THIRD WORLD TRAVELER puts
up magazine articles and book excerpts
that offer an alternative view to the corporate media about the
state of democracy in America,
and about the impact of the policies of the United States' government,
transnational corporations, international trade and financial
institutions, and the corporate press,
on war and peace, democracy, civil liberties, free speech, human
rights, and social and economic justice,
in the Third World, and in the United States.
THIRD WORLD TRAVELER also
provides information and links
to aid international travelers.
Visitors
are encouraged to buy the books and subscribe to the magazines
that appear on this website,
to ask their libraries to put them on their shelves and their
bookstores to stock them,
and to tell others about the wealth of information that they provide.
For, without public awareness of and support for independent progressive
authors, publications and publishers, this much-needed information
may not continue to be available.
"Societies characterized
by enduring deep divisions of income and wealth, such as most
third-world societies, are wounded societies with little sense
of the common good... As America drifts in this direction, ending
poverty and redistributing income should be at the top of the
national agenda."
Charles Derber, Corporation
Nation
*****
"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."
William Shirer
" Not a nut or bolt
shall reach Chile under Allende. Once Allende comes to power we
shall do all within our power to condemn Chile and all Chileans
to utmost deprivation and poverty..."
U.S. Ambassador to Chile,
three years before the US-supported coup against Chile's elected
President Allende
*****
" [U.S. aid] has
tended to flow disproportionately to Latin American governments
which torture their citizens..."
Lars Schoultz, leading academic
specialist on human rights in Latin America
*****
" When I visited
Auschwitz I was horrified. And when I visited Iraq, I thought
to myself, 'What will we tell our children in fifty years when
they ask what we did when the people in Iraq were dying.'"
Mairead McGuire, Nobel Peace
Prize Winner, Northern Ireland
"Globalization can
be seen as the triumph of capitalism: the ascendancy of economics
over politics, of corporate demands over public policy, of the
private over the public interest, of the transnational corporation
and its global framework over the national state."
Gary Teeple - Globalization
and the Decline of Social Reform
*****
"Why should we worry
about the death squads? They're bumping off the commies, our enemies.
I'd give them more power. Hell, I'd give them some cartridges
if I could, and everyone else would too...Why should we criticize
them? The death squad - I'm for it."
Former president of the American
Chamber of Commerce in Guatemala, September 1980
*****
"Perhaps, you have
a responsibility to be informed, to know for yourself. To know
the truth. And then, perhaps you must decide with your own conscience
and your personal energy and your resources what you should do."
Isabel Allende
" We are willing
to accept lies if they make our lives easier. "
Producer from the TV series
"People's Century", opining on why Americans tolerate
unjust and inhumane U.S. government policies, at home and abroad
*****
"The search of the
young today is more specific than the ancient search for the Holy
Grail. The search of the youth today is for ways and means to
make the machine - and the vast bureaucracy of the corporation
state and of government that runs that machine - the servant of
man. That is the revolution that is coming. It could be a revolution
in the nature of an explosive political regeneration. It depends
on how wise the Establishment is. If, with its stockpile of arms,
it resolves to suppress the dissenters, America will face, I fear,
an awful ordeal."
William O. Douglas, former
U.S. Supreme Court Justice, 1969
*****
" It doesn't take
a genius to pump up the GNP [of a developing country] by burning
down rainforests, using slave labor and social repression to keep
things in place. "
Hazel Henderson, economist
"If you want to know
about the world and understand and educate yourself, you have
to dig;
dig up books and articles, read and find out for yourself."
John Stockwell, former CIA
official and author
*****
"It is a paradox
that the nation that did so much to articulate and codify human
rights in its foundation documents has so consistently resisted
the effective functioning of an international framework to protect
these principles and values."
