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/…
Zbigniew Brzezinski: Two basic steps are thus required: first to identify the geostrategically dynamic Eurasian states that have the power to cause a potentially important shift in the international distribution of power and to decipher the central external goals of their respective political elites and the likely consequences of their seeking to attain them; (...) second to formulate specific U.S. policies to offset, co-opt, and/or control the above. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
John Pilger: The suppression of the truth about Ukraine is one of the most complete news blackouts. The biggest Western military build-up in the Caucasus and eastern Europe since world war two is blacked out. Washington's secret aid to Kiev and its neo-Nazi brigades responsible for war crimes against the population of eastern Ukraine is blacked out. Evidence that contradicts propaganda that Russia was responsible for the shooting down of a Malaysian airliner is blacked out. And, New York Times and Washington Post are the censors. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Zbigniew Brzezinski: Tu put it in a terminology that harkens back to the more brutal age of ancient empires, the three grand imperatives of imperial geostrategy are to prevent collusion and maintain security dependance among the vassels, to keep tributaries pliant and protected, and to keep the barbarians from coming together. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Timothy Bancroft-Hinchey: In 2011, NATO launched an illegal, savage attack against Libya, the country with the Highest Human Development Index in Africa. ... At the time, Libyans were fed, they had homes (free), education (free), healthcare (free), a good water supply and Libya was a filter and staging post for migrants moving towards Europe. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Why does my dumb ass keep bouncing around these platforms instead of just using them consistently? new posts should be novelty enough to let the dopamine flow why
Federico Pieraccini: Julian Assange's major fault lies in having revealed the true face of US imperialism, an imperialism that has for decades brought wars, death and destruction around the world for its own political and economic gain, using illegitimate justifications that are backed up by self-proclaimed experts and amplified and repeated endlessly by the mainstream media. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Brett Wilkins: Operation Allied Force was NATO's 78-day air war against Yugoslavia in 1999. It was a war waged as much against Serbian civilians as much as it was against Slobodan Milosevic's forces, and it was a campaign of breathtaking hypocrisy and selective outrage. More than anything, it was a war that by President Bill Clinton's own admission was fought for the sake of NATO's credibility. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Brian Kalman: Special operations forces deployed across the globe, in almost every country, can help initiate, maintain and perpetuate conflict as long as the United States stays in a position of relatively unrivaled power in the world. The U.S. military industrial complex does not desire large winnable wars, but "low-intensity" conflicts that last as long as possible. That is how the system retains power, maintains profits, and remains relevant. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
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. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Philip Graham: Mainstream reporters are always pro-war, acting as cheerleaders for the military-industrial complex and propagandists for the government. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
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. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Andrew Bacevich: If generals (and militarized civilians) don't want a war to end, that suffices as a rationale for its continuation. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
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. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Hands down the worst most bullshit thing about Friendica...
No notifications for moderation reports. Only way to know if something has been reported? Gotta manually go check the list (oh and no way to clear items from the list, or do anything with them at all...)
Few months ago I had a rude awakening to this, and then apparently it's been a minute since I last checked (I try and check every time I think of it).
Thankfully the only recent report was a remote server but eww... I hate that it took me that long to block that server.
Paul Craig Roberts: The US mainstream media repeats lies as if they were facts. The US media is making itself an accomplice to wars based on fabrications. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
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. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
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/…
