“❝Washington — perhaps as many global powers have done in the past — uses what I might call the “immaculate conception” theory of crises abroad. That is, we believe we are essentially out there, just minding our own business, trying to help make the world right, only to be endlessly faced with a series of spontaneous, nasty challenges from abroad to which we must react. There is not the slightest consideration that perhaps US policies themselves may have at least contributed to a series of unfolding events. This presents a huge paradox: how can America on the one hand pride itself on being the world’s sole global superpower, with over seven hundred military bases abroad and the Pentagon’s huge global footprint, and yet, on the other hand, be oblivious to and unacknowledging of the magnitude of its own role — for better or for worse — as the dominant force charting the course of world events? This Alice-in-Wonderland delusion affects not just policy makers, but even the glut of think tanks that abound in Washington. In what may otherwise often be intelligent analysis of a foreign situation, the focus of each study is invariably the other country, the other culture, the negative intentions of other players; the impact of US actions and perceptions are quite absent from the equation. It is hard to point to serious analysis from mainstream publications or think tanks that address the role of the United States itself in helping create current problems or crises, through policies of omission or commission. We’re not even talking about blame here; we’re addressing the logical and self-evident fact that the actions of the world’s sole global superpower have huge consequences in the unfolding of international politics. They require examination.”
― Graham E. Fuller, quote from A World Without Islam
“The west, and especially the United States, has shown no serious or sustained interest in the Middle East until the last half century. We tend to be comfortably ignorant of the history of Western interventionism in the region over centuries — or even over a millennium. We are only superficially aware of Middle Eastern critiques of Western policies that touch on oil, finances, political intervention, Western-sponsored coups, Western support for pro-Western dictators, and carte blanche American support for Israel in the complex Palestinian problem — which, after all, had its roots not in Islam, but in Western persecution and butchery of European Jews. European powers have also exported their local quarrels and parleyed them into two world wars that were fought out partly on Middle Eastern soil, as was much of the Cold War as well. All this suggests that many other causative factors are at work that have at least as much explanatory power for the current turmoil as does “Islam.”
It is not simply a matter of “blaming the West” as some readers might rush to suggest here. I argue that deeper geopolitical factors have created numerous confrontational factors between the East and the West that predate Islam, continued with Islam and around Islam, and may be inherent in the territorial imperatives and geopolitical outlook of any states that occupy those areas, regardless of religion.”
― Graham E. Fuller, quote from A World Without Islam
“International politics is not unlike the jungle: smaller and weaker animals require acute intelligence, sensitive antennae, and nimbleness of footing to assure their own self-preservation; the strong—such as elephants—need pay less attention to ambient conditions and can often do as they wish, and others will get out of the way.”
― Graham E. Fuller, quote from A World Without Islam
“One less desirable aspect of democracy is that it seems to require serious demonization of the enemy if the nation and public opinion are to be galvanized sufficiently to pay a serious price in blood or treasure at war.”
― Graham E. Fuller, quote from A World Without Islam
“Old and cherished ideas die hard.”
― Graham E. Fuller, quote from A World Without Islam
“Religion may in most of its forms be defined as the belief that the gods are on the side of the Government. —Bertrand Russell”
― Graham E. Fuller, quote from A World Without Islam
“When asked his opinion of the French Revolution, Chinese Premier Zhou En-Lai in the 1950s famously remarked, “It’s too early to tell.”
― Graham E. Fuller, quote from A World Without Islam
Graham E. Fuller
Born place: The United States
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“But perhaps life has a tendency to converge on a pathway, something like a magnetic pull that draws it back despite temporary deviations.”
― Richard Dawkins, quote from An Appetite for Wonder: The Making of a Scientist
“It is nothing new, these vital lies men tell themselves, muttering and mumbling them like charms and incantations against the powers of Night. The voodoos and medicine men and the devil-devil doctors were the fathers of metaphysics. Night and the Noseless One were ogres that beset the way of light and life. And the metaphysicians would win by if they had to tell lies to do it. They were vexed by the brazen law of the Ecclesiast that men die like the beasts of the field and their end is the same. Their creeds were their schemes, their religions their nostrums, their philosophies their devices, by which they half-believed they would outwit the Noseless One and the Night. "Bog-lights, vapours of mysticism, psychic overtones, soul orgies, wailings among the shadows, weird gnosticisms, veils and tissues of words, gibbering subjectivisms, gropings and maunderings, ontological fantasies, pan-psychic hallucinations—this is the stuff, the phantasms of hope, that fills your bookshelves. Look at them, all the sad wraiths of sad mad men and passionate rebels—your Schopenhauers, your Strindbergs, your Tolstois and Nietzsches. "Come. Your glass is empty. Fill and forget.”
― Jack London, quote from John Barleycorn: Alcoholic Memoirs
“This marking, said Victoria, running her finger over a knot in the bark. What does it look like to you?
It looks like a heart, said Lawrence. He put his fingers on the knot too. They brushed Victoria's, and he drew back. I mean, not that I think about things like that, or--well, you know.”
― Claire Legrand, quote from The Cavendish Home for Boys and Girls
“he smiled at her as though he had not with a single sentence blown the sane structure of her life into slithering fragments.”
― Laura London, quote from The Windflower
“..Window panes that rattled under the lash of the wind for two months on end, rain that leaked beneath the doors, her husband out and drinking, electricity cut off and the radio shut down, the boredom, the quiet and incredible loneliness - Margaret Looney would remember when she first discovered love and wonder at how immense it must have been to be lasting so long.”
― Niall Williams, quote from Four Letters of Love
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