THIRD WORLD TRAVEL
"Travel is fatal to bigotry,
prejudice, and narrow-mindedness. Broad, wholesome, and charitable
views cannot be acquired by vegetating in one tiny corner of the
globe."
Mark Twain
" Many Americans want
to nurture an image of innocence and decency and yet most Americans
want most of all to stay on top and continue to applaud clear
victories in the Third World however achieved. "
Richard Falk, professor
" The government of the
United States does not, in its policies, express the decency of
its people. "
Jerry Fresia, author of Toward
an American Revolution
*****
" Where is the outrage?
... If we are moved merely by greed, and there's no longer any
respect for decent or honest government, then we will suffer the
results. "
Barbara Tuchman, historian and
author
" ... the NSS [National
Security State] is an instrument of class warfare, organized and
designed to permit an elite, local and multinational, to operate
without any constraint from democratic processes. This allows
the bulk of the population to be treated as a mere cost of production."
Edward Herman, economist and media
analyst
*****
" Few of us, can easily
surrender our belief that society must somehow make sense. The
thought that the State has lost its mind and is punishing so many
innocent people is intolerable. And the evidence has to be internally
denied. "
Arthur Miller, playwrite
" 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
*****
"Bringing democratic control
to the conduct of foreign policy requires a struggle merely to
force the issue onto the public agenda."
Eric Alterman, author
"Power lies in the growth
of awareness."
Herbert de Souza, Brazilian human
rights activist
*****
"As long as people are
marginalized and distracted [they] have no way to organize or
articulate their sentiments, or even know that others have these
sentiments. People assume that
they are the only people with a crazy idea in their heads. They
never hear it from anywhere else. Nobody's supposed to think that.
... Since there's no way to get together with other people who
share or reinforce that view and help you articulate it, you feel
like an oddity, an oddball. So you just stay on the side and you
don't pay any attention to what's going on. You look at something
else, like the Superbowl."
Noam Chomsky, American linguist
and US media and foreign policy critic
" The people can have
anything they want. The trouble is, they do not want anything.
At least they vote that way on election day."
Eugene Debs, American socialist
leader, 1855-1926
*****
" Given the [weapons]
industry's command of the Congress and the Pentagon, the defense
firms create the demand for weaponry, prescribe the technological
development for our defense system, and supply the needed funds
- the defense budget. There is no novelty here. This is the military-industrial
complex ... "
John Kenneth Galbraith, economist
and author
*****
" It should never be forgotten
that the people must have priority. "
Ho Chi Minh, Vietnamese nationalist
leader, president of North Vietnam-1954-1969
"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, English dramatist
"When you give food to
the poor, they call you a saint.
When you ask why the poor have no food, they call you a communist."
Archbishop Helder Camara, Brazilian
liberation theologist
*****
"Humans are complex creatures.
We have a demonstrated capacity for hatred, violence, competition,
and greed. We have as well a demonstrated capacity for love, tenderness,
cooperation, and compassion. Healthy societies nurture the latter
and in so doing create an abundance of those things that are most
important to the quality of our living. Dysfunctional societies
nurture the former and in so doing create scarcity and deprivation.
A healthy society makes it easy to live in balance with the environment,
whereas a dysfunctional society makes it nearly impossible. Whether
we organize our societies for social and environmental health
or for dysfunction is a choice that is ours to make."
David Korten, economist and internationalist
"Nothing appears more
surprising to those who consider human affairs with a philosophical
eye than the easiness with which the many are governed by the
few, and the implicit submission with which men resign their own
sentiments and passions to those of their rulers. When we inquire
by what means this wonder is effected, we shall find that, as
force is always on the side of the governed, the governors have
nothing to support them but opinion. It is, therefore, on opinion
only that government is founded, and this maxim extends to the
most despotic and most military governments as well as to the
most free and most popular."
David Hume, Scottish philosopher
and historian, "Of the First Principles of Government"
1758
*****
" The only way to abolish
war is to make peace heroic."
John Dewey, American philosopher
and educator, 1859-1952
" The Third World War
is a war that has been fought by the United States against the
Third World. It might also be called the Forty-Year War, like
the Thirty-Year and Hundred-Year Wars in Europe, for this one
began when the CIA was founded in 1947 and continues today. As
wars go, it has been the second or third most destructive of human
life in all of history, after World War I and World War II. "
John Stockwell, former CIA official
and author
*****
"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 head of U.S. State
Department Policy Planning Staff, 1948
" The most effective way
to restrict democracy is to transfer decision-making from the
public arena to unaccountable institutions: kings and princes,
priestly castes, military juntas, party dictatorships, or modern
corporations."
Noam Chomsky, American linguist
and US media and foreign policy critic
*****
"A people that wants to
be free must arm itself with a free press."
George Seldes, journalist
"Today the United States
has, by far, the most unequal distribution of wealth and income
in the industrialized world. "
Vermont Congressman Bernie Sanders
*****
" 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.
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