U.S.Foreign Policy and Pentagon
"Why of course the people
don't want war.Why should some poor slob on a farm want to risk
his life in a war when the best he can get out of it is to come
back to his farm in one piece? Naturally, the common people don't
want war: neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter
in Germany. That is understood. But after all it is the leaders
of the country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple
matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or
a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship
...Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the
bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to
tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists
for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger."
Hermann Goering, Nazi leader,
at the Nuremberg Trials after World War II
" ... the United States
[is] cast in the role of Praetorian Guard, protecting the interests
of the global financial order against fractious elements in the
Third World. "
John Stockwell, former CIA official
and author
United States foreign policy since
the 1980s, effectively dictated by the U.S. right-wing, has been
"selective rollback" - the deliberate overthrow of foreign
governments, especially in the third world, which are seen as
socialist, nationalist or just uncooperative with U.S. business
interests, by a program of political, psychological and economic
warfare, military and paramilitary actions, and the infiltration
of agents and saboteurs.
"How dare Americans allow
their government to cause such misery [in the world]."
Ramsey Clark, former United States
Attorney General and human rights activist
" Rollback as a foreign
policy ... causes untold devastation and misery for millions overseas,
and hinders any potential positive U.S. influence in world affairs...
To the extent the U.S. public backs rollback, this support is
rooted in a misguided sense of patriotism. Patriotism itself -
love of one's country and one's people - is a natural and reasonable
human feeling. But patriotism which measures one's country by
military superiority over all rivals regardless of consequence
is irrational... There is surely a more rational form of patriotism
that searches for excellence in social, economic and moral spheres
rather than in weapon systems. "
from the book Rollback by Thomas
Bodenheimer and Robert Gould
"From 1945 to 2003, the
United States attempted to overthrow more than 40 foreign governments,
and to crush more than 30 populist-nationalist movements fighting
against intolerable regimes. In the process, the US bombed some
25 countries, caused the end of life for several million people,
and condemned many millions more to a life of agony and despair."
William Blum
" 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, political scientist
and author
" America's inability
to come to terms with revolutionary change in the The Third World...has
created our biggest international problems in the postwar era.
But the root of the problem is not, as many Americans persist
in believing, the relentless spread of communism. Rather, it is
our own difficulty in understanding that Third World revolutions
are primarily nationalist, not communist. Nationalism, not capitalism
or communism, is the dominant political force in the modern world.
You might think that revolutionary nationalism and the desire
for self-determination would be relatively easy for Americans
- the first successful revolutionaries to win their independence
- to understand. But instead we have been dumbfounded when other
peoples have tried to pursue the goals of our own revolution two
centuries ago.... "
Former U.S. Senator Frank Church,
on the shortsightedness of 'rollback' as our foreign policy doctrine
" 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
"Get some new lawyers"
US Secretary of State Madeline
Albright to British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook when he told
her
he was informed that the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia was illegal
under international law
" ... there is a system
of terroristic states -- the real terror network -- that has spread
throughout Latin America and elsewhere over the past several decades,
and which is deeply rooted in the corporate interest and sustaining
political-military-financial propaganda mechanisms of the United
States and its allies in the Free World."
Edward Herman, economist and media
analyst
"If we love this country,
we'd better change it."
Ramsey Clark, former United States
Attorney General and human rights activist
" America must prevent
other states "from challenging our leadership or seeking
to overturn the established political and economic order....We
must maintain the mechanisms for deterring potential competitors
from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role. "
Pentagon's Defense Planning Guide
for 1994-1999
" Why should we flagellate
ourselves for what the Cambodians did to each other?"
Henry Kissinger - who (with Richard
Nixon) was responsible for the massive bombing of Cambodia in
1973, which killed three-quarters of a million peasants and disrupted
Cambodian society, setting the stage for Pol Pot to come to power
and ultimately kill another one-and-a-half million people
"Was there ever any domination
that did not appear natural to those who possessed it?"
