief
that no matter what the United States does abroad, no matter how
bad it may look, no matter what horror may result, the American
government means well. American leaders may make mistakes, they
may blunder, they may even on the odd occasion cause more harm
than good, but they do mean well. Their intentions are always
honorable. Of that Americans are certain. They genuinely wonder
why the rest of the world can't see how kind and generous and
self-sacrificing America has been."
William Blum
"On every network
there's the same small circle of pundits who know so little about
so much, explaining the world to us and getting it so wrong."
Amy Goodman
"The theories
offered by economists rationalize the self-interest of big business
and the wealthy. Such theories claim to benefit society and the
public's well-being. But they do just the opposite: they make
the great mass of people poorer while making the rich fabulously
richer."
economicst Ravi Batra
"The
difference between patriotism and nationalism is that the patriot
is proud of his country for what it does, and the nationalist
is proud of his country no matter what it does; the first attitude
creates a feeling of responsibility, but the second a feeling
of blind arrogance that leads to war."
Sydney J Harris
"The people
will believe what the media tells them they believe."
George Orwell
"Since the Bush-Cheney
Administration took office in January 2001, controlling the major
oil and natural gas fields of the world had been the primary,
though undeclared, priority of US foreign policy... Not only the
invasion of Iraq, but also the toppling of the Taliban in Afghanistan,
had nothing to do with 'democracy,' and everything to do with
pipeline control across Central Asia and the militarization of
the Middle East."
F. William Engdahl
"The national
interest in a capitalist society is little more than the interest
of its upper class."
Lawrence H. Shoup and
William Minter
"There is nothing
puzzling about America's gratuitously aggressive foreign policy.
What an aggressive foreign policy accomplishes by slow degrees,
a state of war accomplishes in a trice. Overnight [war] kills
reform, overnight it transforms insurgents into traitors and the
Republic into an imperiled realm. Overnight it strangles free
politics, distracts and overawes the citizenry. Overnight it blasts
public hope."
Walter Karp
"Most Americans
have no idea that what we are fed by the news media is nothing
more than a portrayal of what powerful corporations want us to
believe, that what happens to pass as education is as often as
not mere propaganda, that what we learn in church may have very
little or nothing to do with the truth, that what our parents
teach us may be nothing more than an accumulation of their own
personal biases, no doubt a rather subtle modification of what
they were taught by their parents. And through such a process,
governments and nations around the world wield control as to what
their citizens, believe, value, and do."
Doug Soderstrom
"I would no
more teach children military training than teach them arson, robbery,
or assassination."
Eugene Debs
"What the press
do is they tell you lies, lies they already know you want to hear.
The press can figure out what its readers or viewers believe,
and make a hell of a living pandering to their egos and telling
them that they're smart. They lie and tell the audience they are
right, and they never have to change your mind about anything.
And the audience rewards them, lauding them and paying them money
to keep hearing those sweet, self-serving lies."
Allan Uthman
"Free trade
has done to America what even the Great Depression could not do.
Even during the economic cataclysm of the 1930s, earnings rose
with productivity because the United States was still a closed
economy with high tariffs. But since 1973, earnings have declined
while productivity has continued to rise. Eventually, free trade
could be more devastating than even the Great Depression."
economist Ravi Batra
"The New York
Times was the house organ of the Establishment. It was committed,
both editorially and in its presentation of the news, to the interests
of an Establishment: continuity, security and legitimacy. Therefore
they generally supported business and finance, the American version
of empire, the government and the president, until, and unless,
some excess was so egregious that it posed a threat to continuity,
security or legitimacy."
Larry Beinhart
"You don't have
to burn books to destroy a culture, just get the people to stop
reading them."
Ray Bradbury
"When
our military is no longer committing war crimes, when we are in
compliance with basic standards of human rights and social justice,
then we can break out the bumper stickers and ribbons that say
"Support Our Troops". Until then, every American, as
well as our military, are guilty of crimes against peace."
Joe Mowrey
"Advertisers
want to avoid programs with serious complexities and disturbing
controversies that interfere with the "buying mood"."
Noam Chomsky and Edward
S. Herman - Manufacturing Consent
"Since the anticommunism
hysteria in the years following the Second World War, a bipartisan
consensus has existed on foreign policy. Meaningful political
discourse has been almost absent about foreign policy issues.
So many foreign policy decisions have been placed beyond public
scrutiny, that almost all of what passes as official information
about foreign policy is manufactured by government agencies for
its propaganda effect."
