Lenin: Central to all the disquisitions of the self-determination opponents is the claim that it is generally "unachievable" under capitalism or imperialism. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Daniel Estulin: Most Americans and Europeans get their news from state-controlled television, under the misconception that reporters are meant to serve the public. In fact, reporters do not serve the public. Reporters are paid employees and serve the media owners, whose company's shares are traded on Wall Street. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Lenin: The state is a machine for maintaining the rule of one class over another. When there were no classes in society, when, before the epoch of slavery, people laboured in primitive conditions of greater equality, in conditions when the productivity of labour was still at its lowest, and when primitive man could barely procure the wherewithal for the crudest and most primitive existence, a special group of people whose function is to rule and to dominate the rest of society, had not and could not yet have emerged. Only when the first form of the division of society into classes appeared, only when slavery appeared, when a certain class of people, by concentrating on the crudest forms of agricultural labour, could produce a certain surplus, when this surplus was not absolutely essential for the most wretched existence of the slave and passed into the hands of the slave-owner, when in this way the existence of this class of slave-owners was secure-then in order that it might take firm root it was necessary for a state to appear. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Lenin: The state is a machine for the oppression of one class by another, a machine for holding in obedience to one class other, subordinated classes. There are various forms of this machine. The slave-owning state could be a monarchy, an aristocratic republic or even a democratic republic. In fact the forms of government varied extremely, but their essence was always the same: the slaves enjoyed no rights and constituted an oppressed class; they were not regarded as human beings. We find the same thing in the feudal state. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Michel Chossudovsky: It is in the interest of the corporate elites to accept dissent and protest as a feature of the system inasmuch as they do not threaten the established social order. The purpose is not to repress dissent, but, on the contrary, to shape and mould the protest movement, to set the outer limits of dissent. To maintain their legitimacy, the economic elites favor limited and controlled forms of opposition.. To be effective, however, the process of "manufacturing dissent" must be carefully regulated and monitored by those who are the object of the protest movement. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Seumas Milne: Noam Chomsky is the closest thing in the English-speaking world to an intellectual superstar. ... But, the bulk of the mainstream western media doesn't seem to have noticed. His books sell in their hundreds of thousands, he is mobbed by students as a celebrity, but he is rarely reported or interviewed in the US outside radical journals and websites. The explanation, of course, isn't hard to find. Chomsky is America's most prominent critic of the US imperial role in the world. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Henry Kissinger: We want to help, not undermine you (Pinochet). You did a great service to the West in overthrowing Allende. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Nelson Mandela: The cause of Communism is the greatest cause in the history of mankind, because it seeks to remove from society all forms of oppression and exploitation to liberate mankind, and to ensure peace and prosperity to all. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Caitlin Johnstone: Plutocrats own the mass media and the status quo-friendly voices, which creates an environment full of peer pressure to conform and workplace pressure to advance establishment-friendly narratives. Add to this the phenomenon of access journalism, wherein journalists are incentivized to cozy up to power and pitch softball questions to officials in order to gain access to them, and things get slanted. All of this can create an environment of consensus which has nothing to do with facts or reality, but rather with what narratives favor the US-centralized empire and the plutocrats who control it. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Malcolm X: The white man supports Reverend Martin Luther King, subsidizes Reverend Martin Luther King, so that Reverend Martin Luther King can continue to teach the Negroes to be defenseless-that's what you mean by nonviolent-be defenseless in the face of one of the most cruel beasts that has ever taken people into captivity-that's this American white man, and they have proved it throughout the country by the police dogs and the police clubs. A hundred years ago they used to put on a white sheet and use a bloodhound against Negroes. Today they have taken off the white sheet and put on police uniforms and traded in the bloodhounds for police dogs, and they're still doing the same thing. Just as Uncle Tom, back during slavery used to keep the Negroes from resisting the bloodhound or resisting the Ku Klux Klan by teaching them to love their enemies or pray for those who use them despitefully, today Martin Luther King is just a twentieth-century or modern Uncle Tom or religious Uncle Tom, who is doing the same thing today to keep Negroes defenseless in the face of attack that Uncle Tom did on the plantation to keep those Negroes defenseless in the face of the attack of the Klan in that day. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Fred Reed: The major news outlets are controlled. Reporters understand the rules perfectly. You do not ever, criticize Israel. You don't say anything remotely interpretable as racist. Women are sacrosanct. The endless wars get minimal coverage and almost nothing that would upset the public. Huge military contracts get almost no mention. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Lenin: The workers are surrounded on all sides by such a sea of lies in the bourgeois newspapers that they must fight for the truth at all costs, they must learn to recognise falsehoods and reject them. The erroneous views of the liquidators of the workers' party must be calmly refuted. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
John F. Kennedy: For we are opposed around the world by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies primarily on covert means for expanding its sphere of influence-on infiltration instead of invasion, on subversion instead of elections, on intimidation instead of free choice, on guerrillas by night instead of armies by day. It is a system which has conscripted vast human and material resources into the building of a tightly knit, highly efficient machine that combines military, diplomatic, intelligence, economic, scientific and political operations. Its preparations are concealed, not published. Its mistakes are buried, not headlined. Its dissenters are silenced, not praised. No expenditure is questioned, no rumor is printed, no secret is revealed. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Chris Hedges: Functional illiteracy in North America is epidemic. There are 7 million illiterate Americans. Another 27 million are unable to read well enough to complete a job application, and 30 million can't read a simple sentence. There are some 50 million who read at a fourth - or fifth - grade level. Nearly a third of the nation's population is illiterate or barely literate - a figure that is growing by more than 2 million a year. A third of high-school graduates never read another book for the rest of their lives, and neither do 42 percent of college graduates. In 2007, 80 percent of the families in the United States did not buy or read a book. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Shiri Bailem
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