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Wisdom on War, Peace, Liberty
Americans are smart at doing stupid things.
-- comment of a Marshall Islander in the film HALF-LIFE, an Australian documentary about the US 1954 hydrogen bomb explosion in the Marshall Islands.
When a man must be afraid to drink freely from his country's rivers and streams, that country is no longer fit to live in.
The sneakiest form of literary subtlety, in a corrupt society, is to speak the plain truth. The critics will not understand you; the public will not believe you; your fellow writers will shake their heads.
One thing more dangerous than getting between a grizzly sow and her cub is getting between a businessman and a dollar bill.
One final paragraph of advice: Do not burn yourselves out. Be as I am — a reluctant enthusiast, a part-time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure. It is not enough to fight for natural land and the west; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it's still there. So get out there and hunt and fish and mess around with your friends, ramble out yonder and explore the forests, encounter the grizzly, climb the mountains, bag the peaks, run the rivers, breath deep of that yet sweet and lucid air, sit quietly for awhile and contemplate the precious stillness, that lovely, mysterious and awesome space. Enjoy yourselves, keep your brain in your head and your head firmly attached to the body, the body active and alive, and I promise you this much: I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies, over those deskbound men with their hearts in a safe deposit box and their eyes hypnotized by desk calculators. I promise you this: you will outlive the bastards.
-- Edward Abbey, author of Desert Solitaire, The Monkey Wrench Gang and many other works
All opinions are not equal. Some are a very great deal more robust, sophisticated, and well supported in logic and argument than others.
"The whole fabric of society will go to wrack if we really lay hands of reform on our rotten institutions. From top to bottom the whole system is a fraud, all of us know it, laborers and capitalists alike, and all of us are consenting parties to it."
-- Henry Adams, American historian, 1838-1918
Cautious, careful people, always casting about to preserve their reputation and social standing, never can bring about reform. Those who are really in earnest must be willing to be anything or nothing in the world's estimation, and publicly and privately, in season and out, avow their sympathy with despised and persecuted ideas and their advocates, and bear the consequences.
-- Steve Biko, murdered by South African Apartheid regime
-- William Blum, author of "Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II," and "Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower" www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Blum/WhyTerroristsHateAmer.html
the Earth's present brief tenants are indeed the last who will have the opportunity to know wildness as we have known it, unless we pass it on.
Two views are vying for the allegiance of humankind. One is the status quo - more industrialized growth, leading to a computerized world of 12 billion people surviving as a global ant heap. The other is a transformed civilization based on wisdom, restraint and caring.
-- Jerry Brown, Earth Island Journal, Winter 1997 (www.earthisland.org)
A paranoid is a man who knows a little of what's going on
--Marine Corp General Smedley Butler
... Thus, I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street ... I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-12. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras `right' for American fruit companies in 1903...
We must give up the Prussian ideal - carrying on offensive warfare and imposing our wills upon other people in distant places. Such doctrine is unAmerican and vicious...
There must be no more reactionary and destructive intelligence work. The true domestic enemies of our nation - hunger, injustice and exploitation - should concern the military intelligence; not the subversive shadows of their own creation ..."
-- Major General Smedley Butler, from "In Time of Peace: The Army," Common Sense, November, 1935
Extinction is not something to contemplate. It is something to rebel against.
-- Dr. Helen Caldicott
My greatest political asset, which professional politicians fear; IS MY MOUTH, out of which comes all kinds of things one shouldn't always discuss for reasons of political expediency.
-- Shirley Chisholm, the first African-American woman elected to the U.S. Congress.
that [surveillance] capability at any time could be turned around on the American people and no American would have any privacy left, such [is] the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn't matter. There would be no place to hide. If this government ever became a tyranny, if a dictator ever took charge in this country, the technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back, because the most careful effort to combine together in resistance to the government, no matter how privately it was done, is within the reach of the government to know. Such is the capability of this technology ...
I don't want to see this country ever go across the bridge. I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency [casino ฟรี เครดิตNSA] and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return.
-- Senator Frank Church (D-Idaho), 1975, quoted in James Bamford "The Puzzle Palace"
-- Leonard Cohen, musician
If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did, and it never will. Find out just what people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue until they are resisted with either words or blows, or both. The limits of tyrants are proscribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress ... People might not get all that they work for in this world, but they must certainly work for all they get.
