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Nya citat 2001-11-14

Where a government has come into power through some form of popular vote, fraudulent or not, and maintains at least an appearance of constitutional legality, the guerrilla outbreak cannot be promoted, since the possibilities of peaceful struggle have not yet been exhausted.
Che Guevarafrom "General Principles of Guerilla Warfare"

We can either have democracy in this country or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of few, but we can't have both.
Louis Brandeis, US Supreme Court Justice

How come if it's the rich... it's called democracy? But if it's the poor who go there, it's rebellion?
Joseph Estrada

Instead of taxing rich people, governments borrow from them, and pay them interest for the privilege.
Doug Henwood

Silence is the ultimate weapon of power.
Charles deGaulle

The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.
Steve Biko

In bourgeois society capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality.
from The Communist Manifesto

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... to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it by furnishing the exorbitant funds demanded. Yet, in retrospect, these disasters seem never to have happened, seem never to have been quite real.
General Douglas MacArthur 1957

The United States spends more on arms annually, $275 billion presently, than the rest of the Security Council combined. U.S. arms expenditures are approximately 25 times the gross national product of Iraq. The U.S. has in its stockpiles more nuclear bombs, chemical and biological weapons, more aircraft, rockets and delivery systems in number and sophistication than the rest of the world combined. Included are twenty commissioned Trident II nuclear submarines any one of which could destroy Europe.
Ramsey Clark, former U.S. Attorney General, November 1998

The basic purpose of the U.S. Army is to kill Russians.
General John Crosby 1982San Francisco Chronicle, 7 June 1982

The fact that some elements (of the U.S. government) may appear to be potentially "out of control" can be beneficial to creating and reinforcing fears and doubts within the minds of an adversary's decision makers.
...
That the U.S. may become irrational and vindictive if its vital interests are attacked should be a part of the national persona we project to all adversaries... It hurts to portray ourselves as too fully rational and cool-headed...

U.S. Strategic Command 1995

There shouldn't be anything left on the ground. We log to infinity. Because we need it. It's ours. It's out there and we need it all. Now.
Harry Merlo, CEO Louisiana-Pacific

There are only two sorts of people in life you can trust—good Christians and good Communists.
Joe Slovo, former leader of the South African Communist Party.

The important thing is not to stop questioning.
Albert Einstein

At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality.
Che Guevarafrom Man and Socialism in Cuba

Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves: "Who am I to be brilliant, georgeous, talented, fabulous?" Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people will not feel secure around you. We are born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It is not just in some of us; it is in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our fear, our presence automatically liberates us.
Nelson Mandela

We fight racism with solidarity. We do not fight exploitative capitalism with Black Nationalism. We fight capitalism with basic socialism.
Bobby Seale, Black Panther

I think 'one man, one vote,' just unrestricted democracy, would not be wise. There needs to be some kind of protection for the minority which the white people represent now, and they need and have a right to demand a protection of their rights.
Pat Robertson

Experience has taught me that the shallowest of communist platitudes contains more of a hierarchy of meaning than contemporary bourgeois profundity.
Walter Benjamin, German philosopher, 1931

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 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

America is today the leader of a world-wide anti revolutionary movement in 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 the least happiness for the greatest number.
Arnold J Toynbee, british historian

We have about 50% 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 democratisation. 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, 24th February 1948

Today, the United States spends more on military arms and other forms of 'national security' than the rest of the world combined. U.S. leaders preside over a global military apparatus of a magnitude never before seen in human history.
...
In 1993 it included almost a half-million troops stationed at over 395 major military bases and hundreds of minor installations in thirty-five foreign countries, and a fleet larger in total tonnage and firepower than all the other navies of the world combined

Michael Parenti 1995from the book Against Empire 1995

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...
George Kennan, Director of Policy Planning U.S. State Department, 1948

The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist — McDonald's cannot flourish without McDonnel Douglas, the designer of the F-15.
Thomas L. Friedman 1999"A Manifesto for the Fast World",
New York Times Magazine, 
March 28, 1999

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 United States Marine Commandant, 1966

The greatest purveyor of violence on earth is my own government.
Martin Luther King Jr 1967

Our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival... First, the US must show the leadership necessary to establish and protect a new order that holds the promise of convincing potential competitors that they need not aspire to a greater role or pursue a more aggressive posture to protect their legitimate interests.
We must account sufficiently for the interest of the advanced industrial nations to discourage them from seeking to overturn the established political and economic order. Finally, we must maintain the mechanism, for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role.