Daniel Hellinger and
Dennis R. Judd Brooks - The Democratic Facade
Augusto Pinochet - Chile,
"Papa Doc" Duvalier - Haiti, Efrain Rios Montt - Guatemala,
Park Chung-hee - South Korea, King Fahd - Saudi Arabia
P W Botha - South Africa,
Sani Abacha - Nigeria, Rafael Trujillos - Dominican Republic,
General Suharto - Indonesia, Fulgencio Batista - Cuba
Shah Pahlevi - Iran,
Mobuto Sese Seko - Zaire, Ferdinand Marcos - Philippines, Anastasio
Somoza - Nicaragua
King Hassan II - Morocco,
Pol Pot - Cambodia, Hosni Mubarak - Egypt, Saddam Hussein - Iraq
"Condelleza
Rice and Colin Powell are both dangerous people. What they did
in Haiti [Jean-Bertrand Aristide coup] is a good measure of it.
They destroyed a democracy. They squelched loans that had been
approved by the Inter-American Development Bank. They did everything
behind the scenes, including arming the thugs that came to overrun
the country. They're frauds."
Randall Robinson
"We have brought
torture, cluster bombs, depleted uranium, innumerable acts of
random murder, misery, degradation and death to the Iraqi people,
and call it 'bringing freedom and democracy to the Middle East'."
Harold Pinter
"Since the late
1940s, the United States has been deliberately engaged in an imperial
project, and anyone who would hold the office of the presidency
has to be willing to serve that end. All presidents have to promote
the national security state, both domestically and in American
foreign policy, if they wish to attain and hold on to power."
Morris Berman
"The news and
the truth are not the same thing. "
Walter Lippmann
"The American
press is, and always has been, a booster press, its editorial
pages characteristically advancing the same arguments as the paid
advertising copy."
Lewis Lapham
"Our leaders
are cruel because only those willing to be inordinately cruel
and remorseless can hold positions of leadership in the foreign
policy establishment. 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
"American policymakers,
setting themselves up as guardians of the world system, are more
inclined than ever to simply disregard international laws and
conventions if they get in the way of unrivaled military supremacy.
Every instance of U.S. armed intervention during the 1980s and
1990s represents a flagrant violation of regional treaties and
laws, not to mention the UN Charter itself, which explicitly prohibits
military attacks against sovereign nations - for example, Grenada,
Nicaragua, Haiti, Panama, Serbia, and Iraq. In any event, the
U.S. has consistently shown its contempt for international bodies,
agreements, and procedures that might conflict with its hegemonic
aspirations."
Carl Boggs
"Americans
are wonderfully courteous to strangers, yet indiscriminately shoot
kids in schools. They believe they are masters of the world, yet
know nothing about what goes on outside their shores. They are
people who believe the world stretches from California to Boston
and everything outside is the bit they have to bomb to keep the
price of oil down. Only one in five Americans hold a passport
and the only foreign stories that make their news are floods,
famine, and wars, because it makes them feel good to be an American.
Feeling good to be American is what they live for. "
Brian Reade, columnist
for London Mirror newspaper
"The media are
a pitiful lot. They don't give us any history, they don't give
us any analysis, they don't tell us anything. They don't raise
the most basic questions: Who has the most weapons of mass destruction
in the world by far? Who has used weapons of mass destruction
more than any other nation? Who has killed more people in this
world with weapons of mass destruction than any other nation?
The answer: the United States."
Howard Zinn
"We Americans
are the ultimate innocents. We are forever desperate to believe
that this time the government is telling us the truth."
Sydney Schanberg
"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 on Foreign Relations to the US State Department, 1941,
from CFR War & Peace Studies archives
"If it had not
been for the discontent of a few fellows who had not been satisfied
with their conditions, you would still be living in caves. Intelligent
discontent is the mainspring of civilization. Progress is born
of agitation. It is agitation or stagnation."
Eugene Debs
2009 - the New Guilded
Age in America
"All
societies we know of are governed by the selfish interests of
the ruling class or classes."
Plato
"Patriotism
has got to be more than hanging out a flag and then sitting on
your ass watching jets bomb Afghanistan."
Ruth Coniff
"The United
States has entered the ranks of the failed states. One of the
most remarkable manifestations of a failed state is that the criminals
are all inside the government operating against the people, whereas
in a normal state, the criminals are on the outside of the government,
operating against it. So, we now have every manifestation of being
a failed state, with the government in the hands of a few Wall
Street gangsters."
Paul Craig Roberts
"A
properly functioning system of indoctrination has a variety of
tasks, some rather delicate. One of its targets is the stupid
and ignorant masses. They must be kept that way, diverted with
emotionally potent oversimplifications, marginalized and isolated."
Noam Chomsky
"Americans are
too broadly underinformed to digest nuggets of information that
seem to contradict what they know of the world . Instead, news
channels prefer to feed Americans a constant stream of simplified
information, all of which fits what they already know. That way
they don't have to devote more air time or newsprint space to
explanations or further investigations. Politicians and the media
have conspired to infantilize, to dumb down, the American public.
At heart, politicians don't believe that Americans can handle
complex truths, and the news media, especially television news,
basically agrees."