Amnesty International - "United
States of America-Rights for All", October 1998
*****
" With unfailing
consistancy, U.S. intervention has been on the side of the rich
and powerful of various nations at the expense of the poor and
needy. Rather than strengthening democracies, U.S. leaders have
overthrown numerous democratically elected governments or other
populist regimes in dozens of countries ... whenever these nations
give evidence of putting the interests of their people ahead of
the interests of multinational corporate interests. "
Michael Parenti, political
scientist and author
" To keep information
from the public is the function of the corporate media."
Gore Vidal, Perpetual War
for Perpetual Peace
*****
"The media serve
the interests of state and corporate power, which are closely
interlinked, framing their reporting and analysis in a manner
supportive of established privilege and limiting debate and discussion
accordingly."
Noam Chomsky
*****
" The U.S. President
has been largely refashioned as a high-level trade representative
for the transnationals."
The Nation magazine
"Poor people living
in third-world countries are not the only victims of the so-called
new world order. At the heart of this "new" order is
a troubling paradox: Poor people within the United States, and
the country as a whole, are getting poorer at the same time as
the rich within the United States are getting richer."
Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer - Brave
New World Order
*****
"The modern susceptibility
to conformity and obedience to authority indicates that the truth
endorsed by authority is likely to be accepted as such by a majority
of people, who are innately obedient to authority. This obedience-truth
will then become a consensus-truth accepted by many individuals
unable to stand alone against the majority. In this way, the truth
promulgated by the propaganda system - however irrational - stands
a good chance of becoming the consensus, and may come to seem
self-evident common sense."
David Edwards, Burning All
Illusions
*****
"Those in power are blind devotees to private enterprise.
They accept that degree of socialism implicit in the vast subsidies
to the military-industrial-complex, but not that type of socialism
which maintains public projects for the disemployed and the unemployed
alike."
William O. Douglas, former
U.S. Supreme Court Justice, 1969
"Big corporations
and billionaires fund 90 percent to 98 percent of the Democratic
and Republican Party budgets."
Howard Zinn
*****
"If a baseball player
slides into home plate and, right before the umpire rules if he
is safe or out, the player says to the umpire-"Here is $1,000."
What would we call that? We would call that a bribe. If a lawyer
was arguing a case before a judge and said, "Your honor before
you decide on the guilt or innocence of my client, here is $1,000."
What would we call that? We would call that a bribe. But if an
industry lobbyist walks into the office of a key legislator and
hands her or him a check for $1,000, we call that a campaign contribution.
We should call it a bribe."
Janice Fine
*****
"This country, with
its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever
they shall grow weary of the existing Government, they can exercise
their constitutional right of amending it or their revolutionary
right to dismember or overthrow it."
Abraham Lincoln, 1861
" [T]here seems to
be nothing to prevent the transnational corporations taking possession
of the planet and subjecting humanity to the dictatorship of capital....
In order to crush any thought of organized resistance to the supporters
of the new world order, tremendous police and military forces
are being used to establish a doctrine of repression...."
Christian la Brie, Le Monde
Diplomatique (Paris)
*****
"[Genocide] certainly
is a valid word in my view, when you have a situation where we
see thousands of deaths per month, a possible total of I million
to 1.5 million over the last nine years. If that is not genocide,
then I don't know quite what is."
Denis Halliday, former UN
humanitarian coordinator - on effect of US sanctions on Iraqi
people
*****
"Bringing democratic
control to the conduct of foreign policy requires a struggle merely
to force the issue onto the public agenda."
Eric Alterman
"... the United States
is slipping into a category of countries - among them Brazil,
Britain, and Guatemala - where the gap [between rich and poor]
is the worst around the globe."
United Nations' Human Development
Report
*****
" The cost of being
presented as a " responsible and serious candidate"
by the media [is] usually to show fundamental agreement with the
existing distribution of wealth and power. "
Michael Lerner
*****
"To provide its happy
people with perpetual fun is now the deepest purpose of Western
civilization."
