THIRD WORLD TRAVEL

"Travel is fatal to bigotry, prejudice, and narrow-mindedness. Broad, wholesome, and charitable views cannot be acquired by vegetating in one tiny corner of the globe."

Mark Twain

Third World page

" Many Americans want to nurture an image of innocence and decency and yet most Americans want most of all to stay on top and continue to applaud clear victories in the Third World however achieved. "

Richard Falk, professor

Third World - definitions

" The government of the United States does not, in its policies, express the decency of its people. "

Jerry Fresia, author of Toward an American Revolution

*****

" Where is the outrage? ... If we are moved merely by greed, and there's no longer any respect for decent or honest government, then we will suffer the results. "

Barbara Tuchman, historian and author

Dividing the World

" ... the NSS [National Security State] is an instrument of class warfare, organized and designed to permit an elite, local and multinational, to operate without any constraint from democratic processes. This allows the bulk of the population to be treated as a mere cost of production."

Edward Herman, economist and media analyst

*****

" Few of us, can easily surrender our belief that society must somehow make sense. The thought that the State has lost its mind and is punishing so many innocent people is intolerable. And the evidence has to be internally denied. "

Arthur Miller, playwrite

 

Definition of Third World

" The enormous gap between what US leaders do in the world and what Americans think their leaders are doing is one of the great propaganda accomplishments of the dominant political mythology. "

Michael Parenti, political scientist and author

*****

"Bringing democratic control to the conduct of foreign policy requires a struggle merely to force the issue onto the public agenda."

Eric Alterman, author

Third World travel philosophy

"Power lies in the growth of awareness."

Herbert de Souza, Brazilian human rights activist

*****

"As long as people are marginalized and distracted [they] have no way to organize or articulate their sentiments, or even know that others have these sentiments. People assume that they are the only people with a crazy idea in their heads. They never hear it from anywhere else. Nobody's supposed to think that. ... Since there's no way to get together with other people who share or reinforce that view and help you articulate it, you feel like an oddity, an oddball. So you just stay on the side and you don't pay any attention to what's going on. You look at something else, like the Superbowl."

Noam Chomsky, American linguist and US media and foreign policy critic

Responsible travel in Third World

" The people can have anything they want. The trouble is, they do not want anything. At least they vote that way on election day."

Eugene Debs, American socialist leader, 1855-1926

*****

" Given the [weapons] industry's command of the Congress and the Pentagon, the defense firms create the demand for weaponry, prescribe the technological development for our defense system, and supply the needed funds - the defense budget. There is no novelty here. This is the military-industrial complex ... "

John Kenneth Galbraith, economist and author

*****

" It should never be forgotten that the people must have priority. "

Ho Chi Minh, Vietnamese nationalist leader, president of North Vietnam-1954-1969

Elsewhere

"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, English dramatist

The Drowning Child and the Expanding Circle

"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

*****

"Humans are complex creatures. We have a demonstrated capacity for hatred, violence, competition, and greed. We have as well a demonstrated capacity for love, tenderness, cooperation, and compassion. Healthy societies nurture the latter and in so doing create an abundance of those things that are most important to the quality of our living. Dysfunctional societies nurture the former and in so doing create scarcity and deprivation. A healthy society makes it easy to live in balance with the environment, whereas a dysfunctional society makes it nearly impossible. Whether we organize our societies for social and environmental health or for dysfunction is a choice that is ours to make."

David Korten, economist and internationalist

We must travel...

"Nothing appears more surprising to those who consider human affairs with a philosophical eye than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few, and the implicit submission with which men resign their own sentiments and passions to those of their rulers. When we inquire by what means this wonder is effected, we shall find that, as force is always on the side of the governed, the governors have nothing to support them but opinion. It is, therefore, on opinion only that government is founded, and this maxim extends to the most despotic and most military governments as well as to the most free and most popular."

David Hume, Scottish philosopher and historian, "Of the First Principles of Government" 1758

*****

" The only way to abolish war is to make peace heroic."

John Dewey, American philosopher and educator, 1859-1952

 

" The Third World War is a war that has been fought by the United States against 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. 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. "

John Stockwell, former CIA official and author

*****

"We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world-benefaction.... We should cease to talk about vague and unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better."

George Kennan head of U.S. State Department Policy Planning Staff, 1948

Conscientious projectors - travelers and human rights

" The most effective way to restrict democracy is to transfer decision-making from the public arena to unaccountable institutions: kings and princes, priestly castes, military juntas, party dictatorships, or modern corporations."

Noam Chomsky, American linguist and US media and foreign policy critic

*****

"A people that wants to be free must arm itself with a free press."

George Seldes, journalist

E-mail page

"Today the United States has, by far, the most unequal distribution of wealth and income in the industrialized world. "

Vermont Congressman Bernie Sanders

*****

" 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.


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