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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this much-needed information may not continue to be available.
"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
"During times
of universal deceit, telling the truth is revolutionary."
George Orwell
"The news and
the truth are not the same thing."
Walter Lippmann
"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
"You don't have
to burn books to destroy a culture, just get the people to stop
reading them."
Ray Bradbury
a searchable database
of quotations - excerpted from hundreds of books and thousands
of articles - challenging conventional wisdom
"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
"The people
will believe what the media tells them they believe."
George Orwell
"The permanent
possibility of war is the foundation for stable government; it
supplies the basis for general acceptance of political authority.
It has enabled societies to maintain necessary class distinctions,
and it has ensured the subordination of the citizen to the state,
by virtue of the residual war powers inherent in the concept of
nationhood. No modern political ruling group has successfully
controlled its constituency after failing to sustain the continuing
credibility of an external threat of war."
Report from Iron Mountain
(1967)
"An acceptable
economic surrogate for the war system will require the expenditure
of resources for completely nonproductive purposes at a level
comparable to that of the military expenditures otherwise demanded
by the size and complexity of each society. Such a substitute
system of apparent "waste" must be of a nature that
will permit it to remain independent of the normal supply-demand
economy; it must be subject to arbitrary political control."
Report from Iron Mountain
(1967)
"A viable substitute
for war as a social system cannot be a mere symbolic charade.
It must involve real risk of real personal destruction, and on
a scale consistent with the size and complexity of modern social
systems. Credibility is the key. Whether the substitute is ritual
in nature or functionally substantive, unless it provides a believable
life-and-death threat it will not serve the socially organizing
function of war."
Report from Iron Mountain
(1967)
"The war system
makes the stable government of societies possible. It does this
essentially by providing an external necessity for a society to
accept political rule. In so doing, it establishes the basis for
nationhood and the authority of government to control its constituents."
Report from Iron Mountain
(1967)
"[A political
substitute for war] must be found, of credible quality and magnitude,
if a transition to peace is ever to come about without social
disintegration. It is more probable, in our judgment, that such
a threat will have to be invented... In a world of peace, the continuing stability
of society will require: 1) an effective substitute for military
institutions that can neutralize destabilizing social elements
and 2) a credible motivational surrogate for war at can insure
social cohesiveness."
Report from Iron Mountain
(1967)
"Substitute
institutions ... have been proposed for consideration as replacements
for the nonmilitary functions of war... a) An omnipresent, virtually
omnipotent international police force. b) An established and recognized
extraterrestrial menace. c) Massive global environmental pollution.
d) Fictitious alternate enemies."
Report from Iron Mountain
(1967)
"The existence
of an accepted external menace ... is essential to social cohesiveness
as well as to the acceptance of political authority. The menace
must be believable, it must be of a magnitude consistent with
the complexity of the society threatened, and it must appear,
at least, to affect the entire society."
Report from Iron Mountain
(1967)
"The precedence
of a society's war-making potential over its other characteristics
is not the result of the "threat" presumed to exist
at any one time from other societies. This is the reverse of the
basic situation; "threats" against the "national
interest" are usually created or accelerated to meet the,
changing needs of the war system."
Report from Iron Mountain
(1967)
"In the permanent
absence of war, new institutions must be developed that will effectively
control the socially destructive segments of societies... for
purposes of adapting the physical and psychological dynamics of
human behavior to the needs of social organization, a credible
substitute for war must generate an omnipresent and readily understood
fear of personal destruction. This fear must be of a nature and
degree sufficient to ensure adherence to societal values to the
full extent that they are acknowledged to transcend the value
of individual human life."
Report from Iron Mountain
(1967)
"Wars are not
"caused" by international conflicts of interest... war-making
societies require - and thus bring about - such conflicts. The
capacity of a nation to make war expresses the greatest social
power it can exercise; war-making, active or contemplated, is
a matter of life and death on the greatest scale subject to social
control. It should therefore hardly be surprising that the military
institutions in each society claim its highest priorities."
Report from Iron Mountain
(1967)
"In advanced
modern democratic societies the war system has provided political
leaders with [a] political-economic function of increasing importance:
it has served as the last great safeguard against the elimination
of necessary social classes."
Report from Iron Mountain
(1967)
"A viable political
substitute for war must posit a generalized external menace to
each society of a nature and degree sufficient to require the
organization and acceptance of political authority."
Report from Iron Mountain
(1967)
"The arbitrary
nature of war expenditures and of other military activities make
them ideally suited to control ... essential class relationships.
Obviously, if the war system were to be discarded, new political
machinery would be needed at once to serve this vital subfunction.
Until it is developed, the continuance of the war system must
be assured, if for no other reason, among others, than to preserve
whatever quality and degree of poverty a society requires as an
incentive, as well as to maintain the stability of its internal
organization of power."
Report from Iron Mountain
(1967)
"The existence
of an accepted external menace ... is essential to social cohesiveness
as well as to the acceptance of political authority. The menace
must be believable, it must be of a magnitude consistent with
the complexity of the society threatened, and it must appear,
at least, to affect the entire society."
Report from Iron Mountain
(1967)
"An acceptable economic
surrogate for the war system will require the expenditure of resources
for completely nonproductive purposes at a level comparable to
that of the military expenditures otherwise demanded by the size
and complexity of each society. Such a substitute system of apparent
"waste" must be of a nature that will permit it to remain
independent of the normal supply-demand economy; it must be subject
to arbitrary political control."
Report from Iron Mountain
(1967)
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
"War is the principal
motivational force for the development of science at every level,
from the abstractly conceptual to the narrowly technological.