Jeremy Seabrook, Third World
Network
" Does it sound outrageous
to you that military spending for fiscal year 2000 will be almost
$290 billion and all other domestic discretionary spending, such
as education, job training, housing, Amtrak, medical research,
environment, Head Start and many other worthwhile programs will
total $246 billion, the biggest disparity in modern times ? "
Dale Bumpers, former US Senator
and recent Director of the Center for Defense Information
*****
"The two major parties
have abdicated their responsibility to lead, to advocate solutions,
and to promote true democracy."
Ralph Nader
*****
"All the emphasis
on crime and drugs and pornography used to justify the suppression
of the Internet is really aimed at suppressing knowledge of the
radical political alternatives that are now available."
Tony Benn, British Labour
Party Member of Parliament
"In the United States,
both the Republican and Democratic Parties, with only a few prominent
exceptions, have been and are in the pay of the corporate media
and communication giants."
John Nichols and Robert McChesney
*****
"War is caused by
elites acting in what they take to be their own interests, institutional
violence promulgated by ruling groups for personal gain."
The Nation magazine
*****
"Increases in prison
spending [in the U.S.] average twice as high as increases in education
spending."
National Criminal Justice
Commission (1996)
"America is today
the leader of a world-wide anti-revolutionary movement in the
defense of vested interests. She now stands for what Rome stood
for. Rome consistently supported the rich against the poor in
all foreign communities that fell under her sway; and, since the
poor, so far, have always and everywhere been far more numerous
than the rich, Rome's policy made for inequality, for injustice,
and for the least happiness of the greatest number."
Arnold Toynbee, historian,
1961
*****
"... the establishment
can't admit [that] it is human rights violations that make ...
countries attractive to business -- so history has to be fudged,
including denial of our support of regimes of terror and the practices
that provide favorable climates of investment, and our destabilization
of democracies that [don't] meet [the] standard of service to
the transnational corporation..."
Edward S. Herman
*****
" Anyone who challenges
the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising
effectiveness. "
George Orwell, author of
the book "1984"
"Over breakfast coffee
we read of 40,000 American dead in Vietnam. Instead of vomiting,
we reach for the toast. Our morning rush through crowded streets
is not to cry murder but to hit that trough before somebody else
gobbles our share."
Dalton Trumbo, author of
'Johnny Got His Gun', in the introduction to the reissue of his
book, 1970.
*****
" Every man of humane
convictions must decide on the protest that best suits his convictions,
but we must all protest. "
Martin Luther King, Jr.
*****
"Bad ideas flourish
because they are in the interest of powerful groups."
Paul Krugman
" The purpose of
commercial [media] is to induce mass sales. For mass sales there
must be a mass norm ... By suppressing the individual, the unique,
the industry ... assures itself a standard product for mass consumption."
John Whiting
*****
"Americans have been
taught that their nation is civilized and humane. But, too often,
U.S. actions have been uncivilized and inhumane."
Howard Zinn
*****
" The great multinationals
are unwilling to face the moral and economic contradictions of
their own behavior - producing in low-wage dictatorships and selling
to high-wage democracies. Indeed, the striking quality about global
enterprises is how easily free-market capitalism puts aside its
supposed values in order to do business. The conditions of human
freedom do not matter to them so long as the market demand is
robust. The absence of freedom, if anything, lends order and efficiency
to their operations."
William Greider
"We can have democracy
in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the
hands of a few, but we can't have both."
Louis Brandeis, Supreme Court
Justice from 1916-1939
*****
"When you give food
to the poor, they call you a saint.
When you ask why the poor have no food, they call you a communist."
Archbishop Helder Camara,
Brazilian liberation theologist
*****
"The American oligarchy
increasingly has less in common with the American people than
it does with the equivalent oligarchies in Germany or Mexico or
Japan."
Lewis Lapham
"The U.S. ranks last
among developed countries in the percentage of its GNP (0.11%)
given in aid. On average, governments in the European Union contribute
three times as much of their GNP (0.33%) in non-military foreign
aid."
