Authors' page
"In dictatorships we are
more fortunate than you in the West in one respect. We believe
nothing of what we read in the newspapers and nothing of what
we watch on television, because we know it's propaganda and lies.
Unlike you in the West, we've learned to look behind the propaganda
and to read between the lines, and unlike you, we know that the
real truth is always subversive."
dissident Czech novelist Zdener
Urbanek
"No people can be both
ignorant and free."
Thomas Jefferson
We were not born critical of
existing society. There was a moment in our lives (or a month,
or a year) when certain facts appeared before us, startled us,
and then caused us to question beliefs that were strongly fixed
in our consciousness - embedded there by years of family prejudices,
orthodox schooling, imbibing of newspapers, radio, and television."
Howard Zinn
"The news and truth are
not the same thing. "
Walter Lippmann
"Democracy is not about trust; it is about distrust. It
is about accountability, exposure, open debate, critical challenge,
and popular input and feedback from the citizenry. It is about
responsible government. We have to get our fellow Americans to
trust their leaders less and themselves more, trust their own
questions and suspicions, and their own desire to know what is
going on."
Michael Parenti
"You can always hear the
people who are willing to sacrifice somebody else's life. They're
plenty loud and they talk all the time. You can find them in churches
and schools and newspapers and legislatures and congress. That's
their business. They sound wonderful. Death before dishonor. This
ground sanctified by blood. These men who died so gloriously.
They shall not have died in vain. Our noble dead."
Dalton Trumbo, author
of the book "Johnny Got His Gun"
"The national interest
in a capitalist society is little more than the interest of its
upper class."
Lawrence H. Shoup and William
Minter
"History is written by
those who win and those who dominate."
Edward Said, literary critic
"If those in charge of
our society - politicians, corporate executives, and owners of
press and television - can dominate our ideas, they will be secure
in their power. They will not need soldiers patrolling the streets.
We will control ourselves."
Howard Zinn, historian and author
"The media serve the interests
of state and corporate power, which are closely interlinked, framing
their reporting and analysis in a manner supportive of established
privilege and limiting debate and discussion accordingly."
Noam Chomsky
"The fact that an opinion
has been widely held is no evidence that it is not utterly absurd."
Bertrand Russell
"Societies characterized
by enduring deep divisions of income and wealth, such as most
third-world societies, are wounded societies with little sense
of the common good... As America drifts in this direction, ending
poverty and redistributing income should be at the top of the
national agenda."
Charles Derber, Corporation Nation
"The enormous gap between
what US leaders do in the world and what Americans think their
leaders are doing is one of the great propaganda accomplishments
of the dominant political mythology."
Michael Parenti
"The people will believe
what the media tells them they believe."
George Orwell
"The national interest
in a capitalist society is little more than the interest of its
upper class."
Lawrence H. Shoup and William
Minter
"Free and responsible
government by popular consent just can't exist without an informed
public."
Bill Moyers
"During times of universal
deceit, telling the truth is revolutionary."
George Orwell
" 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
" The United States is
evolving into an a corporate oligarchy that merely wears the trappings
of a democracy."
Robert Kaplan
"Real information, subversive
information, remains the most potent power of all ... we must
not fall into the trap of believing that the media speaks for
the public. That wasn't true in Stalinist Czechoslovakia and it
isn't true of the United States."
Harold Pinter
"America will never be
destroyed from the outside. If we falter, and lose our freedoms,
it will be because we destroyed ourselves."
Abraham Lincoln
"Every ten years or so,
the United States needs to pick up some crappy little country
and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean
business."
neoconservative Michael Ledeen
" Politicians have become
corporate prostitutes."
Helen Caldicott, MD
" As the mainstream media
has become increasingly dependent on advertising revenues for
support, it has become an anti-democratic force in society."
Robert McChesney, journalist and
author
" If an American is concerned
only about his nation, he will not be concerned about the peoples
of Asia, Africa, or South America. Is this not why nations engage
in the madness of war without the slightest sense of penitence?
Is this not why the murder of a citizen of your own nation is
a crime, but the murder of citizens of another nation in war is
an act of heroic virtue? "
Martin Luther King, Jr.
" Once you have learned
how to ask questions - relevant and appropriate and substantial
questions - you have learned how to learn and no one can keep
you from learning whatever you want or need to know."
Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner
"Four sorrows ... are
certain to be visited on the United States. Their cumulative effect
guarantees that the U.S. will cease to resemble the country outlined
in the Constitution of 1787. First, there will be a state of perpetual
war, leading to more terrorism against Americans wherever they
may be and a spreading reliance on nuclear weapons among smaller
nations as they try to ward off the imperial juggernaut. Second
is a loss of democracy and Constitutional rights as the presidency
eclipses Congress and is itself transformed from a co-equal 'executive
branch' of government into a military junta. Third is the replacement
of truth by propaganda, disinformation, and the glorification
of war, power, and the military legions. Lastly, there is bankruptcy,
as the United States pours its economic resources into ever more
grandiose military projects and shortchanges the education, health,
and safety of its citizens."
Chalmers Johnson, Sorrows of Empire
"During times of universal
deceit, telling the truth is revolutionary."
George Orwell
"In many respects, we
now live in a society that is only formally democratic, as the
great mass of citizens have minimal say on the major public issues
of the day, and such issues are scarcely debated at all in any
meaningful sense in the electoral arena."
Robert McChesney
"The American public has
become so conditioned by crises, by warnings, by words, that there
are few, other than the young, who protest against what is happening."
Senator J. William Fulbright
" With unfailing consistancy,
U.S. intervention has been on the side of the rich and powerful
of various nations at the expense of the poor and needy. Rather
than strengthening democracies, U.S. leaders have overthrown numerous
democratically elected governments or other populist regimes in
dozens of countries ... whenever these nations give evidence of
putting the interests of their people ahead of the interests of
multinational corporate interests."
Michael Parenti, political scientist
and author
"The fact that an opinion
has been widely held is no evidence that it is not utterly absurd."
Bertrand Russell, British mathematician,
philosopher
"History is an account
mostly false, of events mostly unimportant, which are brought
about by rulers, mostly knaves, and soldiers, mostly fools."
Ambrose Bierce, American writer,
1842-1914
"There is nothing puzzling
... about America's gratuitously aggressive foreign policy or
about the oligarchs' successful efforts to drag the Republic into
five wars. What an aggressive foreign policy accomplishes by slow
degrees, a state of war accomplishes in a trice. Overnight [war]
kills reform, overnight it transforms insurgents into traitors
and the Republic into an imperiled realm. Overnight it strangles
free politics, distracts and overawes the citizenry. Overnight
it blasts public hope."
Walter Karp
"The American press, with
a very few exceptions, is a kept press. Kept by the big corporations
the way a whore is kept by a rich man."
Theodore Dreiser, 1871-1945
"We are not hated
because we practice democracy, value freedom, or uphold human
rights. We are hated because our government denies these
things to people in Third World countries whose resources are
coveted by our multinational corporations. That hatred we
have sown has come back to haunt us in the form of terrorism and
in the future, nuclear terrorism."
Robert Bowman, Vietnam Veteran,
bishop of the United Catholic Church in Melbourne Beach, FL.
" The news and truth are
not the same thing. "
Walter Lippmann
"There is no reason to
accept the doctrines crafted to sustain power and privilege, or
to believe that we are constrained by mysterious and unknown social
laws. These are simply decisions made within institutions that
are subject to human will and that must face the test of legitimacy.
And if they do not meet the test, they can be replaced by other
institutions that are more free and more just, as has happened
often in the past."
Noam Chomsky
"Throughout the twentieth
century and into the beginning of the twenty-first, the United
States repeatedly used its military power, and that of its clandestine
services, to overthrow governments that refused to protect American
interests. Each time, it cloaked its intervention in the rhetoric
of national security and liberation. In most cases, however, it
acted mainly for economic reasons-specifically to establish, promote
and defend the right of Americans to do business around the world
without interference."
Stephen Kinzer
" They have pillaged the
world. When the land has nothing left for men who ravage everything,
they scour the sea. If an enemy is rich, they are greedy; if he
is poor, they crave glory. Neither East nor West can sate their
appetite. They are the only people on earth to covet wealth and
poverty with equal craving. They plunder, they butcher, they ravish,
and call it by the lying name of "empire." They make
a desert and call it "peace"."
Roman historian Tacitus
"The twentieth century
has been characterized by three developments of great political
importance: the growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power,
and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting
corporate power against democracy."
Alex Carey
"You don't have to burn
books to destroy a culture, just get the people to stop reading
them."
Ray Bradbury
"It is the function of
the CIA to keep the world unstable, and to propagandize and teach
the American people to hate, so we will let the Establishment
spend any amount of money on arms."
John Stockwell, former CIA official
and author
"[I] never saw a foreign
intervention that the [New York] Times did not support, never
saw a fare increase or a rent increase or a utility rate increase
that it did not endorse, never saw it take the side of labor in
a strike or lockout, or advocate a raise for underpaid workers.
