THIRD WORLD TRAVELER
is an archive of articles and book excerpts
that seek to tell the truth
about the state of 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
also provides information and links to aid international travelers.
Visitors
are encouraged to buy the books and subscribe to the magazines,
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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.
"No people can
be both ignorant and free."
Thomas Jefferson
"The news and
the truth are not the same thing. "
Walter Lippmann
"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,
former U.S. Supreme Court Justice
a searchable database
of thousands of quotations
"I wouldn't
call it fascism exactly, but [an American] political system nominally
controlled by an irresponsible, dumbed down electorate who are
manipulated by dishonest, cynical, controlled mass media that
dispense the propaganda of a corrupt political establishment can
hardly be described as democracy either."
Edward Zehr
"The people
will believe what the media tells them they believe."
George Orwell
"We were not
born critical of existing society. There was a moment in our lives
(or a month, or a year) when certain facts appeared before us,
startled us, and then caused us to question beliefs that were
strongly fixed in our consciousness - embedded there by years
of family prejudices, orthodox schooling, imbibing of newspapers,
radio, and television."
Howard Zinn
"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
"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
"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
"Real information, subversive information, remains the
most potent power of all . We must not fall into the trap of believing
that the media speaks for the public. That wasn't true in Stalinist
Czechoslovakia and it isn't true of the United States."
Harold Pinter
"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
"We have about
50% of the world's wealth but only 6.3% of its population....
Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships
which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without
positive detriment to our national security. To do so, we will
have to dispense with all sentimentality and daydreaming, and
our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate
national objectives. 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, secret
U.S. State Department memo, 1948
"The U.S. record
of war crimes has been, from the nineteenth century to the present,
a largely invisible one, with no government, no political leaders,
no military officials, no lower-level operatives held accountable
for criminal actions... Anyone challenging this mythology is quickly
marginalized, branded a traitor or Communist or terrorist or simply
a lunatic beyond the pale of reasonable discussion."
Carl Boggs
"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."
Robert McChesney
"You don't have
to burn books to destroy a culture, just get the people to stop
reading them."
Ray Bradbury
"Democracy is
not about trust; it is about distrust. It is about accountability,
exposure, open debate, critical challenge, and popular input and
feedback from the citizenry. It is about responsible government.
We have to get our fellow Americans to trust their leaders less
and themselves more, trust their own questions and suspicions,
and their own desire to know what is going on."
Michael Parenti
"Those who know
the least obey the best."
George Farquhar
"In dictatorships
we are more fortunate than you in the West in one respect. We
believe nothing of what we read in the newspapers and nothing
of what we watch on television, because we know it's propaganda
and lies. Unlike you in the West, we've learned to look behind
the propaganda and to read between the lines, and unlike you,
we know that the real truth is always subversive."
dissident Czech novelist
Zdener Urbanek
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
"Americans cannot
escape a certain responsibility for what is done in our name around
the world. In a democracy, even one as corrupted as ours, ultimate
authority rests with the people. We empower the government with
our votes, finance it with our taxes, bolster it with our silent
acquiescence. If we are passive in the face of America's official
actions overseas, we in effect endorse them."
Mark Hertzgaard
"While free
markets tend to democratize a society, unfettered capitalism leads
invariably to corporate control of government."
Robert Kennedy. Jr.
What if everything we were told
about 9-11 was a lie ?
"Why of course
the people don't want war... 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."
Hermann Goering
"The goal of
conservative rulers around the world, led by those who occupy
the seats of power in Washington, is the systematic rollback of
democratic gains, public services, and common living standards
around the world."
Michael Parenti
"During times
of universal deceit, telling the truth is revolutionary."
George Orwell
"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
"The twentieth
century has been characterized by three developments of great
political importance: the growth of democracy, the growth of corporate
power, and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting
corporate power against democracy."
Alex Carey
"Paramount among
the responsibilities of a free press is the duty to prevent any
part of the government from deceiving the people..."
Hugo Black, Supreme
Court Justice
"Television
is altering the meaning of "being informed" by creating
a species of information that might properly be called disinformation...
Disinformation does not mean false information. It means misleading
information - misplaced, irrelevant, fragmented or superficial
information - information that creates the illusion of knowing
something, but which in fact leads one away from knowing."
Neil Postman
"What chiefly
governs the [U.S.] military budget is the need to spend enormous
sums of money in a useless way. The allegedly powerful Pentagon
is simply a receptacle for wasteful expenditure, just as a city
dump is the receptacle for the refuse of a city."
Walter Karp
"From 1945 to
2003, the United States attempted to overthrow more than 40 foreign
governments, and to crush more than 30 populist-nationalist movements
fighting against intolerable regimes. In the process, the US bombed
some 25 countries, caused the end of life for several million
people, and condemned many millions more to a life of agony and
despair."
William Blum
"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
"The price good
people pay for their indifference to public affairs is to be ruled
by evil men."
Plato
"If fascism
ever came to the United States, it would be wrapped in an American
flag."
Huey Long
" 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
" 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.
"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
"Who needs censorship
when we have self-censorship. When news is being withheld, or
neutralized, at best, how can we expect anything but cynicism
from those who read our daily papers? Maybe the reason many aren't
buying newspapers isn't that they can get information for free
on the Internet, but because they don't believe what they read,
and how can they?"
Jane Lyn Stahl
"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
"This [the U.S.
Constitution] is likely to be administered for a course of years
and then end in despotism... when the people shall become so corrupted
as to need despotic government, being incapable of any other."
Benjamin Franklin
"For ethics
to matter to us, the happiness and suffering of others must matter
to us."
Sam Harris
"The United
States is a society in which people not only can get by without
knowing much about the wider world but are systematically encouraged
not to think independently or critically and instead to accept
the mythology of the United States as a benevolent, misunderstood
giant as it lumbers around the world trying to do good."
Robert Jensen
"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]
"You don't need
a totalitarian dictatorship like Hitler's to get by with murder
... you can do it in a democracy as long as the Congress and the
people Congress is supposed to represent don't give a damn?"
William Shirer
"Free and responsible
government by popular consent just can't exist without an informed
public."
Bill Moyers
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
"To criticize
one's country is to do it a service .... Criticism, in short,
is more than a right; it is an act of patriotism - a higher form
of patriotism, I believe, than the familiar rituals and national
adulation."
U.S. Senator J. William
Fulbright
"The point of
public relations slogans like "Support our troops" is
that they don't mean anything... That's the whole point of good
propaganda. You want to create a slogan that nobody's going to
be against, and everybody's going to be for. Nobody knows what
it means, because it doesn't mean anything. Its crucial value
is that it diverts your attention from a question that does mean
something: Do you support our policy? That's the one you're not
allowed to talk about."
Noam Chomsky
"Media manipulation
in the U.S. today is more efficient than it was in Nazi Germany,
because here we have the pretense that we are getting all the
information we want. That misconception prevents people from even
looking for the truth."
Mark Crispin Miller
"[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
"Capitalism
is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men for the nastiest
of motives will somehow work for the benefit of all."
John Maynard Keynes
Where Money Comes From
"The men the
American people admire most extravagantly are the most daring
liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to
tell them the truth."
H. L. Mencken
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