Friends Committee on National
Legislation
*****
" Today, the United
States and Somalia are the only two countries in the world which
haven't ratified the United Nations Convention on the Rights of
the Child. And since Somalia is a country with no internationally
recognized government, the United States essentially stands alone
as the last holdout to legally guarantee children the same full
range of human rights ... agreed to by 191 other sovereign states.
"
Catherine Langevin-Falcon
*****
"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 ..."
US General Douglas MacArthur,
1957
" Patriotism, like
religion, meets people's need for something greater to which their
individual lives can be anchored ... America's state religion,
[is] patriotism, a phenomenon which has convinced many of the
citizenry that "treason" is morally worse than murder
or rape "
William Blum
*****
"In the media, the
world is turned upside down. The contras and the KLA are "democratizers";
the lethal sanctions against Iraq exist to deliver its people
from their dictator; the destruction of Yugoslavia through aerial
bombardment of civilians and their infrastructure is a "humanitarian
intervention."
Michelle Stoddard
*****
" As the mainstream
media has become increasingly dependent on advertising revenues
for support, it has become an anti-democratic force in society."
Robert McChesney
"The cold war provided
the perfect excuse for Western governments to plunder and exploit
the Third World in the name of freedom; to rig its elections,
bribe its politicians, appoint its tyrants and, by every sophisticated
means of persuasion and interference, stunt the emergence of young
democracies in the name of democracy."
John le Carre'
*****
"A terrorist is someone
who has a bomb but doesn't have an air force."
William Blum
*****
" Americans cannot
teach democracy to the world until they restore their own."
William Greider
" The propaganda
system allows the U.S. Ieadership to commit crimes without limit
and with no suggestion of misbehavior or criminality; in fact,
major war criminals like Henry Kissinger appear regularly on TV
to comment on the crimes of the derivative butchers. "
Edward S. Herman
*****
"The issues are much
too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for
themselves."
"I don't see why
we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the
irresponsibility of its people."
Henry Kissinger commenting
on Chile, prior to Augusto Pinochet's U.S.-supported / CIA-facilitated
military coup against Chile's democratically-elected President
Salvador Allende
*****
" Throughout the
world, on any given day, a man, woman or child is likely to be
displaced, tortured, killed or "disappeared", at the
hands of governments or armed political groups. More often than
not, the United States shares the blame."
Amnesty International, in
its annual report on U.S. military aid and human rights
"... what the Agency
[CIA] does is ordered by the President and the NSC [National Security
Council]. The Agency neither makes decisions on policy nor acts
on its own account. It is an instrument of the President."
Philip Agee, CIA Diary
*****
" It is the function
of the CIA to keep the world unstable and to propagandize the
American people to hate, so we will let the establishment spend
any amount of money on arms. "
John Stockwell, former CIA
official and author
*****
"I believe that if
we had and would keep our dirty, bloody, dollar-soaked fingers
out of the business of these [Third World] nations so full of
depressed, exploited people, they will arrive at a solution of
their own.... And if unfortunately their revolution must be of
the violent type because the "haves" refuse to share
with the "have-nots" by any peaceful method, at least
what they get will be their own, and not the American style, which
they don't want and above all don't want crammed down their throats
by Americans."
General David Sharp, former
US Marine Commandant,1966
" In the councils
of government, we must guard against unwarranted influence, whether
sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential
for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist."
President Dwight D. Eisenhower
in his Farewell Address, 1961
*****
" The range of debate
between the dominant U.S. [political] parties tends to closely
resemble the range of debate within the business class. "
Robert McChesney
*****
" America's inability
to come to terms with revolutionary change in the Third World...has
created our biggest international problems in the postwar era.
But the root of the problem is not, as many Americans persist
in believing, the relentless spread of communism. Rather, it is
our own difficulty in understanding that Third World revolutions
are primarily nationalist, not communist. Nationalism, not capitalism
or communism, is the dominant political force in the modern world.
You might think that revolutionary nationalism and the desire
for self-determination would be relatively easy for Americans
- the first successful revolutionaries to win their independence
- to understand. But instead we have been dumbfounded when other
peoples have tried to pursue the goals of our own revolution two
centuries ago."