And don't let me get started on universal health care and Social
Security. So why do people think the Times is liberal?"
veteran New York Times reporter
John Hess
"If those in charge of
our society - politicians, corporate executives, and owners of
press and television - can dominate our ideas, they will be secure
in their power. They will not need soldiers patrolling the streets.
We will control ourselves."
Howard Zinn, historian and author
"The left-right political
spectrum [is used] to neutralize unwelcome facts and ideas or
just condition citizens to think along certain lines.
The "left" leaning
segment of the press [in the US] can always be relied upon to
automatically assault ideas and information from the right"
and vice versa. In fact, media outlets have been artificially
set up just for this purpose: both Nation and New Republic on
the "left" were financed by Willard Straight, using
Payne Whitney (The Order) funds. On the "right" National
Review published by William Buckley (The Order) runs a perpetual
deficit, presumably made up by Buckley.
Neither the independent right
nor the independent left sees the trap. They are so busy firing
at each other; they've mostly forgotten to look behind the scenes.
And The Order smugly claims control of the 'moderate" center."
Antony Sutton
"Political language is
designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and
to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind."
George Orwell
"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, playwrite
"We were not born critical
of existing society. There was a moment in our lives (or a month,
or a year) when certain facts appeared before us, startled us,
and then caused us to question beliefs that were strongly fixed
in our consciousness-embedded there by years of family prejudices,
orthodox schooling, imbibing of newspapers, radio, and television."
Howard Zinn
"No form of government,
once in power, can be trusted to limit its own ambition, to extend
freedom and to wither away. This means that it is up to the citizenry,
those outside of power, to engage in permanent combat with the
state, short of violent, escalatory revolution, but beyond the
gentility of the ballot-box, to insure justice, freedom and well
being."
Howard Zinn, on the need for dissent
and non-violent protest
"You can always hear the
people who are willing to sacrifice somebody else's life. They're
plenty loud and they talk all the time. You can find them in churches
and schools and newspapers and legislatures and congress. That's
their business. They sound wonderful. Death before dishonor. This
ground sanctified by blood. These men who died so gloriously.
They shall not have died in vain. Our noble dead."
Dalton Trumbo, author
of the book "Johnny Got His Gun"
"What chiefly governs
the [U.S.] military budget is the need to spend enormous sums
of money in a useless way. The allegedly powerful Pentagon is
simply a receptacle for wasteful expenditure, just as a city dump
is the receptacle for the refuse of a city."
Walter Karp
"We were not born critical
of existing society. There was a moment in our lives (or a month,
or a year) when certain facts appeared before us, startled us,
and then caused us to question beliefs that were strongly fixed
in our consciousness-embedded there by years of family prejudices,
orthodox schooling, imbibing of newspapers, radio, and television."
Howard Zinn
" I am astonished each
time I come to the U.S. by the ignorance of a high percentage
of the population, which knows almost nothing about Latin America
or about the world. It's quite blind and deaf to anything that
may happen outside the frontiers of the U.S..
Eduardo Galeano, Latin American
writer and historian
"[Nationalism is] 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, historian and author
"There is no reason to
accept the doctrines crafted to sustain power and privilege, or
to believe that we are constrained by mysterious and unknown social
laws. These are simply decisions made within institutions that
are subject to human will and that must face the test of legitimacy.
And if they do not meet the test, they can be replaced by other
institutions that are more free and more just, as has happened
often in the past."
Noam Chomsky, American linguist
and US media and foreign policy critic
" Americans cannot teach
democracy to the world until they restore their own."
William Greider
"The corporate media and
pundit class increasingly function as press agents for whoever
is in power."
Adolph L. Reed. Jr.
" ... the United States,
for generations, has sustained two parallel but opposed states
of mind about military atrocities and human rights: one of U.S.
benevolence, generally held by the public, and the other of ends-justify-the-means
brutality sponsored by counterinsurgency specialists. Normally
the specialists carry out their actions in remote locations with
little notice in the national press. That allows the public to
sustain its faith in a just America, while hard-nosed security
and economic interests are still protected in secret. "
Robert Parry, investigative reporter
and author
"Americans are too broadly
underinformed to digest nuggets of information that seem to contradict
what they know of the world ... Instead, news channels prefer
to feed Americans a constant stream of simplified information,
all of which fits what they already know. That way they don't
have to devote more air time or newsprint space to explanations
or further investigations... Politicians and the media have conspired
to infantilize, to dumb down, the American public. At heart, politicians
don't believe that Americans can handle complex truths, and the
news media, especially television news, basically agrees."
Tom Fenton, former CBS foreign
correspondent
"This [the U.S. Constitution]
is likely to be administered for a course of years and then end
in despotism... when the people shall become so corrupted as to
need despotic government, being incapable of any other."
