Imperial Ambitions: Conversations on the Post-9/11 World

For the powerful, crimes are those that others commit.

No honest journalist should be willing to describe himself or herself as 'embedded.' To say, 'I'm an embedded journalist' is to say, 'I'm a government Propagandist.

The two main criminals are France and the United States. They owe Haiti enormous reparations because of actions going back hundreds of years. If we could ever get to the stage where somebody could say, 'We're sorry we did it,' that would be nice. But if that just assuages guilt, it's just another crime. To become minimally civilized, we would have to say, 'We carried out and benefited from vicious crimes. A large part of the wealth of France comes from the crimes we committed against Haiti, and the United States gained as well. Therefore we are going to pay reparations to the Haitian people.' Then you will see the beginnings of civilization.

Corporations barely pay taxes. The corporate tax rate is already very low, but corporations have worked out an array of complicated techniques so they often don't have to pay taxes at all... The scale of sheer robbery by corporate power is enormous.

You aren't supposed to learn that dedicated, committed effort can bring about significant changes of consciousness and understanding. That's a very dangerous idea, and therefore it's been wiped out of history.

There is oppression that shouldn't exist. There is a struggle for freedom all the time. There are very serious dangers: the species may be heading toward extinction. I can't see how anybody can fail to have an interest in trying to help people become more engaged in thinking about these problems and doing something about them.

If you give up every time you don't achieve the immediate gain you want, you're just guaranteeing that the worst is going to happen... You can't expect an easy victory after one protest march.

The kindest thing you can say about Reagan is that he may not have known what the policies of his administration were...

Iran is a different story. Iran is a much more serious military and economic force. And for years Israel has been pressing the United States to take on Iran. Iran is too big for Israel to attack, so they want the big boys to do it. And it’s quite likely that this war may already be under way. A year ago, more than 10 percent of the Israeli air force was reported to be permanently based in eastern Turkey—at the huge U.S. military base there—and flying reconnaissance over the Iranian border. In addition, there are credible reports that the United States, Turkey, and Israel are attempting to stir up Azeri nationalist forces in northern Iran.9 That is, an axis of U.S.-Turkish-Israeli power in the region opposed to Iran could ultimately lead to the split-up of Iran and maybe even to military attack, although a military attack will happen only if it’s taken for granted that Iran would be basically defenseless. They’re not going to invade anyone who they think can fight back.

This has nothing in particular to do with access to the oil for import into the United States. It’s about control of the oil.

Acheson argued that the United States had the right of preventive war against a mere challenge to our position and prestige, not even a threat to our existence.

Dean Acheson, a respected elder statesman and a senior adviser to the Kennedy administration, delivered a lecture to the American Society of International Law in which he stated that no “legal issue” arises if the United States responds to any challenge to its “power, position, and prestige.

The new doctrine was not one of preemptive war, which arguably falls within some stretched interpretation of the UN Charter, but rather a doctrine that doesn’t begin to have any grounds in international law, namely, preventive war. That is, the United States will rule the world by force, and if there is any challenge to its domination—whether it is perceived in the distance, invented, imagined, or whatever—then the United States will have the right to destroy that challenge before it becomes a threat. That’s preventive war, not preemptive war.

To a large extent, that's the way empires work. Internal class war is a significant element of empire.

I should say, though, to my amazement, the occupation is not succeeding. It takes real talent to fail at this. [On the American invasion of Iraq]

President Kennedy was trying to organize the hemisphere to support his terrorist attacks against Cuba, which were very severe. ... the Mexican Ambassador said, "If we publicly declare that Cuba is a threat to our security, forty million Mexicans will die laughing.

Bernays said that the more intelligent members of the community can direct the population through "the engineering of consent," which he considered "the very essence of the democratic process.

Also in the background is a long-standing US hatred of the European social system, which provides decent wages, working conditions, and benefits. The United States doesn't want that model to exist, because it is a dangerous one. People may get funny ideas.

The embedded journalists are talking about the suffering of the marines, who are so hot and are being fired on all the time.

In fact the entire political leadership should face the death penalty under U.S. law for these actions. They're all eligible for the death penalty, according to the War Crimes Act passed by the 1996 Republican congress.

The Times was a cheerleader for the coup in Guatemala and also applauded the coup in Iran in 1953. Thomas McCann, ... says, "It is difficult to make a convincing case for manipulation of the press when the victims proved so eager for the experience.

Reagan was an incredible coward. Somebody who could believe that an air base in Grenada could be used to attack the United States does not even reach the level of a laughingstock.

Reagan's regime was one of murder, brutality, and violence, which devastated a number of countries and probably left two hundred thousand people dead in Latin America, with hundreds of thousand of orphans and widows.

If you want to learn about patriarchal families, you don't ask the father, you ask the mother; then maybe you will learn something.

The idea that you have to avoid teaching evolution or pretend you're not teaching it is unique in the industrial world. And the statistics are mind-boggling. Roughly half the population think the world was created a couple thousand years ago.