Lenin: Imperialism is forcing the masses into this struggle by sharpening class antagonisms to an immense degree, by worsening the conditions of the masses both economically-trusts and high cost of living, and politically-growth of militarism, frequent wars, increase of reaction, strengthening and extension of national oppression and colonial plunder. Victorious socialism must achieve complete democracy and, consequently, not only bring about the complete equality of nations, but also give effect to the right of oppressed nations to self-determination, i.e., the right to free political secession. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote8056
Lenin: Imperialism is the highest stage of development of capitalism. Capital in the advanced countries has outgrown the boundaries of national states. It has established monopoly in place of competition, thus creating all the objective prerequisites for the achievement of socialism. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote8057
Karl Marx: Whilst the cotton industry introduced child-slavery in England, it gave in the United States a stimulus to the transformation of the earlier, more or less patriarchal slavery, into a system of commercial exploitation. In fact, the veiled slavery of the wage workers in Europe needed, for its pedestal, slavery pure and simple in the new world. Tantae molis erat, to establish the "eternal laws of Nature" of the capitalist mode of production, to complete the process of separation between labourers and conditions of labour, to transform, at one pole, the social means of production and subsistence into capital, at the opposite pole, the mass of the population into wage labourers, into "free labouring poor," that artificial product of modern society. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote8059
Karl Marx: Colonial system, public debts, heavy taxes, protection, commercial wars, &c., these children of the true manufacturing period, increase gigantically during the infancy of Modem Industry. The birth of the latter is heralded by a great slaughter of the innocents. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote8061
Jessica Yellin: The press corps was under enormous pressure from corporate executives to make sure the Iraq War (2003) was a war that was presented in a way that was consistent with the patriotic fervor in the nation. The higher the president's ratings, the more pressure I had from news executives to put on positive stories about the president. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote8063
Katie Couric: There was such a significant march to war (Iraq 2003), and people who questioned it very early on, and really as the war progressed, were considered unpatriotic. ... There was a sense, a pressure from the corporations who own where we work, and from government itself, to really squash any kind of dissent. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote8064
Karl Marx: The system of protection was an artificial means of manufacturing manufacturers, of expropriating independent labourers, of capitalising the national means of production and subsistence, of forcibly abbreviating the transition from the medieval to the modern mode of production. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote8065
John Pilger: The reason we don't see the war on civilians in Afghanistan, the war that has caused the most extraordinary devastation, human and cultural and structural devastation in both Iraq and Afghanistan, is because of what is almost laughingly called the mainstream media... Mainstream media reporters now have become so embedded with the establishment, embedded with authority. They're not journalists. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote8066
James Peck: Thousands of dossiers have been produced describing in meticulous detail the death squads and torture and extrajudicial executions carried out by brutal regimes and pathological dictators around the world. When people with black or yellow or brown skin, with Islamic or Communist or nationalist credentials murder their prisoners or bomb their villagers, they are condemned - often quite selectively, to be sure - by the "civilized" world. And they should be condemned. But the American leaders who ordered the free fire zones in Vietnam and the Phoenix program, or directed the Contras against the Sandinistas, or were complicit in Saddam Hussein's gas warfare against the Kurds, or set up and operated Guantánamo are not taken to court. They face no trials. On any human rights website you will find a growing number of prominent leaders indicted for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Few are American or Western European or Israeli. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote8068
John Pilger: Had journalists done their job in 2003, had they questioned and investigated the propaganda about Iraq's WMD, instead of amplifying it, hundreds of thousands of men, women and children might be alive today; and millions might not have fled their homes; the sectarian war between Sunni and Shia might not have ignited, and the infamous Islamic State might not now exist. Most of the public in western countries have little idea of the sheer scale of the crime committed by our governments in Iraq. Even fewer are aware that, in the 12 years before the invasion, the US and British governments set in motion a holocaust by denying the civilian population of Iraq a means to live. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote8069
James Peck: Behind the veil of legitimacy and humanitarian concerns can be found the same powerful people and organizations such as the Open Society Institute of George Soros, the Ford Foundation, the United States Institute of Peace, the National Endowment for Democracy and many more, financing and using a maze of well known NGO's such as Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, the International Crisis Group, etc., as well as more obscure entities. With the help of these various groups it is possible not only to shape but to create the news, the agenda and public opinion to further aims which are, in short, the control of the world, its natural resources and the furtherance of the uniform ideal of a perfect world polity made in America. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote8070
John Bolton: It is a big mistake for us to grant any validity to international law even when it may seem in our short-term interest to do so because over the long term, the goal of those who think that international law really means anything are those who want to constrain the United States. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote8071
David McGowan: Selling fear to the American people has become a mainstay of the press and of both political parties in this country. Taking a "tough on crime" stance, particularly in a climate of perpetual fear created by the "war on drugs" and the "war on terrorism," is always a politically safe posture... By focusing on crime, attention is effectively directed away from more divisive issues on which a politician might have to take a stand that would cost them votes. Meanwhile, a fearful populace continues to surrender their civil rights and constitutional protections at an alarming rate, so that their government may protect them from the rampant criminality of the masses. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote8072
Gloria La Riva: As UN Ambassador and the Secretary of State in the Bill Clinton regime, Madeleine Albright was a fanatical advocate of the genocidal sanctions blockade that killed more than a million women, children and men in Iraq, and of the 1999 U.S./NATO bombing war against Yugoslavia. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote8074