-- Frederick Douglass, freed slave and abolitionist, speech at Canandaigua, NY, August 4, 1857, partially reprinted in "Thoughts for All Times," Washington, DC: Frederick Douglass National Historical Site, 1990, p. 6
-- Frederick Douglass - July 4, 1852
As nightfall does not come all at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there is a twilight. And it is in such twilight that we all must be aware of change in the air -- however slight -- lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness.
-- Justice William O. Douglas, US Supreme Court (1939-75)
-- Albert Einstein http://members.tripod.com/dear_mr_president/plea_for_peace/quotes.html
(the FBI and Einstein) www.wsws.org/articles/2002/sep2002/eins-s03.shtml
Through the release of atomic energy, our generation has brought into the world the most revolutionary force since the prehistoric discovery of fire. This basic power of the universe cannot be fitted into the outmoded concept of narrow nationalisms. For there is no secret and there is no defense; there is no possibility of control except through the aroused understanding and insistence of the peoples of the world. ... We scientists recognize our inescapable responsibility to carry to our fellow citizens an understanding of the simple facts of atomic energy and its implications for society. In this lies our only security and our only hope -- we believe that an informed citizenry will act for life and not death.
-- Albert Einstein, 1947
"The world is too dangerous to live in – not because of the people who do evil, but because of the people who sit and let it happen."
This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience ... In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic process.
- President Dwight D. Eisenhower, farewell speech to the nation, January 17, 1961
-- Dwight Eisenhower in a letter to his brother Edgar, November 8, 1954
Here in America we are descended in blood and in spirit from revolutionaries and rebels -- men and women who dared to dissent from accepted doctrine. As their heirs we never confuse honest dissent with disloyal subversion.
I've seen how history has been shaped for you without your knowing it. I believe, also, that unless we do something about it, history will continue to be shaped by powers responsive only to the priorities of maintaining power. And that is relevant to the way we live, both today and tomorrow.
-- Gaeton Fonzi, former investigator for the House Select Committee on Assassinations
Why do they make still more gigantic planes, still heavier bombs and, at the same time, prefabricated houses for reconstruction? Why should millions be spent daily on the war and yet there's not a penny available for medical services, artists or for poor people?
-- Anne Frank, May 3, 1944
They that can give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety
When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of Truth and Love has always won. There have been tyrants and murderers and for a time they can seem invincible, but in the end they always fall. Think of it, always.
-- Mahatma Gandhi (quoted in Homepower magazine Dec 2001/Jan 2002)
more quotes at sfheart.com/Gandhi.html
On this subject I do not wish to think or speak or write with moderation. No! No! Tell a man whose house is on fire to give a moderate alarm; tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the hands of the ravisher; tell the mother to gradually extricate her baby from the fire into which it has fallen – but urge me not to use moderation in a cause like the present.
-- William Lloyd Garrison on slavery from the Liberator, 1831
The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders ... All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism.
-- Nazi war criminal Hermann Goering (at the Nuremberg Trials)
-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1749-1832
Theories have four stages of acceptance: i) this is worthless nonsense; ii) this is an interesting, but perverse, point of view; iii) this is true, but quite unimportant; iv) I always said so.
Inspiration is not garnered from litanies of what is flawed; it resides in humanity’s willingness to restore, redress, reform, recover, reimagine, and reconsider. Healing the wounds of the Earth and its people does not require saintliness or a political party. It is not a liberal or conservative activity. It is a sacred act
-- Paul Hawken, Blessed Unrest
The real difficulty is with the vast wealth and power in the hands of the few and the unscrupulous who represent or control capital. Hundreds of laws of Congress and the state legislatures are in the interest of these men and against the interests of workingmen. These need to be exposed and repealed. All laws on corporations, on taxation, on trusts, wills, descent, and the like, need examination and extensive change. This is a government of the people, by the people, and for the people no longer. It is a government of corporations, by corporations, and for corporations.
-- President Rutherford B Hayes
Secrecy is the cornerstone of all tyranny. Not force, but secrecy...censorship. When any government, or any church, for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, "This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know," the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motives. Mightily little force is needed to control a man who has been hoodwinked; Contrariwise, no amount of force can control a free man, a man whose mind is free. No, not the rack, not fission bombs, not anything. You cannot conquer a free man; The most you can do is kill him.
