THIRD WORLD TRAVELER
is an archive of articles and book excerpts
that seek to tell the truth
about American democracy, media, and foreign policy,
and about the impact of the actions of
the United States government, transnational corporations, global
trade and financial institutions, and the corporate media,
on democracy, social and economic justice, human rights, and war
and peace,
in the Third World, and in the developed world.
THIRD WORLD TRAVELER
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Visitors
are encouraged to buy the books and subscribe to the magazines,
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For, without public awareness of and support for independent authors,
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this much-needed information may not continue to be available.
"During times
of universal deceit, tellling the truth is revolutionary."
George Orwell
"No one outside
America any longer believes the US media or the US government...
You can't believe a word the American media says. If they say
anything correct, it's just an accident.
Paul Craig Roberts
"Even open-minded
people will often find themselves unable to take seriously the
likes of [Noam] Chomsky, [Edward] Herman, [Howard] Zinn and [Susan]
George on first encountering their work; it just does not seem
possible that we could be so mistaken in what we believe. The
individual may assume that these writers must be somehow joking,
wildly over-stating the case, paranoid, or have some sort of axe
to grind. We may actually become angry with them for telling us
these terrible things about our society and insist that this simply
'can't be true'. It takes real effort to keep reading, to resist
the reassuring messages of the mass media and be prepared to consider
the evidence again."
David Edwards - Burning
All Illusions
"Some of the
character traits exhibited by serial killers or criminals may
be observed in many within the political arena... [They] share
the traits of psychopaths who are not sensitive to altruistic
appeals, such as sympathy for their victims or remorse or guilt
over their crimes. They possess the personality traits of lying,
narcissism, selfishness, and vanity. These are the people to whom
we have entrusted our fate. Is it any wonder that America is failing
at home and world-wide?"
Jim Kouri
Dick Cheney / Donald
Rumsfeld / Zbigniew Brzezinski **********************************
Henry Kissinger / David Rockefeller / George H W Bush
"Our leaders are cruel because only those willing to be
inordinately cruel and remorseless can hold positions of leadership
in the foreign policy establishment. People capable of expressing
a full human measure of compassion and empathy toward faraway
powerless strangers do not become president of the United States,
or vice president, or secretary of state, or national security
adviser or secretary of the treasury."
William Blum
a searchable database
of quotations - excerpted from hundreds of books and thousands
of articles - challenging conventional wisdom
"Any president
engaged in lying and empire-building must have some of the traits
of a psychopath ... To murder innocent people in order to aggrandize
the American Empire would be extremely difficult if not impossible
for someone who feels empathy, remorse and guilt and who is incapable
of lying. It might even be suggested that having at least some
psychopathic traits is a qualification for the job."
David Model, "Lying
for Empire"
"Citizens
have never had an opportunity to express their dissent when the
country goes to war. One of the reasons is that the media have
always gone along with administration policy in preparing for
and going to war."
Howard Zinn
Jean-Bertrand Aristide
HAITI
PAGE 
"War means blind
obedience, unthinking stupidity, brutish callousness, wanton destruction,
and irresponsible murder."
Alexander Berkm
"The
question is not how to get good people to rule; the question is
how to stop the powerful from doing as much damage as they can
to us."
Karl Popper
"People,
governments and economies of all nations must serve the needs
of multinational banks and corporations."
Zbigniew Brzezinski
Norman Solomon /Naomi
Wolf / Paul Craig Roberts / Arundhati Roy /John Pilger / Naomi
Klein / Robert McChesney / Chalmers Johnson
"The theories
offered by economists rationalize the self-interest of big business
and the wealthy. Such theories claim to benefit society and the
public's well-being. But they do just the opposite: they make
the great mass of people poorer while making the rich fabulously
richer."
economist Ravi Batra
"CEOs of most
of the world's largest corporations daily make decisions that
destroy the lives of many other human beings. Only about 1 to
3 percent of us are sociopaths - people who don't have normal
human feelings and can easily go to sleep at night after having
done horrific things. And of that 1 percent of sociopaths, there's
probably only a fraction of a percent with a college education.
And of that tiny fraction, there's an even tinier fraction that
understands how business works, particularly within any specific
industry. Thus there is such a shortage of people who can run
modern monopolistic, destructive corporations that stockholders
have to pay millions to get them to work. And being sociopaths,
they gladly take the money without any thought to its social consequences."
