| |
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 Guevara
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 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 Guevara
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 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
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 document
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'.
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
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 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 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 White
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
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, 1965
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
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 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
|
|
|
