Quotations
by Professor Richard Falk
in the foreword to the book
Rollback
Right-wing Power in U.S. Foreign Policy
by Thomas Bodenheimer and Robert Gould
published by South End Press, 1989
The Nuremberg and Tokyo war crimes tribunals, although historic
occasions, were ... viewed by most world leaders as primarily
American morality plays; in those criminal proceedings against
the remnant of the German and Japanese wartime ruling elites,
an emphasis was placed upon the idea that planning and initiating
aggressive war was a crime of state for which political leaders
would from now on be held responsible.
***
Despite a strong pretense of defensiveness, the actual course
of American foreign policy has been much more contradictory in
practice, seeking above all else as much space as possible for
capitalist expansion.
***
The main challenges to capitalist control in recent decades,
have been the largely indigenous pressures of revolutionary nationalism.
... the consistent, bipartisan pattern of U.S. anti-nationalist
intervention in the Third World, ... has certainly has as its
primary character a quality of "aggression"... This
pattern of aggression has translated into massive human suffering
for many non-western societies, often prolonged over a span of
many years.
***
Secrecy is the necessary basis for claiming one kind of policy
while pursuing another quite contradictory line of action.
***
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.
***
[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.
***
What U.S foreign policy has been about in the postwar years
... is an expression of social forces that have been near the
center of power ever since 1945 and are so well entrenched in
the national security bureaucracy as to be constants in the political
setting within which foreign policy takes shape.
***
... the formal procedures of political democracy (political
parties, elections) give virtually no voice to principled criticism
of interventionary diplomacy in the Third World ...
Rollback
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