-- Robert A. Heinlein, Revolt in 2100
People are frustrated not having their voice of reason confirmed. And everyone has that voice of reason that goes, "This is bull man. What I'm watching is bull."
And yet, the media does not confirm it. So after a while, people get...they begin to think they're insane. And that's the bummer about it. And that's why I love non-mainstream stuff because you actually hear honest emotion. And that's what you won't hear on mainstream tv, ever, is honest emotion.
The government will make use of these powers only insofar as they are essential for carrying out vitally necessary measures...The number of cases in which an internal necessity exists for having recourse to such a law is in itself a limited one.
-- Adolf Hitler, promise to the Reichstag (Parliament) on the occasion of the imposition of "temporary" dictatorship following the 1933 Reichstag Fire. www.historyplace.com/worldwar2/timeline/enabling.htm
One of the greatest attractions of patriotism -- it fulfills our worst wishes. In the person of our nation we are able, vicariously, to bully and cheat. Bully and cheat, what's more, with a feeling that we are profoundly virtuous.
Perhaps the forces that menace freedom are too strong to be resisted for very long. It is still our duty to do whatever we can to resist them.
-- Sen. Daniel Inouye during Iran-contra hearings, 1987
By far the most usual way of handling phenomena so novel that they would make for a serious rearrangement of our preconceptions is to ignore them altogether, or to abuse those who bear witness for them.
I hope we shall crush ... in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country.
What a stupendous, what an incomprehensible machine is man! Who can endure toil, famine ... imprisonment or death itself in vindication of his own liberty, and the next moment inflict on his fellow men a bondange one hour of which is fraught with more misery than ages of that which he rose in rebellion to oppose.
-- Thomas Jeffersion, 1786
-- Thomas Jeffersion, 1816
–Thomas Jeffersion to Cornelius C. Blatchly, 21 OCT. 1822
-- Terry Jones was a member of the Monty Python's Flying Circus comedy troupe, archived at www.counterpunch.org/jones03182003.html
“The maintenance of secrets acts like a psychic poison which alienates the possessor from the community”
"Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted"
"Many people fear nothing more terribly than to take a position which stands out sharply and clearly from the prevailing opinion. The tendency of most is to adopt a view that is so ambiguous that it will include everything and so popular that it will include everybody."
I'm not a consensus leader. I do not determine what is right and wrong by looking at the budget of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. ... Ultimately a genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus, but a molder of consensus.
On some positions, cowardice asks the question, is it expedient?
And then expedience comes along and asks the question - is it politic?
Conscience asks the question - is it right?
-- Martin Luther King, "Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution," March 31, 1968 (in response to critics who urged silence on the issue of the War on Viet Nam)
The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit, and if we ignore this sobering reality we will find ourselves organizing clergy and laymen-concerned committees for the next generation. They will be concerned about Guatemala and Peru. They will be concerned about Thailand and Cambodia. They will be concerned about Mozambique and South Africa. We will be marching for these and a dozen other names and attending rallies without end unless there is a significant and profound change in American life and policy. ....
I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a 'thing-oriented' society to a 'person-oriented' society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism and militarism are incapable of being conquered. ....
This is more than a war against terrorism. This is a war against the citizens of all countries. The current elites are creating so much fear that people don't know how to respond. But they must remember. This is a move to implement a world dictatorship within the next five years. There may not be another chance.
- Dr. Johannes Koeppl, a former German defense ministry official and NATO advisor
www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/bgShockwaves.html#fn21
www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/zbig.html
-- John Lennon and Yoko Ono
The most merciful thing in the world ... is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents."
-- H. P. Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu"
Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear... kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor... with the cry of grave national emergency. Always there has been some terrible evil at home or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it...
-- General Douglas MacArthur (1957)
-- Wangari Muta Maathai, Nobel Peace Prize winner
If we are going to manage our resources sustainability, efficiently, if we are going to share them equitably, we need democratic space. It is impossible to manage resources responsibly and sustainably in a dictatorship, because in such a situation you have a few people controlling the resources at the expense of the many, and therefore, you cannot have peace. Sooner or later, you have conflict. And when we look at many of the wars that have been fought today and have been fought in the past, they are over resources.