Kwame Nkrumah: The result of neo-colonialism is that foreign capital is used for the exploitation rather than for the development of the less developed parts of the world. Investment, under neo-colonialism, increases, rather than decreases, the gap between the rich and the poor countries of the world. The struggle against neo-colonialism is not aimed at excluding the capital of the developed world from operating in less developed countries. It is aimed at preventing the financial power of the developed countries being used in such a way as to impoverish the less developed. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote8075
Che Guevara: This type of struggle provides us with the opportunity to become revolutionaries, the highest level of the human species. At the same time, it enables us to emerge fully as men. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote8076
Jefferson Morley: In El Salvador, the Reagan administration backed an ultra-right faction of the military led by intelligence officer Roberto d'Aubuisson who was trained at the CIA-run International Police Academy in Washington. D'Aubuisson masterminded the assassination of Monsignor Romero in March 1980 and commanded the death squads that liquidated civilians in favor of peaceful change. In Guatemala, the ultra-right celebrated Reagan's elections and stepped up its campaign of kidnapping opponents in the capital and massacring peasants in the countryside. ... In 1993, the UN Truth Commission found that 85 percent of the deaths of civilian non-combatants in El Salvador were attributable to government forces. Only 5 percent could be attributed to the left. In other words, the security forces armed and trained by the United States were 17 times more likely to be responsible for political murders than the anti-U.S. forces. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote8077
James Peck: The American Constitution itself does not include economic, social, and cultural rights. It includes no mandate to have the basic needs of people satisfied. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote8078
S. Brian Willson: It is estimated that Africa lost fifty to sixty million human beings to death and slavery during the nearly four hundred years of the transatlantic slave trade. It has been calculated that only ten to fifteen million survived the kidnapping process and the subsequent long, forced march of hundreds of miles to the African coast, during which the captives were chained to one another. If that wasn't savage enough, they were forced to endure the transport of six to ten weeks on one of 54,000 separate slave voyages, five thousand miles across the ocean. Called floating coffins, each ship held anywhere from 250 to 600 Africans. The trans-Atlantic slave trade is the largest known forced intercontinental movement of human beings in history. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote8079
James Peck: Washington set out after the Vietnam War to craft human rights into a new language of power designed to promote American foreign policy... Washington has shaped idealism into a potent ideological weapon for ends having little to do with human rights - and everything to do with extending America's global reach. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote8080
John Kenneth Galbraith: If the state is the executive committee of the great corporation and the planning system, it is partly because neoclassical economics is its instrument for neutralizing the suspicion that this is so. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote8082
John Kenneth Galbraith: When the modern corporation acquires power over markets, power in the community, power over the state and power over belief, it is a political instrument, different in degree but not in kind from the state itself. To hold otherwise - to deny the political character of the modern corporation - is not merely to avoid the reality. It is to disguise the reality. The victims of that disguise are those we instruct in error. The beneficiaries are the institutions whose power we so disguise. Let there be no question: economics, so long as it is thus taught, becomes, however unconsciously, a part of the arrangement by which the citizen or student is kept from seeing how he or she is, or will be, governed. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote8084
John Kenneth Galbraith: No grant of feudal privilege has ever equaled, for effortless return, that of the grandparent who bought and endowed his descendants with a thousand shares of General Motors or General Electric. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote8085
Jonathan Cook: Western corporations own the media, and their advertising makes the industry profitable. In this sense, the media cannot fulfil the function of watchdog of power, because in fact it is power. It is the power of the globalised elite to control and limit the ideological and imaginative horizons of the media's readers and viewers. It does so to ensure that imperial interests, which are synonymous with those of the corporations, are not threatened. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote8088
Michael Ledeen: Just as it is sometimes necessary temporarily to resort to evil actions to achieve worthy objectives, so a period of dictatorship is sometimes the only hope for freedom. ... Paradoxically, preserving liberty may require the rule of a single leader - a dictator - willing to use those dreaded 'extraordinary measures', which few know how, or are willing, to employ. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote8089
Peter Phillips: In Venezuela the corporate media are still owned by the elites. The five major TV networks, and nine of ten of the major newspapers maintain a continuing media effort to undermine Chavez and the socialist revolution. But despite the corporate media and $20 million annual support to the anti-Chavez opposition institutions from USAID and National Endowment for Democracy, two-thirds of the people in Venezuela continue to support President Hugo Chavez and the United Socialist Party of Venezuela. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote8090
S. Brian Willson: Cold War propaganda cast a toxic spell on the minds of three generations, including some of the most intelligent people, and its influence continues today. Relentless Cold War rhetoric accomplished a near total indoctrination of our entire US culture. Religious institutions, academic and educational institutions from kindergarten through graduate school, professional associations, political associations from local to national, the scientific community, economic system, entertainment industry from radio and TV to Hollywood and sports, fraternal organizations, boy scouts, etc.-all systematically were complicit in and cooperated to preserve unquestioning belief in the unique nobility of the US American system while instilling rabid, paranoid fear of "enemies"-in our midst as well as "out there"-in order to rationalize otherwise pathologically inexplicable behavior around the world as well as at home. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote8091
Dave Johnson: Many people don't understand our country's problem of concentration of income and wealth because they don't see it. People just don't understand how much wealth there is at the top now. The wealth at the top is so extreme that it is beyond most people's ability to comprehend. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote8092
