"They tell us that we live in a great free republic; that our institutions are democratic; that we are a free and self-governing people . . . Wars throughout history have been waged for conquest and plunder . . . And that is war in a nutshell. The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles."
---Eugene V. Debs, as quoted in Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States
"In skating over thin ice, our safety is in our speed."
---Ralph Waldo Emerson
"When first introduced into English vernacular, the concept of 'political' was a war cry and a call to arms. It has lost that meaning since . . . it was originally coined as critique of reality but later transformed into 'objective description' of reality as its heralds and missionaries turned into that reality's administrators."
---Zygmunt Bauman, Society Under Seige
"If you are not frightened yet, you have not been paying attention to recent world history . . . You better check out what happened to the people of Diego Garcia, when the U.S. military decided that it wanted their island as a military base."
---Rosemarie Jackowski, advocacy journalist and Vermont Attorney General candidate
"If this is the best god can do, I am not impressed. Results like these do not belong on the resume of a supreme being."
---George Carlin
6 comments:
Of course the Carlin one is my favorite.
Have a wonderful weekend.
Debs is my favorite, with Carlin a close second.
Thanks for quoting me. Yes, the entire world is in danger until the only nation that has ever used nuclear weapons is disarmed. Any nation that has already used nukes cannot be trusted.
rosemarie jackowski
Hello all...
I got one for you...from Sophocles: "The keenest sorrow is to recognize ourselves as the sole cause of all our adversities."
I dunno Mickey it sounds greek to me...
Rosemarie I'm with you on disarmament. Japan did so twice in its history and it seems to be getting by alright.
Keir...if Japan disarmed twice, does that mean that they now have less than zero weapons?
rosemarie jackowski
Okay you got me. Nice one. What I meant was that Japan took a huge technological step backwards when it began restricting guns, and then outlawed them entirely in the 17th century. According to Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs, and Steel, Japan's "safety in isolation came to an end in 1853, when the visit of Cammander Perry's U.S. fleet bristling with cannons convinced Japan of its need to resume gun manufacture."
What I had in mind with a second "disarmament" was its pacifist constitution (written after its own bloody flirtation with empire ended with---ta-dah!---two big American bombs.)
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