-- Wangari Maathai, Nobel Peace Laureate Wangari Maathai on the Environment, the War in Iraq, Debt and Women's Equality, By Amy Goodman Democracy Now! March 8, 2005
http://www.greenbeltmovement.org/a.php?id=74
-- Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free, The Germans, 1938-45 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955)
Today's children are the first generation to grow up in a world that has the power to destroy itself. Bravery consists in recognizing danger clearly enough to prepare for it and to try to protect the things one is living for ... Those who are involving themselves in preventable tasks are teaching the children an invaluable lesson -- that the new dangers can be faced and met by new kinds of actions.
-- anthropologist Margaret Mead, Red Book, 1962
If I were 21 I would walk the earth. I would go barefoot longer; I'd learn how to throw a Frisbee, I'd go braless if I were a woman and I would wear no underwear if I were a man. I'd play cards and wear the same pair of jeans until they were so stiff they could get up and strut around the room by themselves. ... So don't take the short road. Fool around. Have fun. ... You're not going to get this time back. Don't panic and go to graduate school and law school. This nation has enough frightened, dissatisfied yuppies living in gated communities, driving S.U.V.'s and wondering where their youth went.
We need you to walk the earth, so that other nations can see the beauty of American youth, rather than seeing our young in combat fatigues behind the barrel of an M-16.
-- James McBride, an author and jazz musician who addressed Pratt University graduates in 2005
http://world.std.com/~emg/followme.html
World War III will be a guerrilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation.
-- Marshall McLuhan, 1970
And despite what the revisionists would have us believe about him, JFK rejected war against a smaller, weaker, poorer country, began to work for détente with the Soviets, and threatened to "scatter the CIA to the four winds." Now, that was leadership for a new generation. And at that time, we had a choice; but Kennedy correctly pointed out that what we really wanted was not a Pax Americana imposed with American weapons of war; not even a peace for our time; but, instead a peace for all time.
Snipers' bullets took that America away from us. And almost in rapid succession, bullets took Martin King and Bobby Kennedy from us, too. It came to my attention during my last days in Congress that Bobby was considering King for his running mate. Now, imagine the America we might have had. But when confronted with evil back then, what did we do?
-- Representative Cynthia McKinney, D-Georgia, October 2003
On July 26, 1920, the acerbic and cranky scribe [Mencken] wrote in The Baltimore Sun: " . . . all the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre — the man who can most easily (and) adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum. The presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day, the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron."
www.mcclatchydc.com/galloway/story/19824.html
The enormous gap between what US leaders do in the world and what Americans think their leaders are doing is one of the great propaganda accomplishments of the dominant political mythology.
the majority of politicians, on the evidence available to us, are interested not in truth but in power and in the maintenance of that power. To maintain that power it is essential that people remain in ignorance, that they live in ignorance of the truth, even the truth of their own lives. What surrounds us therefore is a vast tapestry of lies, upon which we feed. ....
I put to you that the United States is without doubt the greatest show on the road. Brutal, indifferent, scornful and ruthless it may be but it is also very clever. As a salesman it is out on its own and its most saleable commodity is self love. It's a winner....
Language is actually employed to keep thought at bay.....
-- Harold Pinter, 2005 Nobel Laureate for Literature, from his acceptance speech
-- M. Planck
To announce that there must be no criticism of the president or that we are to stand by the president right or wrong is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.
www.ibnlive.com/news/if-treated-like-taslima-id-give-up-writing/53464-3-single.html
Arundhati Roy on IN's Gag of Taslima Nasreen
Karan Thapar: Let me quote to you some of the things that she said, not from Dwikhandito, but from an interview she gave to Anthony McIntyre, The Blanket in 2006. She says, "It's not true that Islam is good for humanity. It's not at all good. Islam completely denies human rights." Elsewhere she talks about what she calls the venomous snake of Islam. To me that sounds as if it goes perhaps beyond a simple critique and into deliberate provocation.
Arundhati Roy: Yeah, but I wouldn't say ban him or kill him. I would say what a ridiculous person. What a ridiculous thing. How can you start reacting to everything like that? We have an infinite number of stupidities in the world. How can you start having your foundations rocked by every half-wit?