From a 1992 Pentagon policy documentThe New York Times, March 8, 1992

The US must carry out some act somewhere in the world which shows its' determination to continue to be a world power.
Henry Kissinger in April 1975

Never before in modern history has a country dominated the earth so totally as the United States does today. America is now the Schwarzenegger of international politics: showing off muscles, obtrusive, intimidating. The Americans, in the absence of limits put to them by anybody or anything, act as if they own a kind of blank check in their McWorld.
Der Spiegel 1997

Nonviolence is tough. You don't practice nonviolence by attending conferences; you practice it on picket lines, and that can be hard when you are faced with people who may be ready to attack you with rocks, baseball bats, knives, even guns.
Cesar Chavez

Too long have the workers of the world waited for some Moses to lead them out of bondage. He has not come; he never will come. I would not lead you out if I could; for if you could be led out, you could be led back again. I would have you make up your minds that there is nothing you cannot do for yourselves.
Eugene Debs

I am not a liberator. Liberators do not exist. The people liberate themselves.
Che Guevara

This is about America's energy security... It's also about preventing strategic inroads by those who don't share our values. We're trying to move these newly independent countries toward the West... We would like to see them reliant on Western commercial and political interests rather than going another way. We've made a substantial political investment in the Caspian, and it's very important to us that both the pipeline map and the politics come out right.
Former US Energy Secretary Bill Richardson, a few months before the 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia

...we will certainly remain here a long time so that we can also guarantee the security of the energy corridors which traverse this country.
General Michael Jackson, KFOR commander in Macedonia

We first crush people to the earth, and then claim the right of trampling on them forever, because they are prostrate.
Lydia Maria Child

I beseech you, I beg you, I order you, in the name of God - stop the repression.
Archbishop of San Salvador Oscar Romero, the day before his execution by U.S.-sponsored death squads

The troops came and told the peasants the land was theirs now. They could elect their own leaders and run it themselves. The peasants couldn't believe their ears, but they held elections that very night. The next morning the troops came back and I watched as they shot every one of the elected leaders.
Testimony by an ISTA technician overseeing U.S.-sponsored "agrarian reform" in El Salvador 1980

We do not have a policy of scorched earth. We have a policy of scorched Communists.
Guatemalan General Ephrain Rios Montt, on the success of the "beans and bullets" counterinsurgency program

What we did yesterday, and the day before, this is called war. This is what war is. War is hell. And, God damn it, if I order you to kill your mother, that is just what you're going to do.
Captain Salazar of the U.S.-sponsored Atlacatl Battalion to his troops after the El Mozote massacre in El Salvador

You are guerrillas and this is justice.
Soldiers of the U.S.-sponsored Atlacatl Battalion to peasants being massacred in El Salvador in december 1981

We found that the State Department chose four companies controlled by drug traffickers to provide assistance to the Contras. As a result, drug traffickers got funds out of the U.S. Treasury as part of our contra humanitarian assistance to them.
Senate Subcommittee on Narcotics, Terrorism, and International Operations

I will observe the constitution whenever it does not contradict military decrees.
Colonel Hugo Banzer, U.S.-sponsored President of Bolivia, 1971-1978

After all, in our prisons too, there are hundreds, perhaps even thousands of people who I would call political prisoners.
Andrew Young, former U.N. Ambassador, on U.S. human rights

You have a survivability of command in control, survivability of industrial potential, protection of a percentage of your citizens, and you have a capability that inflicts more damage on the opposition than it can inflict on you. That's the way you can have a winner.
George Bush Sr, explaining how to win a nuclear war to Los Angeles Times reporter Robert Scheer, 1980

Covert operations should not be confused with missionary work.
Henry Kissinger describing why US withdrew aid to the Kurds, 1975

That's a nice list of targets, but that's not enough. [...] [It is also important to target] ...what is unique about Iraqi culture, that they put very high value on, that psychologically would make an impact on the population and regime. [....] If push came to shove, the cutting edge would be downtown Baghdad. If I want to hurt you, it would be at home, not out in the woods someplace.
General Michael Dugan, US Airforce Chief of Staff, 15th September 1990. He was removed from his post shortly afterwards, with US Secretary of Defence Dick Cheney describing Dugan's comments as 'inappropriate'.Washington Post, 15th September 1990

Let us not ignore the truth among ourselves .. politically we are the aggressors and they defend themselves... The country is theirs, because they inhabit it, whereas we want to come here and settle down, and in their view we want to take away from them their country.
David Ben Gurion, first Prime Minister of Israel

