“In traditional society like the feudal system, people had a certain place, and they had certain rights-in fact, they had what was called at the time a "right to live." I mean,under feudalism it may have been a lousy right, but nevertheless people were assumed to have natural entitlement for survival. But with the rise of what we call capitalism, the right had to be destroyed: people had to have it knocked out of their heads that they had any automatic "right to live" beyond what they could win for themselves on the labor market.”
“the distinguished Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington, in his text American Politics, observes that power must remain invisible if it is to be effective: “The architects of power in the United States must create a force that can be felt but not seen. Power remains strong when it remains in the dark; exposed to the sunlight it begins to evaporate.”
“It can be seen, then, that a public debate on the issue of the Nakbah, whether conducted in Israel itself or in the United States, its imperial protector, could open up questions concerning the moral legitimacy of the Zionist project as a whole. The mechanism of denial, therefore, was crucial, not only for defeating the counter-claims made by Palestinians in the peace process, but, far more importantly, for disallowing any significant debate on the very essence and moral foundations of Zionism.”
“I mean, contrary to the contemporary version of it, classical liberalism (which remember was pre-capitalist, and in fact, anti-capitalist) focused on the right of people to control their own work, and the need for free creative work under your own control—for human freedom and creativity. So to a classical liberal, wage labor under capitalism would have been considered totally immoral, because it frustrates the fundamental need of people to control their own work: you're a slave to someone else.”
“Rand Paul...said national health insurance is slavery. He said, I'm a physician, and if there's national health insurance, the government is forcing me to take care of somebody who is ill. Why should I be a slave to the state? Here we're getting capitalist pathology in its most extreme, lunatic form. It is the opposite of solidarity, mutual support, mutual help.”
“It is easy to be carried away by the sheer horror of what the daily press reveals and to lose sight of the fact that this is merely the brutal exterior of a deeper crime, of commitment to a social order that guarantees endless suffering and humiliation and denial of elementary human rights,”
“Colombia’s advance to first rank among the criminal states in “our little region” is in part the result of the decline in US-managed state terror in Central America, which achieved its primary aims as in Turkey 10 years later, leaving in its wake a “culture of terror” that “domesticat[es] the expectations of the majority” and undermines aspirations towards “alternatives different to those of the powerful,” in the words of Salvadoran Jesuits, who learned the lessons from bitter experience; those who survived the US assault, that is.”
“States of course have complex internal structures, and the choices and decisions of the political leadership are heavily influenced by internal concentrations of power, while the general population is often marginalized. That is true even for the more democratic societies, and obviously for others.”
“In the moral calculus of currently prevailing state capitalism, profits and bonuses in the next quarter greatly outweigh concern for the welfare of one’s grandchildren, and since these are institutional maladies, they will not be easy to overcome. While much remains uncertain, we can assure ourselves, with fair confidence, that future generations will not forgive us our silence and apathy.”
“A human language is a system of remarkable complexity. To come to know a human language would be an extraordinary achievement for a creature not specifically designed to accomplish this task. A normal child acquires this knowledge on relatively slight exposure and without specific training. He can then quite effortlessly make use of an intricate structure of specific rules and guiding principles to convey his thoughts and feelings to others, arousing in them novel ideas and subtle perceptions and judgments.”
“In Greece, British troops entered after the Nazis had withdrawn. They imposed a corrupt regime that evoked renewed resistance, and Britain, in its postwar decline, was unable to maintain control. In 1947, the United States moved in, supporting a murderous war that resulted in about 160,000 deaths.”
“One lesson is that to understand what is happening we should attend not only to critical events of the real world, often dismissed from history, but also to what leaders and elite opinion believe, however tinged with fantasy. Another lesson is that alongside the flights of fancy concocted to terrify and mobilize the public (and perhaps believed by some who are trapped in their own rhetoric), there”
“The enormous public relations industry, from its Origins early in this Century, has been dedicated to the "control of the public mind" as Business Leaders described the task and they acted on their words, surely one of the central themes of modern history. The fact that the public relations industry has its roots and major centers in the country that is "most free" is exactly which we should expect, with a proper understanding of Humes Maxim.”