Former U.S. Senator Frank
Church
" Many of us regard
ourselves as mildly liberal or centrist politically, voice fairly
pleasant sentiments about our poor children, contribute money
to send poor kids to summer camp, feel benevolent. We're not nazis;
we're nice people. We read sophisticated books. We go to church.
We go to synagogue. Meanwhile, we put other people's children
into an economic and environmental death zone. We make it hard
for them to get out. We strip the place bare of amenities. And
we sit back and say to ourselves, "Well, I hope that they
don't kill each other off. But if they do, it's not my fault."
Jonathan Kozol
*****
" We live amidst
massive inequality. We don't really care that most people have
little power to alter the conditions of their lives. We refuse
to acknowledge that the earth is dying and that we are killing
it. ... Our unthinking celebration of individual achievement and
upward mobility works to damage the life-giving ties of kinship
and the bonds of community. ...We pretend not to understand the
linkages between our comfortable standard of living and the dictatorships
we impose and protect through an international military presence.
"
Jerry Fresia, Toward an American
Revolution
*****
"More than I00 countries
have now abolished the death penalty in law or practice ... Against
the global trend towards abolition, however, the U.S.A. has relentlessly
increased its rate of executions and the number of crimes punishable
by death."
Amnesty International "United
States of America- Rights for All," October 1998
"Conceit, arrogance
and egotism are the essentials of patriotism.... Patriotism assumes
that our globe is divided into little spots, each one surrounded
by an iron gate. Those who had the fortune of being born on some
particular spot, consider themselves better, nobler, grander,
more intelligent than the living beings inhabiting any other spot.
It is, therefore, the duty of everyone living on that chosen spot
to fight, kill, and die in the attempt to impose his superiority
upon all others."
Emma Goldman, 1869-1940
*****
"The crimes of the
U.S. throughout the world have been systematic, constant, clinical,
remorseless, and fully documented but nobody talks about them."
Harold Pinter
*****
" There is ...a huge
tacit conspiracy between the U.S. government, its agencies and
its multinational corporations, on the one hand, and local business
and military cliques in the Third World, on the other, to assume
complete control of these countries and "develop" them
on a joint venture basis. The military leaders of the Third World
were carefully nurtured by the U.S. security establishment to
serve as the "enforcers" of this joint venture partnership,
and they have been duly supplied with machine guns and the latest
data on methods of interrogation of subversives."
Edward S. Herman
" The government
of the United States does not, in its policies, express the decency
of its people. "
Jerry Fresia, Toward an American
Revolution
*****
" In the United States
today, the Declaration of Independence hangs on schoolroom walls,
but foreign policy follows Machiavelli."
Howard Zinn
*****
" History will have
to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition
was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling
silence of the good people. "
Martin Luther King, Jr.
" The only way to
abolish war is to make peace heroic."
John Dewey, 1859-1952
*****
" What would have
happened if millions of American and British people, struggling
with coupons and lines at the gas stations, had learned that in
1942 Standard Oil of New Jersey [part of the Rockefeller empire]
managers shipped the enemy's fuel through neutral Switzerland
and that the enemy was shipping Allied fuel? Suppose the public
had discovered that the Chase Bank in Nazi-occupied Paris after
Pearl Harbor was doing millions of dollars' worth of business
with the enemy with the full knowledge of the head office in Manhattan
[the Rockefeller family among others?] Or that Ford trucks were
being built for the German occupation troops in France with authorization
from Dearborn, Michigan? Or that Colonel Sosthenes Behn, the head
of the international American telephone conglomerate ITT, flew
from New York to Madrid to Berne during the war to help improve
Hitler's communications systems and improve the robot bombs that
devastated London? Or that ITT built the FockeWulfs that dropped
bombs on British and American troops? Or that crucial balI bearings
were shipped to Nazi-associated customers in Latin America with
the collusion of the vice-chairman of the U.S. War Production
Board in partnership with Goering's cousin in Philadelphia when
American forces were desperately short of them? Or that such arrangements
were known about in Washington and either sanctioned or deliberately
ignored?"
