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Nya citat 2001-11-16
History is the history of war - of leaders of countries finding reasons and rationals to send the young people off to fight.
John Stockwell, former CIA official
I hear people shaking with shudders at the thought of Germany collecting taxes in Holland. I have not heard a word against Holland collecting one twelfth of poor people's wages in Asia. Hitler's crime is that he is actually doing a thing like that to his own kind...
Zora Neale Hurston, black writer, at the start of World War II
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
I dream that someday the United States will be on the side of the peasants in some civil war. I dream that we will be the ones who will help the poor overthrow the rich, who will talk about land reform and education and health facilities for everyone, and that when the Red Cross or Amnesty International comes to count the bodies and take the testimony of women raped, that our side won't be the heavies.
Richard Cohen
... the operative priciples dictating U.S. support and hostility in the Third World have been business criteria first, military convenience second, and any humanistic considerations third and thus effectively irrelevant. In fact, they are less than irrelevant - they are in conflict with the first two criteria, and therefore ... humanizing forces [become] "threats".
Edward Herman
A world in which others controlled the course of their own development ... would be a world in which the American system would be seriously endangered.
Benjamin Cohen
The U.S. will not permit constructive programs in its own domains, so it must ensure that they are destroyed elsewhere to terminate "the threat of a good example".
Noam Chomsky
Fuck your Parliament and your Constitution. We pay a lot of good American dollars to the Greeks, Mr. Ambassador. If your Prime Minister gives me talk about Democracy, Parliament and Constitutions, he, his Parliament, and his Constitution may not last very long.
President Lyndon Johnson to a Greek Ambassador
We [the U.S.] has over 200 incidents in which we have put our troops into other countries to force them to our will.
John Stockwell, former CIA official
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 Herman
The only way to abolish war is to make peace heroic.
John Dewey
In the course of preparing myself... I realized afresh that I hate Churchill and all of his kind. I hate them virulently. They have stalked down the corridors of endless power all through history.... What man of sanity would say on hearing of the atrocities committed by the Japanese against British and Anzac prisoners of war, 'We shall wipe them out, everyone of them, men, women, and children. There shall not be a Japanese left on the face of the earth'? Such simple-minded cravings for revenge leave me with a horrified but reluctant awe for such single-minded and merciless ferocity.
Richard Burton, actor, in an article for the New York Times about his experience playing the role of Winston Churchill
I hate it when they say, "He gave his life for his country." Nobody gives their life for anything. We steal the lives of these kids. We take it away from them. They don't die for the honor and glory of their country. We kill them.
Admiral Gene LaRocque
He may be a son-of-a-bitch, but at least he's our son-of-a-bitch.
President Franklin Roosevelt -- justifying support for Nicaragua's dictator Anastasio Somoza
We enjoy the economic stability that the Armed Forces guarantee us. This [economic] plan can be fulfilled dispite its lack of popular support.
Martinez de Hoz, financial minister of the Argentine military government, 1976
Part of his training by eight American Green Berets consisted of "teaching how to torture". He witnessed a boy of about fifteen, suspected of supporting the guerrillas, being subjected to a demonstration torture by the Green Berets They tore out the youth's fingernails, broke his elbows, gouged out his eyes, and then burned him alive. The author reports that the torture sessions continued into the next day and included a thirteen year-old girl. Another victim had various parts of his body burned and was then taken up in a helicopter while still alive and thrown out at 14,000 feet. The defector noted that "often the army goes and throws people out over the sea."
The Other Side magazine, describing the story of a young Salvadoran who deserted the army in 1982
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 about the chilean election of Salvador Allende in 1970
Why should we be worried about the death squads? They're bumping off the commies, our enemies. I'd give them more power. Hell, l'd get some cartridges if I could, and everyone else would too ... Why should we criticize them? The death squad - I'm for it ... Shit! There's no question we can't wait until Reagan gets in. We hope Carter falls in the ocean real quick ... We all feel that he [Reagan] is our savior.
Testimony of Fred Sherwood, president of the American Chamber of Commerce in Guatemala, September 1980
Was there ever any domination that did not appear natural to those who possessed it?
John Stuart Mill
Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey's opinion that certainly prior to 31 December 1945, and in all probability prior to I November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.
The U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, which interviewed 700 Japanese military and political officials after the war
Truman is a monster. l can think of him as nothing else but the Butcher of Asia. Of his grin of triumph on giving the order to drop the Atom bombs on Japan. Of his maintaining troops in China who are shooting the starving Chinese for stealing a handful of food.
Zora Neale Hurston, black writer, 1946
[Middle East oil is] a stupendous source of strategic power, and one of the greatest material prizes in world history.
U.S. State Department, 1945
The agony and moral anguish that ought to accompany an act of mass killing - yes, even in a war - seemed wholly absent from American culture.
Ruth Rosen, history professor, about the Gulf war
...a set of beliefs taught to each generation in which the Motherland or the Fatherland is an object of veneration and becomes a burning cause for which one becomes willing to kill the children of other Motherlands or Fatherlands.
Howard Zinn on nationalism
I am strongly in favor of using poisoned gas against uncivilized tribes. The moral effect should be good... and it would spread a lively terror...
Winston Churchill commenting on the British use of poison gas against the Iraqis after World War I
You make yourself ridiculous by thinking you can do anything. The world is divided in two. There are the communists on that side and on this side the free world. The Russians and the Americans, no one else. What are we. Americans. Behind me there is the government, behind the government is NATO, behind NATO is the U.S. You can't fight us, we are Americans.
Athens inspector Basil Lambrou, speaking to prisoners before torturing them, during the US-supported Papadopoulos dictatorship
The men who possess real power in this country have no intention of ending the cold war.
Albert Einstein
No one cared, as long as they were Communists, that they were being butchered. No one was getting very worked up about it.
Howard Federspiel, the Indonesia expert at the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, describing the US supported overthrow of Sukarno in 1965 and the associated genocide of at least 500,000 Indonesians
We love your adherence to democratic principle.
Vice President George Bush Sr to Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos
As human rights conditions deteriorate, factors affecting the "climate of investment," like the tax laws and labor repression, improve from the viewpoint of the multinational corporation. This suggests an important line of causation -- military dictatorships tend to improve the investment climate...
The multinational corporate community and the U.S. government are very sensitive to this factor. Military dictators enter into a tacit joint venture arrangement with Free World leaders: They will keep the masses quiet, maintain an open door to multinational investment, and provide bases and otherwise serve as loyal clients. In exchange, they will be aided and protected against their own people, and allowed to loot public property.
Edward Herman
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
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