“Eighty years ago, Martin Heidegger extolled Nazi Germany as providing the best hope for rescuing the glorious civilization of the Greeks from the barbarians of the East and West. Today, German bankers are crushing Greece under an economic regime designed to maintain their wealth and power.”
“Germany was beginning to change even before the Depression. In 1925, there was a mass popular vote for Paul von Hindenburg for president. He was a Prussian aristocrat, yet his supporters were petty bourgeois storekeepers, disillusioned workers, and others--in fact, demographically not unlike the Tea Party movement. And they became the mass bass for Nazism. In 1928, the Nazis still got under 3 percent of the vote. In 1933--that's only five years later--they were so powerful that Hindenburg had to appoint Adolf Hitler as chancellor.”
“As I watch people work, craftsmen, let’s say, automobile mechanics for example, I think one often finds a good deal of pride in work. I think that that kind of pride in work well done, in complicated work well done, because it takes thought and intelligence to do it, especially when one is also involved in management of the enterprise, determination of how the work will be organized, what it is for, what the purposes of the work are, what’ll happen to it, and so on — I think all of this can be satisfying and rewarding activity which in fact requires skills, the kind of skills people will enjoy exercising.”
“. . . public education and Social Security are residues of a dangerous conception that we're all in this together and we have to work together to create a better life and a better future. If you're trying to maximize profit or maximize consumption, then working together is the wrong idea. It has to be beaten out of people's heads. Solidarity makes people hard to control and prevents them from being passive objects of private power. So you have to have a propaganda system that overcomes any deviation from the principle of subjugation to power systems.”
“The liberal press cannot question the basic doctrine of the state religion, that the United States is benevolent, even though often misguided in its innocence, that it labors to permit free choice, even though at times some mistakes are committed in the exuberance of its programs of international goodwill. We must believe that we "Americans" are always good, though, to be sure, fallible.”
“The picture of the world that's presented to the public has only the remotest relation to reality. The truth of the matter is buried under edifice after edifice of lies upon lies. It's all been a marvellous success from the point of view in deterring the threat of democracy, achieved under conditions of freedom, which is extremely interesting.”
“There are major efforts to replace public schools with semi-privatized systems that would still be supported by the public but run more or less privately, such as charter schools. There is no evidence that they are any better. For all we know, they're even worse. But this privatization of schools does undermine solidarity and mutual support--dangerous ideas that harm concentrated power.”
“The studies of Larry Bartels and other political scientists show that working people and the poor tend to do somewhat better under Democratic than Republican administrations. But that just means that the Republicans are deeper in the pockets of the corporate system than the Democrats are. They're both nuzzled there quite happily.”
“If you don't recognize your own crimes, there's no impediment to continuing them. There's a pretty dramatic example of that right at this moment. This happens to be the fiftieth anniversary of John F. Kennedy's decision to launch the war against South Vietnam. Forgetting the fiftieth anniversary of the launching of one of the major atrocities in post-Second World War history is pretty severe. But almost nobody has noticed it. I don't think we'll hear a word about it. And, yes, that opens the way to further aggression.”
“See, whether you have seditious libel is sort of at the core of whether it's a free society or not: if you're not allowed to criticize the government, if you can be punished for assaulting the government with words, even if that's in the background somewhere, the society is not really free. And truth is no defense to this kind of libel charge, keep in mind-in fact, traditionally truth makes the crime worse, because if what you're saying is true, then the undermining of state authority is even worse.”
“From Ferguson to Athens, via Mexico, it is clear that many governments are reproducing the tools that Israel uses to repress and oppress the Palestinians. The replication of those same tactics, methods, and often weapons serves as proof that the Palestinians are now used as guinea pigs for experimentation.”