Thomas Sankara: From imperialism's point of view, it's more important to dominate us culturally than militarily. Cultural domination is more flexible, more effective, less costly. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Oded Yinon: The dissolution of Syria and Iraq into ethnically or religiously unique areas is Israel's primary target on the Eastern front. Its dissolution is even more important for us than that of Syria. Iraq is stronger than Syria. In the short run, it is Iraqi power which constitutes the greatest threat to Israel. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Fidel Castro: Bombs may kill the starving, the ill and the ignorant, but they cannot kill hunger, disease or ignorance. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Michael Parenti: 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. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Chris Hedges: The corporations that profit from permanent war need us to be afraid. Fear stops us from objecting to government spending on a bloated military. Fear means we will not ask unpleasant questions of those in power. Fear permits the government to operate in secret. Fear means we are willing to give up our rights and liberties for promises of security. The imposition of fear ensures that the corporations that wrecked the country cannot be challenged. Fear keeps us penned in like livestock. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
S. Brian Willson: Our propaganda system works very skillfully to mold public opinion toward supporting, and securing obedience to, demands of the power system. Using carefully crafted visual images, sophisticated rhetoric, and sometimes force, propaganda works astoundingly well in shaping ideology. It is amazingly effective in convincing a nation's youth to follow superiors' orders to kill complete strangers in foreign lands while being at high risk of being killed and maimed themselves. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
John V. Walsh: Iran is the third of the big three Paramount Enemies of the U.S. and the West. Interestingly, Iran followed the same course as China and Russia. After the overthrow of the duly elected social democrat and nationalist Mossadegh by the CIA and the imposition of a brutal dictator, the Shah, a revolution, led by clerics in this case, and a peaceful one at that, overthrew the Shah and cut ties with the West. The clerical establishment played the same role in Iran that the Communist Parties of China and Russia played there. They led a revolution for independence and development and they have kept Iran largely outside the orbit of the West for 35 years. They will engage the West now largely on their own terms, just as China and Russia have done. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
The server that failed, all checks come up clean on it so it appears that, as far as I can tell it was a freak incident of a filesystem/volume corruption. Every check passed otherwise and I'm re-installing it now to clean the system up.
John Pilger: Any truth about Israel/Palestine or, more generally, the Middle East is not going to come from the mainstream media. Those of us who know this should rather stop beating our heads against a brick wall, asking why they don't tell the truth. That's not what they're there for. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Michael Collins Piper: We have this powerful Israeli lobby, and the people who finance them are a very wealthy, highly influential group of people who happen to be Jewish. We effectively have an elite few who can dictate our foreign policy. It's a foreign policy that's trying to advance the interests of another country - Israel. These people do not care how many American kids get butchered in Iraq. This is of absolutely no concern to them. They are fully ready to get us into a war against Iran, against Syria. They know that American kids will be cannon fodder, and their kids won't be. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Lenin: In contrast to the petty-bourgeois democrats, Marx regarded all democratic demands without exception not as an absolute, but as a historical expression of the struggle of the masses of the people, led by the bourgeoisie, against feudalism. There is not a single democratic demand which could not serve, and has not served, under certain conditions, as an instrument of the bourgeoisie for deceiving the workers. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Lenin: The proletariat of the oppressing nations cannot confine itself to the general hackneyed phrases against annexations and for the equal rights of nations in general, that may be repeated by any pacifist bourgeois. The proletariat cannot evade the question that is particularly "unpleasant" for the imperialist bourgeoisie, namely, the question of the frontiers of a state that is based on national oppression. The proletariat cannot but fight against the forcible retention of the oppressed nations within the boundaries of a given state, and this is exactly what the struggle for the right of self-determination means. The proletariat must demand the right of political secession for the colonies and for the nations that "its own" nation oppresses. Unless it does this, proletarian internationalism will remain a meaningless phrase; mutual confidence and class solidarity between the workers of the oppressing and oppressed nations will be impossible; the hypocrisy of the reformist and Kautskyan advocates of self-determination who maintain silence about the nations which are oppressed by "their" nation and forcibly retained within "their" state will remain unexposed. The Socialists of the oppressed nations, on the other hand, must particularly fight for and maintain complete, absolute unity (also organizational) between the workers of the oppressed nation and the workers of the oppressing nation. Without such unity it will be impossible to maintain an independent proletarian policy and class solidarity with the proletariat of other countries in the face of all the subterfuge, treachery and trickery of the bourgeoisie; for the bourgeoisie of the oppressed nations always converts the slogan of national liberation into a means for deceiving the workers; in internal politics it utilizes these slogans as a means for conduding reactionary agreements with the bourgeoisie of the ruling nation (for instance, the Poles in Austria and Russia, who entered into pacts with reaction in order to oppress the Jews and the Ukrainians); in the realm of foreign politics it strives to enter into pacts with one of the rival imperialist powers for the purpose of achieving its own predatory aims (the policies of the small states in the Balkans, etc.). wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Robert Parry: As neocon propagandists pursue their goal of riling up the American public against some new foreign threat, that effort requires highlighting certain facts (and even fictions). But the propagandists equally must make sure that many inconvenient truths are conveniently forgotten. Otherwise the alleged threat might not seem all that unusual or threatening. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
John V. Walsh: Russia and China, recently have been driven into one another's arms by the endless crusades of the West to undermine them. Together they constitute a great power center outside the control of the U.S. Empire. Bent on global domination, the U.S. cannot tolerate such a defiant and alternative center of power. The reason is that such a center provides an alternative for others who would gain their independence from the West. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Lenin: Just as mankind can achieve the abolition of classes only by passing through the transition period of the dictatorship of the oppressed class, so mankind can achieve the inevitable merging of nations only by passing through the transition period of complete liberation of all the oppressed nations, i.e., their freedom to secede. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
George Kennan: Were the Soviet Union to sink tomorrow under the waters of the ocean, the American military-industrial establishment would have to go on, substantially unchanged, until some other adversary could be invented. Anything else would be an unacceptable shock to the American economy. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
David Rovics: In the years following the election of Hugo Chavez, millions of people were brought out of poverty, millions of people got medical care who hadn't had it before, schools and hospitals and farmer collectives opened up all over the country, and Venezuela became a beacon for socialism and democracy for many people around the world, including within the United States. Venezuela's Bank of the South liberated many countries from the intentionally destructive strings attached to IMF loans. Millions of people in many other countries benefited from the generosity of the Bolivarian Revolution's internationalist programs, including people struggling to pay their heating bills in cities like Boston and Chicago. ... Chile when a popular socialist (Salvador Allende) was elected in a landslide and started lifting millions of his country's people out of poverty through his extremely popular socialist policies, here's what happened: the US government, through the CIA and other agencies, organized a massive campaign to destabilize Chilean society and destroy the Chilean economy, while cultivating a CIA-trained general within the Chilean military to seize power in a violent coup, which resulted in a military dictatorship that lasted decades and led to untold thousands being tortured and killed by sadistic, US-trained Chilean soldiers and government agents. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
This looks onerous right now... but I can imagine something like this being incorporated into AC system or dehumidifiers, etc, especially if it gets expanded to an array of diseases...
