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. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
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. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
George H. W. Bush: If the American people ever find out what we have done, they would chase us down the street and lynch us. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
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. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
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. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
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. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
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. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
John Kenneth Galbraith: Do not be alarmed by simplification, complexity is often a device for claiming sophistication, or for evading simple truths. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Always be on the alert against Trotskyism, reformism and revisionism / Soyez toujours en alerte contre le trotskysme, le réformisme et le révisionnisme / Seid immer wachsam gegen Trotzkismus, Reformismus und Revisionismus
John Kenneth Galbraith: Any country that has Milton Friedman as an adviser has nothing to fear from a few million Arabs. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
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. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Andrew Gavin Marshall: A 2005 report from Citigroup coined the term "plutonomy," to describe countries "where economic growth is powered by and largely consumed by the wealthy few," and specifically identified the U.K., Canada, Australia, and the United States as four plutonomies. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
William Cormier: The Mainstream News Media (MSM) in the United States is demonstrating they are no better than China, Iran, or Venezuela when it comes down to misleading the public and acting as a government propaganda tool. Vital polls and assessments of the true impact of the Ruling Class War on America is non-existent, and citizens who desire to find real news and an unbiased assessment of the economy have no alternative other than relying on the Internet to glean the real impact of the "recession" on the American economy. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
John Pilger: Why are millions of people in Britain persuaded that a collective punishment called "austerity" is necessary? Following the economic crash in 2008, a rotten system was exposed. For a split second the banks were lined up as crooks with obligations to the public they had betrayed. But within a few months - apart from a few stones lobbed over excessive corporate "bonuses" - the message changed. The mugshots of guilty bankers vanished from the tabloids and something called "austerity" became the burden of millions of ordinary people. Was there ever a sleight of hand as brazen? Today, many of the premises of civilised life in Britain are being dismantled in order to pay back a fraudulent debt - the debt of crooks. The "austerity" cuts are said to be £83 billion. That's almost exactly the amount of tax avoided by the same banks and by corporations like Amazon and Murdoch's News UK. Moreover, the crooked banks are given an annual subsidy of £100bn in free insurance and guarantees - a figure that would fund the entire National Health Service. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Michael Parenti: The objective of U.S. world domination is not just power for its own sake but power to insure plutocratic control of the planet, power to privatize and deregulate the economies of every nation in the world, to hoist upon the backs of peoples everywhere - including the people of North America - the blessings of an untrammeled 'free market' corporate capitalism. The struggle is between those who belleve that the land, labor, capital, technology, and markets of the world should be dedicated to maximizing capital accumulation for the few, and those who believe that these things should be used for the communal benefit and socio-economic development of the many. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
William Jennings Bryan: Plutocracy is abhorrent to a republic; it is more despotic than monarchy, more heartless than aristocracy, more selfish than bureaucracy. It preys upon the nation in time of peace and conspires against it in the hour of its calamity. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Charles Sullivan: The inert masses are mentally and spiritually ill equipped to deal with reality; so they block it out of their minds - aided, of course, by the corporate media and the propaganda apparatus of the government, itself. This is why fantasy is freely substituted for reality; plutocracy is mistaken for democracy, and the majority of the people do not know the difference. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Webster Griffin Tarpley: US society today is neither a tyranny nor a democracy; it is organized from top to bottom according to the principle of oligarchy or plutocracy. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Ramsey Clark: We're not a democracy. It's a terrible misunderstanding and a slander to the idea of democracy to call us that. In reality, we're a plutocracy, a government by the wealthy. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Madeleine Albright: I think this a very hard choice, but the price - we think the price is worth it (about US sanctions killing more than 500,000 Iraqi children). wordsmith.social/protestation/…
James Peck: There is a current of human rights that judges a society by how well it treats the poor and the weak. It challenges power by asking why, in large areas of the world where civil liberties and the rule of law do hold sway, so little is done to meet the most basic economic, medical, and educational needs of the population. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
