Gilad Sharon: We need to flatten entire neighborhoods in Gaza. Flatten all of Gaza. The Americans didn't stop with Hiroshima -the Japanese weren't surrendering fast enough, so they hit Nagasaki, too. There should be no electricity in Gaza, no gasoline or moving vehicles, nothing. Then they'd really call for a ceasefire. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
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/…
Robert Parry: In the world of neocon propaganda, Iran - a treaty signatory that has no nuclear weapons and insists its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes - must be endlessly badgered, but Israel - an undeclared rogue nuclear state with a vast arsenal - must be shielded from similar criticism and pressure. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Justin Raimondo: Israel's goal in the Middle East has been to gin up as much conflict and chaos as possible, keeping its Islamic enemies divided, making it impossible for any credible challenge to arise among its Arab neighbors, and aiming the main blow at Tehran, while paying lip service to the awfulness of ISIS and al-Qaeda. Their quarrel isn't really with the Arabs, anyway, it's with the Persians, whom they fear and loathe, and whose destruction has been their number one objective since the days of Ariel Sharon. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Thomas Sankara: No altar, no belief, no holy book, neither the Qur'an nor the Bible nor the others, have ever been able to reconcile the rich and and the poor, the exploiter and the exploited. And if Jesus himself had to take the whip to chase them from his temple, it is indeed because that is the only language they hear. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Fidel Castro: Revolution is the sense of the historical moment; it is changing everything that must be changed; it is full equality and freedom; it is being treated and treating others like human beings; it is emancipating ourselves, by ourselves and with our very own efforts; it is challenging the dominant powerful forces within and outside of the social and national arena; it is defending the values one believes in at the cost of any sacrifice; it is modesty, selflessness, altruism, solidarity and heroism; it is fighting with audacity, intelligence and realism; it is never telling a lie or violating ethical principles; it is the profound conviction that there is no force on earth that can crush truth and ideas. Revolution is unity, it is independence, it is fighting for our dreams of justice for Cuba and the world that is the basis of our patriotism, our socialism and our internationalism. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Gilad Atzmon: A controversial bill that officially defines Israel as the "Nation-State of the Jewish People" was approved by the Israeli cabinet. Finally Israel has acknowledged its true Jewish nature. Instead of pretending to be a 'Jewish Democracy" - a contradiction in terms, the Jewish State admits that it is a theocracy guided by Jewish racial supremacist ideology. The bill, which is intended to become part of Israel's Basic Laws, recognises Israel's Jewish character, institutionalises Jewish law as an inspiration for legislation and delists Arabic as an official second language. As if until now Arabic had been equal to Hebrew. According to some Israeli critics, the new Israeli bill would weaken the wording of Israel's declaration of independence, which states that the new state would "be based on the principles of liberty, justice and freedom expressed by the prophets of Israel (and) affirm complete social and political equality for all its citizens, regardless of religion, race or gender." Israel has always been the Jewish State, it has never been a liberal place nor has it been committed to justice or equality. The deepest truth is that universal humanism and ethical culture is foreign to Judaic thinking that is tribal and legalistic. 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/…
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/…
Lisa Pease: The American press has gone to extraordinary lengths to demonize Venezuelan President Hugo) Chávez, to portray him as a dictatorial monster, or worse, a crazy man. Of course, if Chávez had given American-based businesses control over his country's oil supply instead of nationalizing it to benefit his countrymen, no doubt the press for Chávez would have been glowing. Historically, the American government and media have both been kind to dictators who allowed the United States to get cheap deals on resources in their country at the expense of the natives there. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
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/…
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/…