John Stuart Mill, British philosopher
and economist, 1806-1873
"Those who own the country
ought to govern it."
John Jay, American statesman and
first Chief Justice of US Supreme Court, 1745-1829
"That men should not be
equal, is the primitive belief of primitive people."
author unknown
"To oppose the policies
of a government does not mean you are against the country or the
people that the government supposedly represents. Such opposition
should be called what it really is: democracy, or democratic dissent,
or having a critical perspective about what your leaders are doing.
Either we have the right to democratic dissent and criticism of
these policies or we all lie down and let the leader, the Fuhrer,
do what is best, while we follow uncritically, and obey whatever
he commands. That's just what the Germans did with Hitler, and
look where it got them."
Michael Parenti
" 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, American linguist
and US media and foreign policy critic
" The modern conservative
is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy:
that is the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness."
John Kenneth Galbraith, economist
and author
" Anyone who challenges
the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising
effectiveness. "
George Orwell, author of the book
"1984"
" The Clinton administration
is revamping NATO and redefining its mission in order to make
it an instrument of American world engagement as peacekeeper,
peacemaker, and policeman... "
William Pfaff, columnist, Z magazine
" The agony and moral
anguish that ought to accompany an act of mass killing -- yes,
even in a war [the Gulf War against Iraq in 1991] -- seemed wholly
absent from American culture."
Ruth Rosen, history professor
" Everyone's values are
defined by what they will tolerate when it is done to others.
"
William Greider, author
" We routinely had Latin
American students at the School of the Americas (SOA) who were
known human rights abusers, and it didn't make any difference
to us."
Instructor at the School of the
Americas in Georgia
" I know of no country
in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom
of discussion as in America. "
Alexis de Tocqueville, 1805 -
1859, French political thinker and author of Democracy in America
"The nationalist not only
does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but
he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them."
George Orwell, English writer,
1903-1950
"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
" It has been true all
through history, the way you get a small group of people to be
very rich is by getting a lot of other people to be very poor.
"
Michael Parenti, political scientist
and author
"What the United States
has done to the country [Cambodia] is greater evil than we have
done to any country in the world..."
California Congressman Pete McClosky
following a visit to Cambodia in the 1970s
" Patriotism, like religion,
meets people's need for something greater to which their individual
lives can be anchored ... America's state religion, [is] patriotism,
a phenomenon which has convinced many of the citizenry that "treason"
is morally worse than murder or rape "
William Blum, author of Killing
Hope
" If we have to use force,
it is because we are America. We are the indispensable nation.
We stand tall. We see further into the future. "
Secretary of State Madelaine Albright,
describing her vision of America's role in the world
"[American leaders] are
perhaps not so much immoral as they are amoral. It's not that
they take pleasure in causing so much death and suffering. It's
that they just don't care ... the same that could be said about
a sociopath. As long as the death and suffering advance the agenda
of the empire, as long as the right people and the right corporations
gain wealth and power and privilege and prestige, as long as the
death and suffering aren't happening to them or people close to
them ... then they just don't care about it happening to other
people, including the American soldiers whom they throw into wars
and who come home - the ones who make it back alive - with Agent
Orange or Gulf War Syndrome eating away at their bodies. American
leaders would not be in the positions they hold if they were bothered
by such things."
William Blum
" History will have to
record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition
was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling
silence of the good people. "
Martin Luther King, Jr.
" ... the CIA had been
running thousands of operations over the years... there have been
about 3,000 major covert operations and over 10,000 minor operations...
all designed to disrupt, destabilize, or modify the activities
of other countries... But they are all illegal and they all disrupt
the normal functioning, often the democratic functioning, of other
societies. They raise serious questions about the moral responsibility
of the United States in the international society of nations.