Modem society places a high value on "pure" science,
but it is historically inescapable that all the significant discoveries
that have been made about the natural world have been inspired
by the real or imaginary military necessities of their epochs.
The consequences of the discoveries have indeed gone far afield,
but war has always provided the basic incentive."
Report from Iron Mountain
(1967)
"It is entirely
possible that the development of a sophisticated form of slavery
may be an absolute prerequisite for social control in a world
at peace. As a practical matter, conversion of the code of military
discipline to a euphemized form of enslavement would entail surprisingly
little revision; the logical first step would be the adoption
of some form of "universal" military service"
Report from Iron Mountain
(1967)
"Games theorists
have suggested ... the development of "blood games"
for the effective control of individual aggressive impulses. It
is an ironic commentary on the current state of war and peace
studies that it was left not to scientists but to the makers of
a commercial film to develop a model for this notion, on the implausible
level of popular melodrama, as a ritualized manhunt. More realistically,
such a ritual might be socialized, in the manner of the Spanish
Inquisition and the less formal witch trials of other periods,
for purposes of "social purification," "state security,"
or other rationale both acceptable and credible to postwar societies.
The feasibility of such an updated version of [an] ancient institution,
though doubtful, is considerably less fanciful than the wishful
notion of many peace planners that a lasting condition of peace
can be brought about without the most painstaking examination
of every possible surrogate for the essential functions of war.
Report from Iron Mountain
(1967)
"It is possible
that one or more major sovereign nations may arrive, through ambiguous
leadership, at a position in which a ruling administrative class
may lose control of ... its ability to rationalize a desired war.
It is not hard to imagine, in such circumstance, a situation in
which such governments may feel forced to initiate serious full-scale
disarmament proceedings... this could be catastrophic."
Report from Iron Mountain
(1967)
"The military
function of the war system serves simply to defend or advance
the "national interest" by means of organized violence.
It is often necessary for a national military establishment to
create a need for its unique powers... And a healthy military
apparatus requires regular "exercise," by whatever rationale
seems expedient, to prevent its atrophy."
Report from Iron Mountain
(1967)
"War production
is exercised entirely outside the framework of the economy of
supply and demand. As such, it provides the only critically large
segment of the total economy that is subject to complete and arbitrary
central control."
Report from Iron Mountain
(1967)
"Far from constituting
a "wasteful" drain on the economy, war spending, considered
pragmatically, has been a consistently positive factor in the
rise of gross national product and of individual productivity...
No combination of techniques for controlling employment, production,
and consumption has yet been tested that can remotely compare
to [war] in effectiveness. It is, and has been, the essential
economic stabilizer of modern societies."
Report from Iron Mountain
(1967)
"The permanent
possibility of war is the foundation for stable government; it
supplies the basis for general acceptance of political authority.
It has enabled societies to maintain necessary class distinctions,
and it has ensured the subordination of the citizen to the state,
by virtue of the residual war powers inherent in the concept of
nationhood. No modern political ruling group has successfully
controlled its constituency after failing to sustain the continuing
credibility of an external threat of war."
Report from Iron Mountain
(1967)
"War has provided
both ancient and modern societies with a dependable system for
stabilizing and controlling national economies. No alternate method
of control has yet been tested in a complex modern economy that
has shown itself remotely comparable in scope or effectiveness."
Report from Iron Mountain
(1967)
"Although war
is "used" as an instrument of national and social policy,
the fact that a society is organized for any degree of readiness
for war supersedes its political and economic structure. War itself
is the basic social system, within which other secondary modes
of social organization conflict or conspire. It is the system
which has governed most human societies of record, as it is today."
Report from Iron Mountain
(1967)
"In general,
the war system provides the basic motivation for primary social
organization. In so doing, it reflects on the societal level the
incentives of individual human behavior. The most important of
these, for social purposes, is the individual psychological rationale
for allegiance to a society and its values. Allegiance requires
a cause; a cause requires an enemy."
Report from Iron Mountain
(1967)
"Those who know
the least obey the best."
George Farquhar
2009 - the New Guilded
Age in America
"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
"Patriotism
has got to be more than hanging out a flag and then sitting on
your ass watching jets bomb Afghanistan."
Ruth Coniff
"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
"A
properly functioning system of indoctrination has a variety of
tasks, some rather delicate. One of its targets is the stupid
and ignorant masses. They must be kept that way, diverted with
emotionally potent oversimplifications, marginalized and isolated."
Noam Chomsky
"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
"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
"The only thing
new in the world is the history you don't know."
President Harry Truman
"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
"Americans cannot
teach democracy to the world until they restore their own."
William Greider
"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
"[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
New Videos
Latin America
Israel and Palestine
Anatomy of Casino Capitalism
"The best available
measure of living standard is the average real wage of production
or nonsupervisory workers. This is because these workers constitute
some 80 percent of the work force of the United States, and it
is their prosperity or poverty that should be the primary determinant
of the U.S. living standard, not the GNP figures commonly used
for this purpose by the administrations or mainstream economists."
economist Ravi Batra
George Galloway on war
crimes
Craig Murray - torture
renditions to Uzbekistan
Lawrence Wilkerson -
former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell
The
Century Of The Self - BBC Documentary on the History of Propaganda
Part
1
Part
2
Part
3
Part
4
The Federal Reserve
"Patriotism
is your conviction that this country is superior to all others
because you were born in it."
George Bernard Shaw
[put ASK on Subject
line (in CAPS)]
"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
("Fair
Use" Notice: Third World Traveler contains copyrighted material
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