"Why Do They Hate Us ?"
Augusto Pinochet-Chile / Shah
Pahlevi-Iran / Pol Pot-Cambodia / Idi Amin-Uganda /Saddam Hussein-Iraq
General Suharto-Indonesia / "Papa
Doc" Duvalier-Haiti / Israel / Efrain Rios Montt-Guatemala
/ Hosni Mubarak-Egypt / Fulgencio Batista-Cuba
Al Sabah dynasty-Kuwait / Al Thani
dynasty-Qatar / Saud dynasty-Saudi Arabia / Khalifa dynasty-Bahrain
" America's inability
to come to terms with revolutionary change in 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
Regions
"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 cold war provided
the perfect excuse for Western governments to plunder and exploit
the Third World in the name of freedom; to rig its elections,
bribe its politicians, appoint its tyrants and, by every sophisticated
means of persuasion and interference, stunt the emergence of young
democracies in the name of democracy."
John le Carre'
Authors
" There is ... a huge
tacit conspiracy between the U.S. government, its agencies and
its multinational corporations, on the one hand, and local business
and military cliques in the Third World, on the other, to assume
complete control of these countries and "develop" them
on a joint venture basis. The military leaders of the Third World
were carefully nurtured by the U.S. security establishment to
serve as the "enforcers" of this joint venture partnership,
and they have been duly supplied with machine guns and the latest
data on methods of interrogation of subversives."
Edward S. Herman
*****
"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
Books
"For the American public
... warfare visited upon other countries has become an entertaining
spectacle."
Carl Boggs
"I believe that if we
had and would keep our dirty, bloody, dollar-soaked fingers out
of the business of these [Third World] nations so full of depressed,
exploited people, they will arrive at a solution of their own....
And if unfortunately their revolution must be of the violent type
because the "haves" refuse to share with the "have-nots"
by any peaceful method, at least what they get will be their own,
and not the American style, which they don't want and above all
don't want crammed down their throats by Americans."
General David Sharp, former US
Marine Commandant,1966
"[Genocide] certainly
is a valid word in my view, when you have a situation where we
see thousands of deaths per month, a possible total of I million
to 1.5 million over the last nine years. If that is not genocide,
then I don't know quite what is."
Denis Halliday, former UN humanitarian
coordinator - on effect of US sanctions on Iraqi people
*****
"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
"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 Soviet Union and
something called communism per se had not been the object of Washington's
global attacks. There had never been an International Communist
Conspiracy. The enemy was, and remains, any government or movement,
or even individual, that stands in the way of the expansion of
the American Empire, by whatever name the US gives to the enemy
- communist, rogue state, drug trafficker, terrorist."
William Blum, Killing Hope
"Foreign aid has been
perfected so that it subsidizes corporate U.S. agriculture while
preventing poor countries from developing profitable agriculture
or feeding themselves."
Nicholas Von Hoffman
*****
" We live amidst massive
inequality. We don't really care that most people have little
power to alter the conditions of their lives. We refuse to acknowledge
that the earth is dying and that we are killing it. ... Our unthinking
celebration of individual achievement and upward mobility works
to damage the life-giving ties of kinship and the bonds of community.
...We pretend not to understand the linkages between our comfortable
standard of living and the dictatorships we impose and protect
through an international military presence. "
Jerry Fresia, Toward an American
Revolution
"America is today the
leader of a world-wide anti-revolutionary movement in the defense
of vested interests. She now stands for what Rome stood for. Rome
consistently supported the rich against the poor in all foreign
communities that fell under her sway; and, since the poor, so
far, have always and everywhere been far more numerous than the
rich, Rome's policy made for inequality, for injustice, and for
the least happiness of the greatest number."
Arnold Toynbee, historian, 1961
*****
"[The ruling elites] know
who their enemies are, and their enemies are the people, the people
at home and the people abroad. Their enemies are anybody who wants
more social justice, anybody who wants to use the surplus value
of society for social needs rather than for individual class greed,
that's their enemy."