The target suffered a terminal illness before a firing squad in Baghdad.
CIA officer testifying to US Senate hearing, after bloody CIA aided coup overthrew Iraqi Prime Minister Abdel Kassem, 1963

Arabs tend to confess; it's part of their nature.
Moshe Etzioni, an Israeli high court justice, in an interview with Amnesty International, when asked about the unusually high rate of confessions from Palestinians (indicating Israel's use of torture), 1977

Obviously, I didn't think, and nobody else did, that the Iraqis were going to take all of Kuwait.
Former Ambassador April Glaspie, in reponse to accusations that the U.S. invited Saddam Hussein to take Kuwait

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 ... When we have settled the land, all the Arabs will be able to do will be to scurry around like drugged roaches in a bottle.
Rafael Eitan, Israeli Chief of Staff

In every city we visited, we documented severe damage to homes, electrical plants, fuel storage facilities, civilian factories, hospitals, churches, civilian airports, vehicles, transportation facilities, food storage and food testing laboratories, grain silos, animal vaccination centres, schools, communication towers, civilian government office buildings, and stores. Almost all facilities we saw had been bombed two or three times, ensuring that they could not be repaired. Most of the bridges we saw had been bombed from both ends.
Adeeb Abed and Gavrielle Gemma, Independent Commission of Inquiry staff members, fact find finding trip to Iraq, April 3rd-14th 1991

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 Sation' there.
British Foreign Office, policy memo, 1947

...we have a solution, that you shall continue to live like dogs, and whoever wants to can leave - and we will see where this process leads. In five years we may have 200,000 less people - and that is a matter of enormous importance.
Moshe Dayan, encouraging the transfer of Gaza strip refugees to Jordan

Saddam Hussein can not restore his own electricity. He needs help. If there are political objectives that the UN coalition has, it can say: 'Saddam, when you agree to do these things, we will allow people to come in and fix your electricity.' It gives us long-term leverage.
US Colonel John A. Warden III, June 1991 quoted in
Gellman

There is no such thing as a Palestinian people... It is not as if we came and threw them out and took their country. They didn't exist.
Golda Meir, former Prime Minister of Israel

That is really not a matter I am terribly interested in.
General Colin Powell, Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, on being asked his assessment of Iraqi military and civilian casualties, April 1991 The Nation 020211

The recent conflict has wrought near apocalyptic results; Iraq has been relegated to a pre-industrial age.
All electrically operated installations have ceased to funtion. Food can not be preserved, water can not be purified, sewage can not be pumped away. Nine thousand homes are destroyed or damaged beyond repair. The flow of food through the private sector has been reduced to a trickle; many food prices are already beyond the purchasing power of most Iraqi families. The mission recommends that sanctions in respect of food supplies should be immediately removed.

Martti Ahtisaari, UN Under Secretary for Administration and Management, March 20th 1991. Ahtisaari was the first UN official to visit post-war Iraq.

That was the most expensive 'no' vote you ever cast.
US Ambassador Pickering to Yemeni Ambassador Abdallah Saleh al-Ashtol, after Yemen voted against Resolution 678, 29th November 1990. The US $70 million aid package to Yemen was cancelled the following day. 900,000 Yemeni migrant workers were later

Neither the foreign head of state (the Shah) nor the President nor Dr. Kissinger desired a victory for our clients (the Kurds). They merely hoped to ensure a level of hostilities high enough to sap the resources of the neighbouring state (Iraq). Even in the context of covert action, ours was a cynical enterprise.
US Congressional Pike Report, describing President Nixon and US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger's policy of arming the Kurds, 1972

Just watch. Everything... everything.
George Bush Sr, in response to press enquiry if US enforcement of sanctions would include food and essentials, August 14th 1990

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, referring to the 10,000 sorties by American/British war criminals in the first eight months of 1999Washington Post, August 30, 1999

[The bombing missions in the Gulf war were a] turkey shoot... it's almost like you flipped on the light in the kitchen at night and the cockroaches start scurrying, and we're killing them.
US Pilot Colonel Richard Whitequoted in The
Independent, 6th 
February 1991

What occurred in Oklahoma City was no different than what Americans rain on the heads of others all the time, and subsequently, my mindset was and is one of clinical detachment. The bombing of the Murrah building was not personal, no more than when Air Force, Army, Navy or Marine personnel bomb or launch cruise missiles against government installations and their personnel.
Timothy McVeigh, who was trained by the U.S. Army