Thom Hartmann
"The
general public are viewed as no more than ignorant and meddlesome
outsiders, a bewildered herd. And it's the responsible men who
have to make decisions and to protect society from the trampling
and rage of the bewildered herd. Now since it's a democracy they
- the herd, that is - are permitted occasionally to lend their
weight to one or another member of the responsible class. That's
called an election."
Noam Chomsky
"There is nothing
puzzling about America's gratuitously aggressive foreign policy.
What an aggressive foreign policy accomplishes by slow degrees,
a state of war accomplishes in a trice. Overnight [war] kills
reform, overnight it transforms insurgents into traitors and the
Republic into an imperiled realm. Overnight it strangles free
politics, distracts and overawes the citizenry. Overnight it blasts
public hope."
Walter Karp
"Most Americans
have no idea that what we are fed by the news media is nothing
more than a portrayal of what powerful corporations want us to
believe, that what happens to pass as education is as often as
not mere propaganda, that what we learn in church may have very
little or nothing to do with the truth, that what our parents
teach us may be nothing more than an accumulation of their own
personal biases, no doubt a rather subtle modification of what
they were taught by their parents. And through such a process,
governments and nations around the world wield control as to what
their citizens, believe, value, and do."
Doug Soderstrom
"What the press
do is they tell you lies, lies they already know you want to hear.
The press can figure out what its readers or viewers believe,
and make a hell of a living pandering to their egos and telling
them that they're smart. They lie and tell the audience they are
right, and they never have to change your mind about anything.
And the audience rewards them, lauding them and paying them money
to keep hearing those sweet, self-serving lies."
Allan Uthman
"The New York
Times is the house organ of the Establishment. It is committed,
both editorially and in its presentation of the news, to the interests
of an Establishment: continuity, security and legitimacy. Therefore
they generally support business and finance, the American version
of empire, the government and the president, until, and unless,
some excess is so egregious that it poses a threat to continuity,
security or legitimacy."
Larry Beinhart
"The main [media]
bias is in favor of the thieves who stole our country and economy,
and own the mainstream media companies. The omnipresent mainstream
media is the greatest weapon of oppression humanity has ever known."
David DeGraw
"Depression
was not accidental. It was a carefully contrived occurrence...
The international bankers sought to bring about a condition of
despair here so that they might emerge as rulers of us all."
Louis T. McFadden, Chairman
of the House Banking and Currency Committee, 1932
Augusto Pinochet - Chile
/ "Papa Doc" Duvalier - Haiti / Efrain Rios Montt -
Guatemala / Park Chung-hee - South Korea / King Fahd - Saudi Arabia
P W Botha - South Africa
/ Sani Abacha - Nigeria / Rafael Trujillos - Dominican Republic
/ General Suharto - Indonesia / Fulgencio Batista - Cuba
Shah Pahlevi - Iran
/ Mobuto Sese Seko - Zaire / Ferdinand Marcos - Philippines /
Anastasio Somoza - Nicaragua
King Hassan II - Morocco
/ Pol Pot - Cambodia / Hosni Mubarak - Egypt / Saddam Hussein
- Iraq
"I spent 33
years in the Marines, most of my time being a high-class muscle
man for big business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short,
I was a racketeer for Capitalism... The general public shoulders
the bill. This bill renders a horrible accounting. Newly placed
gravestones, Mangled bodies. Shattered minds. Broken hearts and
homes. Economic instability. Back-breaking taxation for generations
and generations."
Brigadier General Smedley
D. Butler, 1935
"Since the anticommunism
hysteria in the years following the Second World War, a bipartisan
consensus has existed on foreign policy. Meaningful political
discourse has been almost absent about foreign policy issues.
So many foreign policy decisions have been placed beyond public
scrutiny, that almost all of what passes as official information
about foreign policy is manufactured by government agencies for
its propaganda effect."
Daniel Hellinger and
Dennis R. Judd Brooks - The Democratic Facade
"Condelleza
Rice and Colin Powell are both dangerous people. What they did
in Haiti [2004 U.S.-backed coup that ousted democratically elected
President Jean-Bertrand Aristide] is a good measure of it. They
destroyed a democracy. They squelched loans that had been approved
by the Inter-American Development Bank. They did everything behind
the scenes, including arming the thugs that came to overrun the
country. They're frauds."
Randall Robinson
"There is a
'Committee of 300', men whose identity is known only to each other,
who rule the world."
German Socialist leader
Walter Rathenau, 1922
"The Bilderberg
group is an organization of political leaders and international
financiers that meets secretly every spring to make global policy.