Karan Thapar: Let's put it like this, does freedom of speech necessarily include the right to offend?
Arundhati Roy: Obviously it includes the right to offend otherwise it wouldn't be the freedom of speech.
-- Bertrand Russell, philosopher, mathematician, author, Nobel laureate (1872-1970)
"It is my conviction that culture works very effectively to make invisible and even 'impossible' the actual affiliations that exist between the world of ideas and scholarship, on the one hand, and the world of brute politics, corporate and state power, and military force, on the other."
-- Mario Savio, Berkeley Free Speech Movement, December 3, 1964
For me all of this started with the non-violent direct action in defense of nature, which I didn't see as being a ritual at the beginning. But when I think about it now it actually seems to me to be a ritual activity - to go to that place where humankind meets wild nature, that line where nature's being bulldozed and plowed and pushed back, and to stand right on that line, not looking at nature with the eye to conquest but looking back as part of nature saying "No" to this whole thing. That was really the biggest turning point of my life, the first time that I was involved in something like that.
-- casino ฟรี เครดิตJohn Seed
This is the true joy in life, being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one. Being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community and as I live it is my privilege - my *privilege* to do for it whatever I can. I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work the more I love. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no brief candle to me; it is a sort of splendid torch which I've got a hold of for the moment and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.
-- George Bernard Shaw, Irish dramatist & socialist (1856 - 1950)
It's difficult to get a man to understand something if his salary depends on him not understanding it.
I'm not a radical; I'm just a moderate of time that has not yet come. I'm like a bad comedian. I get the punch line right but my timing is all off...
-- Sam Smith, The Progressive Review
The new world order emanates from a mandarin class that is neither left or right. Its members often are the sort of which it has been said that when they are alone in a room, there is no one there. In such a culture the marketplace of ideas essentially shuts down. There is no longer any real politics, only deals. No victories, only leveraged buyouts. No ideology; only brand loyalty. No conservative and liberal, only Coke and Pepsi...–
-- Sam Smith
And they are everywhere. You will find them running schools and universities and managing once great museums. They talk mush, think mush, market mush, report mush, and defend mush. They attempt to make up in certitude what they lack in wisdom; they can't tell the difference between a phrase and a product; and they create infantile and self-serving distortions of economic principles that they declare to be the only principles in life worth observing. They are, in the end, just so many more televangelists, but with themselves as God. Perhaps worst of all, they are without the capacity for shame. Like other sociopaths, they are remorseless.
The fraud, the huckster, the salesman are not new phenomena in America; what is new is that they now so strongly control every estate of our society. Those of a nature that would have once caused Americans to close the door, hang up, or say "no thank you," now teach our children, run our government, and tell us what to think. They are the Enron generation, filled with postmodern version of Willy Loman: "He don't put a bolt to a nut, he don't tell you the law or give you medicine. He' s a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine."
We have assigned a wealth of practical tasks to those who think in abstractions, speak in cliches, use paperwork as a pacifier, and convert morality, policies and human aspiration into a bunch of numbers or legal restrictions. Perhaps most sadly - and most dangerously - they have learned their values from sources far removed from the thinking of those philosophers, writers and politicians who gave America its greatest moments..
The true measure of a person's worth is not what they say they believe in, but what they do in defense of those beliefs. If you are not acting on your beliefs, then they probably aren't real.?
It is best to think of this as a revolution, not of guns, but of consciousness, which will be won by seizing the key myths, archetypes, eschatologies, and ecstasies, so that life won't seem worth living unless one is on the transforming energy's side.
we are called to act as if we truly believe that the Earth is a living, conscious being that we're part of, that human beings are interconnected and precious, and that liberty and justice for all is a desirable thing.
When I would recreate myself, I seek the darkest wood, the thickest and most interminable, and to the citizen, most dismal swamp. I enter the swamp as a sacred place - a "sanctum sanctorum." There is the strength, the marrow of nature.
If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has his foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.
Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority it is time to pause and reflect.
-- Mark Twain, "A Tramp Abroad"
-- Mark Twain / Samuel Clemens (1835-1910)
- Mark Twain, 1894
-- Sir Peter Ustinov
The greatest danger facing America today is the secret political warfare program the Bush Regime has hidden within its Homeland Security apparatus.