It doesn't so much prevent disease, but it can at least help with peace of mind and rapid disease control (ie. system goes off, everyone in the area quarantines to limit spread)
Lenin: The aim of socialism is not only to abolish the present division of mankind into small states and all national isolation; not only to bring the nations closer to each other, but also to merge them. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Peter Phillips: Pentagon propaganda penetration has occured on mainstream corporate news in the guise of retired Generals as "experts" or pundits who turned out to be nothing more than paid shills for government war policy. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
John Pilger: The most effective propaganda is found not in the Sun or on Fox News - but beneath a liberal halo. When the New York Times published claims that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, its fake evidence was believed, because it wasn't Fox News; it was the New York Times. The same is true of the Washington Post and the Guardian, both of which have played a critical role in conditioning their readers to accept a new and dangerous cold war. All three liberal newspapers have misrepresented events in Ukraine as a malign act by Russia - when, in fact, the fascist led coup in Ukraine was the work of the United States, aided by Germany and NATO. This inversion of reality is so pervasive that Washington's military encirclement and intimidation of Russia is not contentious. It's not even news, but suppressed behind a smear and scare campaign of the kind I grew up with during the first cold war. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
David Swanson: If the war lies were not all over the media, people would not learn them in the first place. If the corrections were heard over and over again, they would get through. If our communications system allowed the presentation of a variety of voices and viewpoints and feared promoting falsehoods more than it feared being insufficiently militaristic, we wouldn't need to investigate the widespread phenomenon of engaged citizens certain of their beliefs but completely deluded. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
John V. Walsh: Where once the U.S. fought battles against insurgent liberation movements, now it fights to bring down defiant governments or leaders. That is a feature of neo-imperialism. Defiance of the West has been the common denominator for those whom the West seeks to destroy. As the world knows by now, "democracy" and "human rights" have nothing to do with U.S. neo-imperial strategy. The two cross paths only by accident. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Stalin: This war is not as in the past; whoever occupies a territory also imposes on it his own social system. Everyone imposes his own system as far as his army can reach. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
S. Brian Willson: US Special Forces operatives, comprised of 70,000 soldiers, have set foot in 150 countries from 2011-2014 (three fourths of the planet's 196 nations), tracking and killing suspected "terrorists." In the process, they torture, destroy homes and families, and kill and wound many innocent. The Special Forces also provide names and cell phone numbers of those they have supposedly identified as targets for guiding drone strikes. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Lenin: The domination of finance capital, as of capital in general, cannot be abolished by any kind of reforms in the realm of political democracy, and self-determination belongs wholly and exclusively to this realm. The domination of finance capital, however, does not in the least destroy the significance of political democracy as the freer, wider and more distinct form of class oppression and class struggle. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
John Stockwell: The basic theme was to make it look like enemy aggression in Angola. So any kind of story that you could write and get into the media anywhere in the world, that pushed that line, we did. One third of my staff in this task force were propagandists, whose professional career job was to make up stories and find ways of getting them into the press. The editors in most Western newspapers are not too skeptical of messages that conform to general views and prejudices. So we came up with another story, and it was kept going for weeks. But it was all fiction. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Daniel Estulin: Prior to media's "humanitarian" propaganda campaigns, neither Somalia nor Kosovo and certainly not Sudan figured prominently among the typical American's concerns. In fact, over 85% of American public could not find Sudan on the world map. The same could be said for Somalia and certainly Kosovo, not to mention Iraq prior to the Desert Storm invasion in 1991. 87% of Americans didn't know where Iraq was on the map and had no idea who Saddam Hussein was until CNN's diligent, relentless efforts to indoctrinate the American public made those military campaigns possible. Nevertheless, what's absolutely mind-boggling is that the public never questioned any of it (U.S. invasion of Iraq in 1991 and again in 2003). By the end of 2010, more than one and a half million innocent Iraqis are dead, along with Saddam Hussein, 5,000+ American troops and unknown tens of thousands maimed for life who are "liberating" the country on behalf of British Petroleum, Royal Dutch Shell, Halliburton, Blackwater, Chase Manhattan Bank, Bank of America, CitiGroup and an unending plethora of multinational corporations, all vying for a piece of an Iraqi sweepstakes and wealth. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Carroll Quigley: The powers of financial capitalism had a far-reaching (plan), nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Lenin: The socialist revolution is not one single act, not one single battle on a single front; but a whole epoch of intensified class conflicts, a long series of battles on all fronts, i.e., battles around all the problems of economics and politics, which can culminate only in the expropriation of the bourgeoisie. It would be a fundamental mistake to suppose that the struggle for democracy can divert the proletariat from the socialist revolution, or obscure, or overshadow it, etc. On the contrary, just as socialism cannot be victorious unless it introduces complete democracy, so the proletariat will be unable to prepare for victory over the bourgeoisie unless it wages a many-sided, consistent and revolutionary struggle for democracy. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Paul Craig Roberts: Mainstream reporters are always pro-war, acting as cheerleaders for the military-industrial complex and propagandists for the government. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