There are about 110 regulars - Rockefellers, Rothschilds, bankers,
heads of international corporations and high government officials
from Europe and North America. Each year, a few new people are
invited and, if found useful, they return to future meetings.
If not, they are discarded. Decisions reached at these secret
meetings affect every American and much of the world."
Jim Tucker's Bilderberg
Diary
"Since the late
1940s, the United States has been deliberately engaged in an imperial
project, and anyone who would hold the office of the presidency
has to be willing to serve that end. All presidents have to promote
the national security state, both domestically and in American
foreign policy, if they wish to attain and hold on to power."
Morris Berman
I.F. Stone / George
Seldes / George Orwell
"Ever since the days of Henry Ford, the Economic Elite
have needed a thriving US middle class to increase growth and
profits, but now, in the global economy, they view the US middle
class as obsolete. They increasingly look globally for profits
and they would rather pay cheap labor in countries like China
and India."
David DeGraw
"The greatest
myth concerning American foreign policies is the deeply-held belief
that no matter what the United States does abroad, no matter how
bad it may look, no matter what horror may result, the American
government means well. American leaders may make mistakes, they
may blunder, they may even on the odd occasion cause more harm
than good, but they do mean well. Their intentions are always
honorable. Of that Americans are certain. They genuinely wonder
why the rest of the world can't see how kind and generous and
self-sacrificing America has been."
William Blum
"American policymakers,
setting themselves up as guardians of the world system, are more
inclined than ever to simply disregard international laws and
conventions if they get in the way of unrivaled military supremacy.
Every instance of U.S. armed intervention during the 1980s and
1990s represents a flagrant violation of regional treaties and
laws, not to mention the UN Charter itself, which explicitly prohibits
military attacks against sovereign nations - for example, Grenada,
Nicaragua, Haiti, Panama, Serbia, and Iraq. In any event, the
U.S. has consistently shown its contempt for international bodies,
agreements, and procedures that might conflict with its hegemonic
aspirations."
Carl Boggs
"Americans are
wonderfully courteous to strangers, yet indiscriminately shoot
kids in schools. They believe they are masters of the world, yet
know nothing about what goes on outside their shores. They are
people who believe the world stretches from California to Boston
and everything outside is the bit they have to bomb to keep the
price of oil down. Only one in five Americans hold a passport
and the only foreign stories that make their news are floods,
famine, and wars, because it makes them feel good to be an American.
Feeling good to be American is what they live for. "
Brian Reade, columnist
for London Mirror newspaper
"The media are
a pitiful lot. They don't give us any history, they don't give
us any analysis, they don't tell us anything. They don't raise
the most basic questions: Who has the most weapons of mass destruction
in the world by far? Who has used weapons of mass destruction
more than any other nation? Who has killed more people in this
world with weapons of mass destruction than any other nation?
The answer: the United States."
Howard Zinn
"We Americans
are the ultimate innocents. We are forever desperate to believe
that this time the government is telling us the truth."
Sydney Schanberg
"[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?"
veteran New York Times
reporter John Hess
"If it had not
been for the discontent of a few fellows who had not been satisfied
with their conditions, you would still be living in caves. Intelligent
discontent is the mainspring of civilization. Progress is born
of agitation. It is agitation or stagnation."
Eugene Debs
"The powers
of financial capitalism had [a] far-reaching aim, 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. This system was to be controlled
in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting
in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private
meetings and conferences."
Dr. Carroll Quigley,
"Tragedy and Hope", 1966
[Henry Ford / Pat Robertson,
/ Joseph McCarthy / James Dobson / William Randolph Hearst / George
W Bush / Dick Cheney]
"The United
States has entered the ranks of the failed states. One of the
most remarkable manifestations of a failed state is that the criminals
are all inside the government operating against the people, whereas
in a normal state, the criminals are on the outside of the government,
operating against it. So, we now have every manifestation of being
a failed state, with the government in the hands of a few Wall
Street gangsters."
Paul Craig Roberts
"Since the Bush-Cheney
Administration took office in January 2001, controlling the major
oil and natural gas fields of the world had been the primary,
though undeclared, priority of US foreign policy... Not only the
invasion of Iraq, but also the toppling of the Taliban in Afghanistan,
had nothing to do with 'democracy,' and everything to do with
pipeline control across Central Asia and the militarization of
the Middle East."
F. William Engdahl
"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. Politicians and the media
have conspired to infantilize, to dumb down, the American public.