-- Douglas Valentine www.douglasvalentine.com/article_security.html
Human beings will generally exercise power when they can get it, and they will exercise it most undoubtedly in popular governments under pretense of public safety.
The covert operators that I ran with would blow up a 747 with 300 people to kill one person. They are total sociopaths with no conscience whatsoever.
-- Gene Wheaton, former Pentagon CID Investigator www.constitution.org/ocbpt/ocbpt_08.htm
-- Oscar Wilde "The Critic as Artist Pt. 2"
The remnants of American liberalism are in a state of denial. They continue to treat the offensive against democratic rights as an aberration or misunderstanding. They seek to obscure from the American people the fact that a fundamental shift has taken place in the direction of dictatorial forms of rule.
-- World Socialist Web Site
www.wsws.org/articles/2002/sep2002/demo-s11.shtml
The last election just laid the foundation of the next 500 years of Dark Ages.
Question Authority - and the authorities will question you.
www3.sympatico.ca/gcircle/csbh/quotes.txt
-- 1994 Inaugural Speech, Nelson Mandela
www.eugeneweekly.com/2006/04/20/news3.html
Q&A with Alfred Brwonell
Association of Environmental Lawyers of Liberia
Alfred Brownell is the president and founder of the Association of Environmental Lawyers of Liberia, aka "Green Advocates," based in Monrovia. Charles Taylor was elected Liberia's president in 1997 but soon became a tyrannical warlord, smuggling arms and diamonds to fuel conflict within Liberia and in neighboring regions. Taylor presided over a brutal civil war that left 300,000 Liberians dead and the economy in shambles. In 2003, the U.N. indicted Taylor with war crimes and crimes against humanity. In late 2005, Liberians elected Ellen Sirleaf-Johnson president. Working with the Environmental Law Alliance Worldwide (E-LAW), Green Advocates is now helping to put in place Liberia's first framework environmental laws. A leading Liberian newspaper credited Brownell for ushering in a new era of freedom in Liberia.
As Liberia enters a new democratic era, what governments can serve as a model?
Well, it's kind of difficult. For awhile, we were looking to America to promote democracy and the rule of law, given the historical ties between Liberia and America. But when you read in the newspapers that Americans are afraid of their phones being tapped and being arrested without charge, that is scary for Liberians, because we look to the Americans for guidance on these issues. There is a saying: "When America sneezes, the rest of the world gets a cold."
Should Americans be concerned about the way U.S.-based companies behave abroad?
Yes, Americans need more education about what their companies do abroad. The negative image that people in other countries have of the U.S. is not so much because of individual American citizens; they are because of your corporations and the kinds of policies they pursue beyond your borders. For an individual who has not come to the U.S. or had interactions with Americans, all they see is this terrible corporate power, like Firestone, using children as slaves to make profits and dumping all of its industrial waste into poor communities. So how do you think poor innocent villagers view Firestone? They know it is an American company, and that's it!
Why doesn't the Liberian government penalize Firestone?
How do you enforce the law against Firestone when Firestone's income is more than the income of the whole country? Firestone is a multinational corporation that made $20.5 billion last year. The country of Liberia had about $88 million last year. This is how these powerful companies have unbridled influence over very poor developing countries. They have all the resources, so they abuse and violate the laws with impunity. If we don't document these things, report them and talk about them, these companies are not going to reform.
What's your message to Americans?
We want to see new policies for how the U.S. will superintend its multinational corporations. There is a need to hold those multinationals accountable, to conduct congressional-level investigations on the behavior of these companies overseas. And there is a need to strengthen the capacity for foreign plaintiffs in countries like Liberia to come to the U.S. and hold those companies accountable. Now, the only instrument that foreign plaintiffs have against U.S. companies and individuals is the Alien Tort Claims Act, and we are seeing an effort to roll back the strength of that act.
(551-479 BCE)
translated by Stephen Mitchell 1988
ISBN 0-06-016001-2
"A man must descend very low to find the force to rise again." -- Hasidic poem
Dom Helder Pessoa Camara (dec.), former Archbishop of the Catholic Archdiocese of Olinda and Recife, Brazil, who spoke out in the 1960s about Brazil's military dictatorship.
"When I feed the poor, I am called a saint. When I ask why they are poor, I am called a communist."