Charles Higham, author of
Trading with the Enemy, about U.S. corporate collaboration with
the Nazis during WWII
*****
"No other democratic
country in the world denies as many people - in absolute or proportional
terms - the right to vote because of felony convictions."
Human Rights Watch - "World
Report 1999, United States"
TRAVEL
" Sports plays a
societal role in engendering jingoist and chauvinist attitudes.
They're designed to organize a community to be committed to their
gladiators."
Noam Chomsky
*****
" [Nearly 70% of
the military budget] is to provide men and weapons to fight in
foreign countries in support of our allies and friends and for
offensive operations in Third World countries .. Another big chunk
of the defense budget is the 20% allocated for our offensive nuclear
force of bombers, missles, and submarines whose job it is to carry
nuclear weapons to the Soviet Union... Actual defense of the United
States costs about 10% of the military budget and is the least
expensive function performed by the Pentagon... "
Rear Admiral Gene LaRoque,
U.S. Navy retired
*****
" The dream of capitalism
is to co-opt people with higher living standards without redistributing
any wealth. Without co-optation, widespread repression is the
only guarantor of gross inequality."
Holly Sklar, Trilateralism
" Few trends could
so thoroughly undermine the very foundations of our free society
as the acceptance by corporate officials of a social responsibility
other than to make as much money for their stockholders as possible.
"
Neo-liberal economist Milton
Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom
*****
" I am astonished
each time I come to the U.S. by the ignorance of a high percentage
of the population, which knows almost nothing about Latin America
or about the world. It's quite blind and deaf to anything that
may happen outside the frontiers of the U.S..
Eduardo Galeano
*****
" It is legal to
purchase a fully assembled Uzi machine gun in this country [United
States] but it's not legal to purchase a fully assembled low-watt
radio transmitter. "
Greg Ruggerio
" We may not be strong
enough to stop wars when the powers that be want them, but at
least we are wise and humane enough to take political and moral
stands as publicly as possible. This is, after all, the foundation
we must build from."
Leslie Cagan
*****
" The U.S. public
is depoliticized, poorly informed on foreign affairs ... and strongly
patriotic in the face of a struggle with "another Hitler".
Even though the public is normally averse to war, even with modest
propaganda efforts ... the public can be quickly transformed into
enthusiastic supporters of war."
Edward S. Herman
*****
" If an American
is concerned only about his nation, he will not be concerned about
the peoples of Asia, Africa, or South America. Is this not why
nations engage in the madness of war without the slightest sense
of penitence? Is this not why the murder of a citizen of your
own nation is a crime, but the murder of citizens of another nation
in war is an act of heroic virtue? "
Martin Luther King, Jr.
"Campaign finance
reform and media reform are directed at the same societal illness--the
influence of private corporate money that improperly negates civic
need and public choice."
Ben Bagdikian, "The
Media Monopoly"
*****
" The conscious and
intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions
of the masses is an important element in democratic society. "
Edward Bernays, "father"
of modern public relations (PR), on government propaganda
*****
" Rollback [the destabilization
and overthrow of Third World leftist-populist governments with
right-wing governments] as a foreign policy ... causes untold
devastation and misery for millions overseas, and hinders any
potential positive U.S. influence in world affairs... To the extent
the U.S. public backs rollback, this support is rooted in a misguided
sense of patriotism. Patriotism itself - love of one's country
and one's people - is a natural and reasonable human feeling.
But patriotism which measures one's country by military superiority
over all rivals regardless of consequence is irrational... There
is surely a more rational form of patriotism that searches for
excellence in social, economic and moral spheres rather than in
weapon systems. "
Thomas Bodenheimer and Robert
Gould, Rollback
"War is the biggest
business in America."
Jim Garrison, New Orleans
District Attorney, prosecutor in the 1967 JFK assassination conspiracy
trial
*****
" Can it be believed
that the democracy which overthrew the feudal system and vanquished
kings will retreat before tradesmen and capitalists."
