Point of View

Quotes that definitely have a Point of View

The American Heritage Dictionary, 1983: "fascism - A system of government that exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically through the merging of state and business leadership, together with belligerent nationalism."

Huey Long: "If fascism ever came to the United States, it would be wrapped in an American flag."

Edward Abbey: "A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government."

Robert Scheer, Los Angeles Times: "The fact is ... that when totalitarian nations... play ball with U.S. business interests, we like them just fine. But when Venezuela's freely elected president threatens powerful corporate interests, the Bush dministration treats him as an enemy."

William Shirer: "For the last fifty years we've been supporting right-wing governments, and that is a puzzlement to me...I don't understand what there is in the American
character... that almost automatically, even when we have a liberal President, we support fascist dictatorships or are tolerant towards them."

Walter Lippmann: "The news and truth are not the same thing."

Carl Boggs:"The U.S. record of war crimes has been, from the nineteenth century to the present, a largely invisible one, with no government, no political leaders, no military officials, no lower-level operatives held accountable for criminal actions... Anyone challenging this mythology is quickly marginalized, branded a traitor or Communist or terrorist or simply a lunatic beyond the pale of reasonable discussion."

Michael Parenti: "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 dominate political mythology."

J. William Fulbright, US Senator: "To criticize one's country is to do it a service ... Criticism, in short, is more than a right; it is an act of patriotism - a higher form of patriotism, I believe, than the familiar rituals and national adulation."

Michael Parenti: "To oppose the policies of a government does not mean you are against the country or the people that the government supposedly represents. Such opposition should be called what it really is: democracy, or democratic dissent, or having a critical perspective about what your leaders are doing. Either we have the right to democratic dissent and criticism of these policies or we all lie down and let the leader, the Fuhrer, do what is best, while we follow uncritically, and obey whatever he commands. That's just what the Germans did with Hitler, and look where it got them."

Dalton Trumbo, Johnny Got His Gun: "You can always hear the people who are willing to sacrifice somebody else's life. They're plenty loud and they talk all the time. You can find them in churches and schools and newspapers and legislatures and congress. That's their business. They sound wonderful. Death before dishonor. This ground sanctified by blood. These men who died so gloriously. They shall not have died in vain. Our noble dead."

Robert Jensen: "The United States is a society in which people not only can get by without knowing much about the wider world but are systematically encouraged not to think independently or critically and instead to accept the mythology of the United States as a benevolent, misunder-stood giant as it lumbers around the world trying to do good."

Arundhati Roy, author and activist: "America continues to remain the enigma it has always been - a curiously insular people administered by a pathologically meddlesome, promiscuous government."

Noam Chomsky: "The point of public relations slogans like 'Support our troops' is that they don't mean anything... That's the whole point of good propaganda. You want to
create a slogan that nobody's going to be against, and everybody's going to be for. Nobody knows what it means, because it doesn't mean anything. Its crucial value is
that it diverts your attention from a question that does mean something: Do you support our policy? That's the one you're not allowed to talk about."

Alex Carey: "The twentieth century has been characterized by three developments of great political importance: the growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power, and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy."

Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf: "The size of the lie is a definite factor in causing it to be believed, for the vast masses of the nation are in the depths of their hearts more easily deceived than they are consciously and intentionally bad. The primitive simplicity of their minds renders them a more easy prey to a big lie than a small one, for they themselves often tell little lies but would be ashamed to tell a big one."

President Thomas Jefferson: "The man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors."

Theodore Dreiser, 1871-1945: "The American press, with a very few exceptions, is a kept press. Kept by the big corporations the way a whore is kept by a rich man."

Mark Crispin Miller: "Media manipulation in the U.S. today is more efficient than it was in Nazi Germany, because here we have the pretense that we are getting all the information we want. That misconception prevents people from even looking for the truth."

Tom Fenton: "Americans are too broadly underinformed to digest nuggets of information that seem to contradict what they know of the world ... Instead, news channels prefer to feed Americans a constant stream of simplified information, all of which fits what they already know. That way they don't have to devote more air time or newsprint space to explanations or further investigations."

Arundhati Roy, Indian author and activist: "In America, the arms industry, the oil industry and the major media networks-indeed, U.S. foreign policy-are all controlled
by the same business combines." (shadows of President Eisenhower's warning about the industrial-Congressional-military complex)

Neil Postman: "Television is altering the meaning of "being informed" by creating a species of information that might properly be called disinformation... Disinformation does not mean false information. It means misleading information - misplaced, irrelevant, fragmented or superficial information - information that creates the illusion of knowing something, but which in fact leads one away from knowing."

Veteran New York Times reporter John Hess: "[I] never saw a foreign intervention that the [New York] Times did not support, never saw a fare increase or a rent increase or
a utility rate increase that it did not endorse, never saw it take the side of labor in a strike or lockout, or advocate a raise for underpaid workers. And don't let me get started on universal health care and Social Security. So why do people think the Times is liberal?"

Mark Hertzgaard:"Americans cannot escape a certain responsibility for what is done in our name around the world. In a democracy, even one as corrupted as ours, ultimate authority rests with the people. We empower the government with our votes, finance it with our taxes, bolster it with our silent acquiescence. If we are passive in the face of America's official actions overseas, we in effect endorse them."

William Blum: "[American leaders] are perhaps not so much immoral as they are amoral. It's not that they take pleasure in causing so much death and suffering. It's that they just don't care ... the same that could be said about a sociopath. As long as the death and suffering advance the agenda of the empire, as long as the right people and the right corporations gain wealth and power and privilege and prestige, as long as the death and suffering aren't happening to them or people close to them ... then they just don't care about it happening to other people, including the American soldiers whom they throw into wars and who come home - the ones who make it back alive - with Agent Orange or Gulf War Syndrome eating away at their bodies. American leaders would not be in the positions they hold if they were bothered by such things."

Hermann Goering: "Why of course the people don't want war... That is understood. But after all it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship ...Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger."

John Nichols and Robert McChesney: "The problem the United States faces is that almost all of its invasions violate international law, and sometimes, as in the case of Iraq, in a blatant manner. So how do the political elite and the news media reconcile this contradiction? Simple: They ignore it. It is virtually unthinkable for a mainstream U.S. reporter to even pursue this issue."

William Blum: "From 1945 to 2003, the United States attempted to overthrow more than 40 foreign governments, and to crush more than 30 populist-nationalist movements fighting against intolerable regimes. In the process, the US bombed some 25 countries, caused the end of life for several million people, and condemned many millions more to a life of agony and despair."

Arundhati Roy, author and activist: "The International Coalition Against Terror is largely a cabal of the richest countries in the world. Between them, they manufacture and sell almost all of the world's weapons, and they possess the largest stockpile of weapons of mass destruction-chemical, biological and nuclear. They have fought the most wars, account for most of the genocide, subjection, ethnic cleansing and human rights violations in modem history, and have sponsored, armed and financed untold numbers of dictators and despots. Between them, they have worshipped, almost deified, the cult of violence and war."