Tom Fenton, former CBS
foreign correspondent
"When the full
and true story of Jean-Bertrand Aristide is finally told, it will
portray a noble and humble man who gave of himself honorably to
serve the interests of all the people of Haiti. His only failure
was his inability to overcome the brutal and corrupt power of
the U.S. and its determination to see him fail. "
Stephen Lendman
CONGO
PAGE
"Africa is extremely
rich in many resources, from agriculture to oil, minerals, and
a huge variety of other resources used all around the world. If
African nations were able to develop their own economies, use
their own resources, and create their own industries and businesses,
they could become self-sufficient at first, and then may become
a force of great competition for the established industries and
elites around the world. After all, Europe does not have much
to offer in terms of resources, as the continent's wealth has
largely come from plundering the resources of regions like Africa,
and in becoming captains of monetary manipulation. A revitalized,
vibrant, economically independent and successful Africa could
spell the end of Western financial dominance. "
Andrew Gavin Marshall
"Every time
weaker nations have attempted to reallocate their resources and
undertake land reform to feed starving populations, powerful interests
emanating from the rich world and its multilateral bodies have
thwarted their efforts."
Susan George
"Even open-minded
people will often find themselves unable to take seriously the
likes of [Noam] Chomsky, [Edward] Herman, [Howard] Zinn and [Susan]
George on first encountering their work; it just does not seem
possible that we could be so mistaken in what we believe. The
individual may assume that these writers must be somehow joking,
wildly over-stating the case, paranoid, or have some sort of axe
to grind. We may actually become angry with them for telling us
these terrible things about our society and insist that this simply
'can't be true'. It takes real effort to keep reading, to resist
the reassuring messages of the mass media and be prepared to consider
the evidence again."
David Edwards - Burning
All Illusions
"The problem
is not that a computer network [Internet] offers an alternative
to the information aristocracy. The true crisis is that neither
the news media nor the government has enough credibility to be
accepted as either truthful or impartial on their own."
military writer William
M. Arkin
[Ariel Sharon - Israel,
King Fahd - Saudi Arabia, Shah Pahlevi - Iran, Saddam Hussain
- Iraq]
"The United
States became the target of terrorists on 9/11 not because of
the country's freedom and democracy, but because U.S. Middle East
policy has had nothing to do with freedom and democracy."
Stephen Zunes
"The need for
major states as enemies stems partly from the fact that only the
perceived presence of enemy states can justify military spending
at the level which the industries concerned have come to demand."
David Edwards - Burning
All Illusions
What Can I Do?
"Americans cannot
teach democracy to the world until they restore their own."
William Greider
"To oppose the
policies of a government does not mean you are against the country
or the people that the government supposedly represents. Such
opposition should be called what it really is: democracy, or democratic
dissent, or having a critical perspective about what your leaders
are doing. Either we have the right to democratic dissent and
criticism of these policies or we all lie down and let the leader,
the Fuhrer, do what is best, while we follow uncritically, and
obey whatever he commands. That's just what the Germans did with
Hitler, and look where it got them."
Michael Parenti
"The best available
measure of living standard is the average real wage of production
or nonsupervisory workers. This is because these workers constitute
some 80 percent of the work force of the United States, and it
is their prosperity or poverty that should be the primary determinant
of the U.S. living standard, not the GNP figures commonly used
for this purpose by the administrations or mainstream economists."
economist Ravi Batra
"If war aims
are stated which seem to be solely concerned with AngloAmerican
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 on Foreign Relations to the US State
Department, 1941
"So important
did military spending and the military-industrial sector become
during World War II and the Cold War that they have become fundamental
to the U.S. economy, U.S. economic growth and above all U.S. technological
development. Despite its often almost incredible wastefulness
and corruption, this military spending has also been in some ways
a kind of unacknowledged but rather successful state industrial
development strategy in a country whose free market ideology meant
that it could not formally adopt or admit to such a strategy."
David Edwards - Burning
All Illusions
"[I] never saw
a foreign intervention that the [New York] Times did not support,
never saw a fare increase or a rent increase or a utility rate
increase that it did not endorse, never saw it take the side of
labor in a strike or lockout, or advocate a raise for underpaid
workers. And don't let me get started on universal health care
and Social Security. So why do people think the Times is liberal?"
veteran New York Times
reporter John Hess
New Videos
Israel and Palestine
Anatomy of Casino Capitalism
George Galloway on war
crimes
Craig Murray - torture
renditions to Uzbekistan
Lawrence Wilkerson -
former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell
H1N1 swine flu vaccine
controversy
The
Century Of The Self - BBC Documentary on the History of Propaganda
Part
1
Part
2
Part
3
Part
4
The Federal Reserve
"Patriotism
is your conviction that this country is superior to all others
because you were born in it."
George Bernard Shaw
[put ASK on Subject
line (in CAPS)]
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