Alex de Tocqueville
*****
"The loud little
handful will shout for war. The pulpit will warily and cautiously
protest at first.... The great mass of the nation will rub its
sleepy eyes, and will try to make out why there should be a war,
and they will say earnestly and indignantly: "It is unjust
and dishonorable and there is no need for war."
Then the few will shout
even louder.... Before long you will see a curious thing: anti-war
speakers will be stoned from the platform, and free speech will
be strangled by hordes of furious men who still agree with the
speakers but dare not admit it...
Next, the statesmen will
invent cheap lies...and each man will be glad of these lies and
will study them because they soothe his conscience; and thus he
will bye and bye convince himself that the war is just and he
will thank God for a better sleep he enjoys by his self-deception."
Mark Twain -- observing how
wars that are at first seen as unnecessary by the mass of the
people become converted into "just" wars
" Coming to grips
with these U.S./CIA activities in broad numbers and figuring out
how many people have been killed in the jungles of Laos or the
hills of Nicaragua is very difficult. But, adding them up as best
we can, we come up with a figure of six million people killed-and
this is a minimum figure. Included are: one million killed in
the Korean War, two million killed in the Vietnam War, 800,000
killed in Indonesia, one million in Cambodia, 20,000 killed in
Angola ... and 22,000 killed in Nicaragua. These people would
not have died if U.S. tax dollars had not been spent by the CIA
to inflame tensions, finance covert political and military activities
and destabilize societies.
Certainly, there are other
local, regional, national and international factors in many of
these operations, but if the CIA were tried fairly in a U.S. court,
under U.S. law, the principle of complicity, incitement, riot,
and mayhem would clearly apply. In the United States, if you hire
someone to commit a murder your sentence may be approximately
the same as that of the murderer himself.
Who are these six million
people we have killed in the interest of American national security?
Conservatives tell us, "It's a dangerous world. Our enemies
have to die so we can be safe and secure." Some of them say,
"I'm sorry, but that's the way the world is. We have to accept
this reality and defend ourselves, to make our nation safe and
insure our way of life."
Since 1954, however, we
have not parachuted teams into the Soviet Union - our number one
enemy - to destabilize that country... Neither do we run these
violent operations in England, France, Sweden, Norway, Belgium,
or Switzerland. Since the mid-1950s they have all been conducted
in Third World countries where governments do not have the power
to force the United States to stop its brutal and destabilizing
campaigns.
One might call this the
"Third World War." It is a war that has been fought
by the United States against the Third World. Others call it the
Cold War and focus on the anti-Communist and anti-Soviet rationales,
but the dead are not Soviets; they are people of the Third World.
It might also be called the Forty-Year War, like the Thirty-Year
and Hundred-Year Wars in Europe, for this one began when the CIA
was founded in 1947 and continues today. Altogether, perhaps twenty
million people died in the Cold War. As wars go, it has been the
second or third most destructive of human life in all of history,
after World War I and World War II.
The six million people
the CIA has helped to kill are people of the Mitumba Mountains
of the Congo, the jungles of Southeast Asia, and the hills of
northern Nicaragua. They are people without ICBMs or armies or
navies, incapable of doing physical damage to the United States
the 22,000 killed in Nicaragua, for example, are not Russians;
they are not Cuban soldiers or advisors; they are not even mostly
Sandinistas. A majority are rag-poor peasants, including large
numbers of women and children.
Communists? Hardly, since
the dead Nicaraguans are predominantly Roman Catholics. Enemies
of the United States? That description doesn't fit either, because
the thousands of witnesses who have lived in Nicaraguan villages
with the people since 1979 testify that the Nicaraguans are the
warmest people on the face of the earth, that they love people
from the United States, and they simply cannot understand why
our leaders would want to spend $1 billion on a contra force designed
to murder people and wreck the country."
John Stockwell, former CIA
official and author
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