Benjamin Franklin
" A nation that continues
year after year to spend more money on military defense than on
programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual doom. "
Martin Luther King, Jr.
"The biggest political
joke in America is that we have a liberal press. It's a joke taken
seriously by a surprisingly large number of people...
The myth of the liberal press has served as a political weapon
for conservative and right-wing forces eager to discourage critical
coverage of government and corporate power ... Americans now have
the worst of both worlds: a press that, at best, parrots the pronouncements
of the powerful and, at worst, encourages people to be stupid
with pseudo-news that illuminates nothing but the bottom line."
Mark Hertzgaard, author
"There is an Establishment
history, an official history, which dominates history textbooks,
trade publishing, the media and library shelves. The official
line always assumes that events such as wars, revolutions, scandals,
assassinations, are more or less random unconnected events. By
definition events can never be the result of a conspiracy, they
can never result from premeditated planned group action... Woe
betide any book or author that falls outside the official guidelines.
Foundation support is not there. Publishers get cold feet. Distribution
is hit and miss, or non-existent."
Antony Sutton
" Society's dominant discourse
shapes not only its politics but the way people think about their
personal lives and choices. Just as John F. Kennedy helped legitimize
a discourse of idealism that gave impetus to the social movements
of the 1960s, so Ronald Reagan managed to legitimize a discourse
of selfishness and insensitivity that has had profound social
consequences ... Shifting society's discourse - from one of selfishness
and cynicism to one of idealism and caring - is the first and
most important political goal ... in the next several decades.
"
Michael Lerner, philosopher, psychologist,
author
"Who needs censorship
when we have self-censorship. When news is being withheld, or
neutralized, at best, how can we expect anything but cynicism
from those who read our daily papers? Maybe the reason many aren't
buying newspapers isn't that they can get information for free
on the Internet, but because they don't believe what they read,
and how can they?"
Jane Lyn Stahl
"Americans are too broadly
underinformed to digest nuggets of information that seem to contradict
what they know of the world ... Instead, news channels prefer
to feed Americans a constant stream of simplified information,
all of which fits what they already know. That way they don't
have to devote more air time or newsprint space to explanations
or further investigations... Politicians and the media have conspired
to infantilize, to dumb down, the American public. At heart, politicians
don't believe that Americans can handle complex truths, and the
news media, especially television news, basically agrees."
Tom Fenton, former CBS foreign
correspondent
"During times of universal
deceit, telling the truth is revolutionary."
George Orwell
"No matter how paranoid
or conspiracy-minded you are, what the government is actually
doing is worse than you imagine."
William Blum
"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, author
"Our upside down welfare
state is "socialism for the rich, free enterprise for the
poor." The great welfare scandal of the age concerns the
dole we give rich people."
William O. Douglas, former U.S.
Supreme Court Justice, 1969
"The American people ought
to know that it is not them, but their government's policies,
that are so hated."
Arundhati Roy, author
"The intellectual world
is locked into a phony verbal battle between "left"
and "right," whereas the real struggle is the battle
between individual freedom and the encroaching power of the absolute
State."
Antony Sutton
"The only thing worth globalizing
is dissent."
Arundhati Roy, author
"Our politicians have
sacrificed their principles on the altar of special interests;
our corporate leaders have sacrificed their integrity on the altar
of profits; and our media watchdogs have sacrificed the voice
of dissent on the altar of audience competition."
Cornel West
"The American media [is]
totally unreliable. You can't believe a word the American media
says. If they say anything correct, it's just an accident."
Paul Craig Roberts
" 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.
"There is [a] largely
unrecorded history and it tells a story quite different than our
sanitized textbooks. It tells a story of the deliberate creation
of war, the knowing finance of revolution to change governments,
and the use of conflict to create a New World Order"
Antony Sutton
"No form of government,
once in power, can be trusted to limit its own ambition, to extend
freedom and to wither away. This means that it is up to the citizenry,
those outside of power, to engage in permanent combat with the
state, short of violent, escalatory revolution, but beyond the
gentility of the ballot-box, to insure justice, freedom and well
being."
Howard Zinn
Lectures/Excerpts
"What the press do is
they tell you lies, lies they already know you want to hear. The
press can figure out what its readers or viewers believe, and
make a hell of a living pandering to their egos and telling them
that they're smart. They lie and tell the audience they are right,
and they never have to change your mind about anything. And the
audience rewards them, lauding them and paying them money to keep
hearing those sweet, self-serving lies."
Allan Uthman
Authors
and Books
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