Quotations page 3

"... 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

*****

"The linkages between the United States and the NSSs [National Security States] are clear and powerful ... but the role of the United States as the sponsor - the Godfather - of this real terror network is hidden from view ... the United States is portrayed as an innocent bystander, occasionally making mistakes in its anxiety to protect the citizens of Latin America from the evils of Communism, but regretful of any excesses that may sometimes occur there. This amazing pretense is carried through despite the historical record of an openly announced role of Godfather dating back at least to 1823 (the Monroe Doctrine), the more or less steady interventionism since then, the remarkable degree of homogeneity within the NSSs, and the recent record of our role in sponsoring and managing the terror network."

Edward S. Herman

*****

"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'

*****

" Government exists for one purpose: to make things better for all people."

Eleanor Roosevelt

*****

" Every man of humane convictions must decide on the protest that best suits his convictions, but we must all protest. "

Martin Luther King, Jr.

*****

"Bad ideas flourish because they are in the interest of powerful groups."

Paul Krugman

*****

" 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

*****

"Americans have been taught that their nation is civilized and humane. But, too often, U.S. actions have been uncivilized and inhumane."

Howard Zinn

*****

" The great multinationals are unwilling to face the moral and economic contradictions of their own behavior - producing in low-wage dictatorships and selling to high-wage democracies. Indeed, the striking quality about global enterprises is how easily free-market capitalism puts aside its supposed values in order to do business. The conditions of human freedom do not matter to them so long as the market demand is robust. The absence of freedom, if anything, lends order and efficiency to their operations."

William Greider

*****

"Increases in prison spending [in the U.S.] average twice as high as increases in education spending."

National Criminal Justice Commission

*****

"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 labor, like food."

Ralph Nader

*****

" The Central Intelligence Agency owns everyone of any significance in the major media."

Former CIA Director William Colby

*****

"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

*****

"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

*****

"The U.S. ranks last among developed countries in the percentage of its GNP (0.11%) given in aid. On average, governments in the European Union contribute three times as much of their GNP (0.33%) in non-military foreign aid."

Friends Committee on National Legislation

*****

" 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

*****

"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

*****

" Never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was legal. "

Martin Luther King, Jr.

*****

"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, about a Congressional report on CIA activities around the world

*****

" 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

*****

" Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. "

George Orwell

*****

"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."

Michelle Stoddard

*****

" As the mainstream media has become increasingly dependent on advertising revenues for support, it has become an anti-democratic force in society."

Robert McChesney

*****

" 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

*****

" ... the airwaves belong to the people. "

from the 1934 Communications Act

*****

"They made a wasteland and called it peace."

Tacitus, Roman historian

*****

"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'

*****

" [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

*****

" 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

*****

" If the business community and political elite want to go to war they find it easy to mobilize domestic consent."

Edward S. Herman

*****

"A terrorist is someone who has a bomb but doesn't have an air force."

William Blum

*****

" Americans cannot teach democracy to the world until they restore their own."

William Greider

*****

"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

*****

"It's a hard decision, but we think the price ... is worth it."

Secretary of State Madelaine Albright, talking about US sanctions on Iraq

*****

" 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 S. Herman

*****

" 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

*****

" Why should we flagellate ourselves for what the Cambodians did to each other?"

Henry Kissinger

*****

"The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves."

"I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people."

Henry Kissinger

*****

" 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

*****

" 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

*****

"... 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

*****

" It is the function of the CIA to keep the world unstable and to propagandize the American people to hate, so we will let the establishment spend any amount of money on arms. "

John Stockwell

*****

"... 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

*****

" 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

*****

"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

*****

" 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

*****

" When do 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 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

*****

"The achievements of past struggles and the aspirations of ... entire nation[s] 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

*****

" 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

*****

" America's inability to come to terms with revolutionary change in 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."

U.S. Senator Frank Church

*****

" 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

*****

"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

*****

" 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

*****

"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

*****

" 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

*****

" 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

*****

" States are not moral agents, people are, and can impose moral standards on powerful institutions."

Noam Chomsky

*****

"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

*****

" The USA 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 ."

"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

*****

"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

*****

" 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.

*****

"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

*****

" 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

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