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"Either-Or," Progressive, February 1961. p. 24

The US has always regarded international laws as an annoying encumbrance, unless they can be used to advantage against an enemy.
Noam Chomsky

Our colonel went to his NATO heads several times and protested against the choice of targets that were not of a military nature... Once we received an encoded order from U.S. military officials to drop anti-personnel bombs over the towns of Pristina and Nis. Our colonel refused the order, and a week later he was deposed.
Spanish F-18 pilot about the bombings of Yugoslavia

If you wake up in the morning and you have no power to your house and no gas to your stove and the bridge you take to work is down and will be lying in the Danube for the next 20 years, I think you begin to ask, 'Hey, Slobo, what's this all about? How much more of this do we have to withstand?'
US Air Force Lt. General Michael Short about the NATO bombings of Yugoslavia

It is a scandal in contemporary international law, don't forget, that while the wanton destruction of towns, cities and villages is a war crime of long standing, the bombing of cities from airplanes goes not only unpunished but virtually unaccused. Air bombardment is state terrorism, the terrorism of the rich. It has burned up and blasted apart more innocents in the past six decades than have all the anti-state terrorists who ever lived.
C Douglas Lummis, political scientist

- Had you been born on the other side of the barricade, you would have been a perfect Stalinist.
- I reject that statement. But... well...it might be. No, no. It might not.

Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci and former CIA Director William Colby

We're going to become guilty, in my judgement, of being the greatest threat to the peace of the world. It's an ugly reality, and we Americans don't like to face up to it. I hate to think of the chapter of American history that's going to be written in the future in connection with our outlawry in Southeast Asia.
Senator Wayne Morse 1967

In all my years in the Army I was never taught that communists were human beings. We were there to kill ideology carried by - I don't know - pawns, blobs of flesh. I was there to destroy communism. We never conceived of people, men, women, children, babies.
Lt. William Calley

I didn't come back to Indochina to give Indochina back to the Indochinese.
French General Jean Leclerc in September 1945

By hook or by crook the development of primary production of all sorts in the colonial territories and dependent areas in the Commonwealth and throughout the world is a life and death matter for the economy of this country.
John Strachey, British Labour Party minister for Food, 1947

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

By no moral right may the ownership and control of the natural and material resources of a territory be regarded as the absolute monopoly of the people who happened to be settled there.
Philip Snowden, British Labour Party Chancellor, 1921

The Indochina War has become France's number one dollar-earning export.
Bernard Fall on U.S. military aid to France

What then did you expect when you unbound the gag that muted those black mouths? That they would chant your praises? Did you think that when those heads that our fathers had forcibly bowed down to the ground were raised again, you would find adoration in their eyes?
Jean-Paul Sartre

The picture of the world's greatest superpower killing or seriously injuring 1,000 non-combatants a week, while trying to pound a tiny backward nation into submission on an issue whose merits are hotly disputed, in not a pretty one.
US Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, in a 1967 letter to US President Lyndon Johnson about the Vietnam War

Look, if you think any American official is going to tell you the truth then you're stupid. Did you hear that? Stupid.
Arthur Sylvester, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs, speaking to U.S. correspondents in Saigon, 1965Congressional Record, 12 May 1966, p. 9978

I would like to say that several months ago in Detroit we had an investigation at which over 150 honorably discharged veterans testified to war crimes committed in Southeast Asia.
...
They told stories that at times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in a fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam, in addition to the normal ravage of war and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country.

John Kerry, navy lieutenant and leader of Vietnam Veterans Against the War in a testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee 1971

...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 the Laos operation

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

On summer nights when the breeze is blowing, I can still hear their cries, the little kids screaming.
Edward L. Daily, U.S. Army machine-gunner at the No Gun Ri Massacre in Korea 1950

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, 1967"A Time to Break the Silence", speech given at
Riverside Church New York City April 4, 1967

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

The USA 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 1998Amnesty International: "United States of America - Rights for All", October 1998

The great nations have always acted like gangsters, and the small nations like prostitutes.
Stanley Kubrick

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

On August 14, 1945, five days after the Nagasaki bombing and the day before the actual acceptance of surrender terms ... more than 1,000 planes were sent to bomb Japanese cities. The last plane had not returned when Truman announced the Japanese had surrendered. Oda Makoto went out into the streets and found in the midst of the corpses American leaflets written in Japanese, which had been dropped with the bombs: 'Your government has surrendered; the war is over.'
Howard Zinn