Excerpted Books page
(alphabetical)
"Only the grand scale
and technocratic impersonality of the crimes conceived and directed
by the [U.S.] ruling elite acting under cover of state authority
distinguish them from garden variety killers."
Darrell Hamamoto
" The political leadership
of this country, as exemplified by the campaign positions of Bush
and Kerry, has become so obsessed with our own security fears
and so convinced of our own virtue that it has very little to
offer in the way of positive socioeconomic development initiatives.
To most of the people of Latin America, Africa and Asia, the United
States has largely become irrelevant to their hopes for a better
future -- except as a potential market for some of their goods
or as a source of outsourced jobs."
Sherle Schewenninger
"Cuba has ... been condemned
for not allowing its people to flee the island. That so many want
to leave Cuba is treated as proof that Cuban socialism is a harshly
repressive system, rather than that the U.S. embargo has made
life difficult in Cuba. That so many millions more want to leave
capitalist countries like Mexico, Nigeria, Poland, El Salvador,
Philippines, South Korea, Macedonia, and others too numerous to
list is never treated as grounds for questioning the free-market
system that inflicts such misery on the Third World."
Michael Parenti
"The U.S. continues to
rank last among developed nations in official [international]
development assistance, giving only 0.12% of GNP."
Friends Committee on National
Legislation
"The United States is
a society in which people not only can get by without knowing
much about the wider world but are systematically encouraged not
to think independently or critically and instead to accept the
mythology of the United States as a benevolent, misunderstood
giant as it lumbers around the world trying to do good."
Robert Jensen, Citizens of Empire
"If the U.S. really believes
that supporting terrorists makes you as guilty as the terrorists
themselves, then it would have to put on trial most of its military
and political leadership over the last handful of administrations,
and more."
Peter McClaren
"The media want to maintain
their intimate relation to state power. They want to get leaks,
they want to get invited to the press conferences. They want to
rub shoulders with the Secretary of State, all that kind of business.
To do that, you've got to play the game, and playing the game
means telling their lies, serving as their disinformation apparatus."
Noam Chomsky
"An alternative [U.S.
foreign] policy offering real security would require ending the
support of oppressive rulers in the Middle East and elsewhere,
pursuing a more balanced approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,
changing our oil-dependent energy policy, and replacing the drive
for overwhelming global military dominance with policies for the
peaceful prevention of atrocities and deadly conflict."
Friends Committee on National
Legislation
"There is no doubt that
if we lived in a police state, it would be easier to catch terrorists.
If we lived in a country where the police were allowed to search
your home at any time for any reason; if we lived in a country
where the government is entitled to open your mail, eavesdrop
on your phone conversations, or intercept your e-mail communications;
if we lived in a country where people could be held indefinitely
based ... on mere suspicion that they are up to no good, the government
would probably discover and arrest more terrorists, or would-be
terrorists.... But that wouldn't be a country in which we would
want to live."
Senator Russ Feingold
"The fact that we've been
a great democracy doesn't mean we will automatically keep being
one if we keep waving the flag."
Norman Mailer
"The communists had Pravda.
Republicans have Fox."
MoveOn.org ad
"The trauma of 9/11 stimulated
infinite possibilities for worry - some quite plausible, but most
inspired by remote what-if fantasies. A society bingeing on fear
makes itself vulnerable to far more profound forms of destruction
than terror attacks. The "terrorism war", like a nostalgic
echo of the cold war, is using these popular fears to advance
a different agenda - the re-engineering of American life through
permanent mobilization."
William Greider
"A terrorist is someone
who has a bomb but doesn't have an air force."
William Blum
"For the third time in
the last hundred years, the U.S. has invaded and occupied Haiti.
Working behind the scenes, the U.S. conducted a destabilization
campaign aimed at toppling the government of Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
This is a message to the rest of the region: If you don't obey,
the U.S. will impose sanctions, overthrow your government, install
a client regime, and support death squads to crush any resistance."
Ashley Smith
"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
"The United States is
the greatest threat to world peace, and has been for a long time,
and not merely because it is the world's only superpower. Equally
important, the United States is also far more disposed to use
its power than any other powerful nation currently is. Though
Americans are culturally and emotionally blind to the fact, the
mere intrusion of US power is, in and of itself, destabilizing."
T.D. Allman
"The men and women who
enlist in this country's military [should] be told the truth that
they are not protecting the United States, they are and always
have been protecting corporate interests."
Chante Wolf, Veterans for Peace
activist
"Americans cannot escape
a certain responsibility for what is done in our name around the
world. In a democracy, even one as corrupted as ours, ultimate
authority rests with the people. We empower the government with
our votes, finance it with our taxes, bolster it with our silent
acquiescence. If we are passive in the face of America's official
actions overseas, we in effect endorse them."
Mark Hertzgaard
"The era of manufacturing
consent has given way to the era of manufacturing news. Soon media
newsrooms will drop the pretense, and start hiring theater directors
instead of journalists."
Arundhati Roy
"The United States is
a society in which people not only can get by without knowing
much about the wider world but are systematically encouraged not
to think independently or critically and instead to accept the
mythology of the United States as a benevolent, misunderstood
giant as it lumbers around the world trying to do good."
Robert Jensen, Citizens of Empire
"We are the only advanced
nation without a national system of subsidized health care."
Elliott Currie, Crime and Punishment
in America
"Somebody's paying the
corporations that destroyed Iraq and the corporations that are
rebuilding it. They're getting paid by the American taxpayer in
both cases. So we pay them to destroy the country, and then we
pay them to rebuild it. Those are gifts from U.S. taxpayer to
U.S. corporations..."
Noam Chomsky
"Expecting FOX News to
report real news is about as silly as waiting for George Bush
and Dick Cheney to tell the truth... Americans care, but it's
tough to care when you don't know what's going on. That ignorance
is what the warmakers count on and what the corporate media delivers."
Amy Goodman
Media
Censorship
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