At heart, politicians don't believe that Americans can handle
complex truths, and the news media, especially television news,
basically agrees."
Tom Fenton, former CBS
foreign correspondent
Jean-Bertrand Aristide
HAITI
PAGE
"When the full
and true story of Jean-Bertrand Aristide is finally told, it will
portray a noble and humble man who gave of himself honorably to
serve the interests of all the people of Haiti. His only failure
was his inability to overcome the brutal and corrupt power of
the U.S. and its determination to see him fail. "
Stephen Lendman
"Africa is extremely
rich in many resources, from agriculture to oil, minerals, and
a huge variety of other resources used all around the world. If
African nations were able to develop their own economies, use
their own resources, and create their own industries and businesses,
they could become self-sufficient at first, and then may become
a force of great competition for the established industries and
elites around the world. After all, Europe does not have much
to offer in terms of resources, as the continent's wealth has
largely come from plundering the resources of regions like Africa,
and in becoming captains of monetary manipulation. A revitalized,
vibrant, economically independent and successful Africa could
spell the end of Western financial dominance. "
Andrew Gavin Marshall
"Every time
weaker nations have attempted to reallocate their resources and
undertake land reform to feed starving populations, powerful interests
emanating from the rich world and its multilateral bodies have
thwarted their efforts."
Susan George
"Americans cannot
teach democracy to the world until they restore their own."
William Greider
"The problem
is not that a computer network [Internet] offers an alternative
to the information aristocracy. The true crisis is that neither
the news media nor the government has enough credibility to be
accepted as either truthful or impartial on their own."
military writer William
M. Arkin
[Ariel Sharon - Israel
/ King Fahd - Saudi Arabia / Shah Pahlevi - Iran / Saddam Hussain
- Iraq]
"The United
States became the target of terrorists on 9/11 not because of
the country's freedom and democracy, but because U.S. Middle East
policy has had nothing to do with freedom and democracy."
Stephen Zunes
"The need for
major states as enemies stems partly from the fact that only the
perceived presence of enemy states can justify military spending
at the level which the industries concerned have come to demand."
David Edwards - Burning
All Illusions
What Can I Do?
"All
societies we know of are governed by the selfish interests of
the ruling class or classes."
Plato
"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."
Michael Parenti
"States, most
especially the large hegemonic ones, such as the United States
and Great Britain, are controlled by the international central
banking system, working through secret agreements at the Bank
for International Settlements (BIS), and operating through national
central banks (such as the Bank of England and the Federal Reserve)...
The same international banking cartel that controls the United
States today previously controlled Great Britain and held it up
as the international hegemon. When the British order faded, and
was replaced by the United States, the US ran the global economy.
However, the same interests are served. States will be used and
discarded at will by the international banking cartel; they are
simply tools."
Andrew Gavin Marshall
"The Council
on Foreign Relations (CFR) took control of the ideological foundations
of the American empire, encompassing the corporate, banking, political,
foreign policy, military, media, and academic elite of the nation
into a generally cohesive overall world view. By altering one's
ideology to that of promoting such an internationalist agenda,
the big money that was behind it would ensure one's rise through
government, industry, academia and media. There are divisions
within the elite, predicated on the basis of how to use American
imperial power, where to use it, on what basis to justify it,
and other various methodological differences. The divide amongst
elites was never on the questions of: should we use American imperial
power, why has America become an Empire, or should there even
be an empire? If one takes such considerations to heart and questions
these concepts, be it within the foreign policy establishment,
intelligence, military, academia, finance, corporate world, or
media; chances are, such a person is not a member of the CFR."
Andrew Gavin Marshall
"So important
did military spending and the military-industrial sector become
during World War II and the Cold War that they have become fundamental
to the U.S. economy, U.S. economic growth and above all U.S. technological
development. Despite its often almost incredible wastefulness
and corruption, this military spending has also been in some ways
a kind of unacknowledged but rather successful state industrial
development strategy in a country whose free market ideology meant
that it could not formally adopt or admit to such a strategy."
David Edwards - Burning
All Illusions
"All conspiracies
are not theories".
from the TV series 'Rubicon'
"Patriotism
has got to be more than hanging out a flag and then sitting on
your ass watching jets bomb Afghanistan."
Ruth Coniff
"Every ten years
or so, the United States needs to pick up some crappy little country
and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean
business."
neoconservative Michael
Ledeen
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Use" Notice: Third World Traveler contains copyrighted material
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