"
John Stockwell, former CIA official
and author
" Coming to grips with
... U.S./CIA activities in broad numbers and figuring out how
many people have been killed in the jungles of Laos or the hills
of Nicaragua is very difficult. But, adding them up as best we
can, we come up with a figure of six million people killed-and
this is a minimum figure. Included are: one million killed in
the Korean War, two million killed in the Vietnam War, 800,000
killed in Indonesia, one million in Cambodia, 20,000 killed in
Angola ... and 22,000 killed in Nicaragua. These people would
not have died if U.S. tax dollars had not been spent by the CIA
to inflame tensions, finance covert political and military activities
and destabilize societies. "
John Stockwell, former CIA official
and author
"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, 1874-1965,
British prime minister during World War II, commenting on the
British use of poison gas against Iraqis after World War I
" 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
"We have about 50% of
the world's wealth but only 6.3% of its population.... Our real
task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships
which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without
positive detriment to our national security. To do so, we will
have to dispense with all sentimentality and daydreaming, and
our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate
national objectives. We need not deceive ourselves that we can
afford today the luxury of altruism and world benefaction....
We should cease to talk about vague and unreal objectives such
as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization.
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, State Department
memo, 1948
"The Middle East is center
of the world's energy resources... That's been an axiom of U.S.
foreign policy, that it must control Middle East energy resources.
It is not a matter of access ... the issue has always been control.
Control is the source of strategic power."
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
"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
" 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
media critic
" Since the modern world
recognizes only wage earners as "productive" members
of society -- housewives, traditional farmers and the elderly
suddenly become identified as "unproductive.""
Helena Norberg-Hodge, anthropologist, speaking about the changes
in traditional societies as they modernize
" The foreign policies
of nation-states, particularly economic and monetary policies,
have always been a highly elitist matter. Policy options are proposed,
reviewed, and executed within the context of a broad bipartisan
consensus that is painstakingly managed by very small circles
of public and private elites.... Where necessary, a consensus
is engineered on issues which must get congressional / parliamentary
approval, but wherever possible executive agreements between governments
are used to avoid the democratic process altogether. "
Peter Thomson
" The first casualty when
war comes is the truth."
U.S. Senator Hiram Johnson, 1917
" ... neoconservative Jeane Kirkpatrick
... argued in 1979 that Third World revolutions are illegitimate,
the products of Soviet expansion rather than of local historical
forces opposed to repressive dictatorships. ... Kirkpatrick had
solved the moral problem of the rollbackers: why it is fine to
overthrow left-wing governments and make friends with rightist
dictators. The Kirkpatrick Doctrine held that right-wing dictatorships
can evolve into democratic governments while left-wing nations
cannot. Under this Doctrine, Marcos, Pinochet, and P.W. Botha
were leading their countries down the path of democracy. "
from the book Rollback by Thomas
Bodenheimer and Robert Gould
" [The] American thirst
for victory, his scorn for defeat, gives the militarist line great
leverage over political debate, although its degree of dominance
ebbs and flows with the nature of the issue and the public mood,
the latter itself significantly shaped by a media that defers
to the state on national security policy in most matters. "
Richard Falk, professor
" It may be necessary
to kill half the Filippinos in order that the remaining half of
the population may be advanced to a higher plane of lfe ..."
US Field Commander, General Shafter,
during US invasion of Philippines in 1899
"The U.S. record of war
crimes has been, from the nineteenth century to the present, a
largely invisible one, with no government, no political leaders,
no military officials, no lower-level operatives held accountable
for criminal actions... Anyone challenging this mythology is quickly
marginalized, branded a traitor or Communist or terrorist or simply
a lunatic beyond the pale of reasonable discussion."
Carl Boggs
"From 1945 to 2003, the
United States attempted to overthrow more than 40 foreign governments,
and to crush more than 30 populist-nationalist movements fighting
against intolerable regimes. In the process, the US bombed some
25 countries, caused the end of life for several million people,
and condemned many millions more to a life of agony and despair."
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
" We are willing to accept
lies if they make our lives easier. "
Producer from the TV series "People's
Century", opining on why Americans tolerate unjust and inhumane
U.S. government policies, at home and abroad
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