Michael Parenti
[Augusto Pinochet - Chile, "Papa
Doc" Duvalier - Haiti, Efrain Rios Montt - Guatemala, Park
Chung-hee - South Korea,
P W Botha - South Africa, Sani Abacha - Nigeria, Rafael Trujillos
- Dominican Republic, General Suharto - Indonesia, Fulgencio Batista
- Cuba,
Mobuto Sese Seko - Zaire, Ferdinand Marcos - Philippines, Anastasio
Somoza - Nicaragua, Pol Pot - Cambodia]
Subjects
" When I visited Auschwitz
I was horrified. And when I visited Iraq, I thought to myself,
'What will we tell our children in fifty years when they ask what
we did when the people in Iraq were dying.' "
Mairead McGuire, Nobel Peace Prize
Winner, Northern Ireland
*****
"... the establishment
can't admit [that] it is human rights violations that make ...
countries attractive to business -- so history has to be fudged,
including denial of our support of regimes of terror and the practices
that provide favorable climates of investment, and our destabilization
of democracies that [don't] meet [the] standard of service to
the transnational corporation..."
Edward S. Herman
" The great multinationals
are unwilling to face the moral and economic contradictions of
their own behavior - producing in low-wage dictatorships and selling
to high-wage democracies. Indeed, the striking quality about global
enterprises is how easily free-market capitalism puts aside its
supposed values in order to do business. The conditions of human
freedom do not matter to them so long as the market demand is
robust. The absence of freedom, if anything, lends order and efficiency
to their operations."
William Greider
*****
" Rollback [the destabilization
and overthrow of Third World leftist-populist governments with
right-wing governments] 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. "
Thomas Bodenheimer and Robert
Gould, Rollback
"[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. Killing Hope
*****
" [T]here seems to be
nothing to prevent the transnational corporations taking possession
of the planet and subjecting humanity to the dictatorship of capital....
In order to crush any thought of organized resistance to the supporters
of the new world order, tremendous police and military forces
are being used to establish a doctrine of repression...."
Christian la Brie, Le Monde Diplomatique
(Paris)
" 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
*****
" 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.
"The American government
has been harvesting the Middle Eastern grapes of wrath for a generation
and not making a secret of it, either. As lousy as the mass media
may be, there was enough news about what was transpiring, year
after year, to get the gist of what was happening... No American
can truthfully say that they could not find out what was going
on ..."
Nicholas Von Hoffman
*****
"The leaders of the empire,
the imperial mafia - George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Richard
Cheney, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard
Perle, et al. ... are as fanatic and as fundamentalist as Osama
bin Laden."
William Blum
" 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
Articles
"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
" Coming to grips with
these 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.
Certainly, there are other
local, regional, national and international factors in many of
these operations, but if the CIA were tried fairly in a U.S. court,
under U.S. law, the principle of complicity, incitement, riot,
and mayhem would clearly apply. In the United States, if you hire
someone to commit a murder your sentence may be approximately
the same as that of the murderer himself.
Who are these six million people
we have killed in the interest of American national security?
Conservatives tell us, "It's a dangerous world. Our enemies
have to die so we can be safe and secure." Some of them say,
"I'm sorry, but that's the way the world is. We have to accept
this reality and defend ourselves, to make our nation safe and
insure our way of life."
Since 1954, however, we have
not parachuted teams into the Soviet Union - our number one enemy
- to destabilize that country... Neither do we run these violent
operations in England, France, Sweden, Norway, Belgium, or Switzerland.
Since the mid-1950s they have all been conducted in Third World
countries where governments do not have the power to force the
United States to stop its brutal and destabilizing campaigns.
One might call this the "Third
World War." It is a war that has been fought by the United
States against the Third World. Others call it the Cold War and
focus on the anti-Communist and anti-Soviet rationales, but the
dead are not Soviets; they are people of 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. Altogether, perhaps twenty million people
died in the Cold War. 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.
The six million people the
CIA has helped to kill are people of the Mitumba Mountains of
the Congo, the jungles of Southeast Asia, and the hills of northern
Nicaragua. They are people without ICBMs or armies or navies,
incapable of doing physical damage to the United States the 22,000
killed in Nicaragua, for example, are not Russians; they are not
Cuban soldiers or advisors; they are not even mostly Sandinistas.
A majority are rag-poor peasants, including large numbers of women
and children.
Communists? Hardly, since the
dead Nicaraguans are predominantly Roman Catholics. Enemies of
the United States? That description doesn't fit either, because
the thousands of witnesses who have lived in Nicaraguan villages
with the people since 1979 testify that the Nicaraguans are the
warmest people on the face of the earth, that they love people
from the United States, and they simply cannot understand why
our leaders would want to spend $1 billion on a contra force designed
to murder people and wreck the country."
John Stockwell, former CIA official
and author
American Empire page
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