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“When people denounced [former Iranian president Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad for rejecting and criminalizing homosexuality, it should be remembered that was true of the United States until very recently. Women's rights were unheard of. Civil rights proponents were horribly treated, not just in the South. It was awful there, but pretty bad here. Environmental issues did not exist. Opposition to aggression was virtually zero. In fact, so little, that to this day, even scholarship mentions the Vietnam War as beginning in 1965.”

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“In fact, it was stated early in the first Bush [presidency], Bush I, in one of their documents they pointed out in the future, US wars are going to be against much weaker enemies. And they have to be won quickly and decisively before a popular reaction develops. And Iif you take a look, that's what's done. Look at Panama, for instance, over a couple of days; and Kosovo, no American troops.”

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“Actually, the phrase "national security" is barely used until the 1930s. And there's a reason. By then, the United States was beginning to become global. Before that the United States had been mostly a regional power - Britain was the biggest global power. After the Second World War, national security is everywhere, because we basically owned the world, so our security is threatened everywhere. Not just on our borders, but everywhere - so you have to have a thousand military bases around the world for "defense."”

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“The most important issues to address are the truly existential threats we face: climate change and nuclear war. On the former, the Republican leadership, in splendid isolation from the world, is almost unanimously dedicated to destroying the chances for decent survival; strong words, but no exaggeration. There is a great deal that can be done at the local and state level to counter their malign project.”

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“On nuclear war, actions in Syria and at the Russian border raise very serious threats of confrontation that might trigger war, an unthinkable prospect. Furthermore, Trump's pursuit of Obama's programs of modernization of the nuclear forces poses extraordinary dangers. As we have recently learned, the modernized U.S. nuclear force is seriously fraying the slender thread on which survival is suspended.”

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“If you and I go into a store to rob it, and I say "shoot," that's not protected. Like all judicial decisions and legislation, this leaves plenty of gray areas, including many of great significance that are rarely discussed: advocacy of imminent war crimes, such as aggression, for example. I think we would all agree that such speech should be protected, despite the often horrific consequences, but it's worth noting that that stretches the doctrine to its limits.”

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“The human species is now at a point where it has to make choices that are going to determine whether decent survival is even possible. Environmental catastrophe, including war, maybe pandemics, these are very serious issues and they can't be addressed within the current structure of institutions. That's almost given. There have to be real significant changes, and only really effective popular mass-based movements can introduce and carry forward such initiatives, as indeed did happen during the 1930s.”

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“Israel uses sophisticated attack jets and naval vessels to bomb densely-crowded refugee camps, schools, apartment blocks, mosques, and slums to attack a population that has no air force, no air defense, no navy, no heavy weapons, no artillery units, no mechanized armor, no command in control, no army and calls it a war.”

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“The point of public relations slogans like "Support Our Troops" is that they don't mean anything ... that's the whole point of good propaganda. You want to create a slogan that nobody is going to be against and I suppose everybody will be for, because nobody knows what it means, because it doesn't mean anything. But its crucial value is that it diverts your attention from a question that does mean something, do you support our policy? And that's the one you're not allowed to talk about.”

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“One of the questions asked in that study was, How many Vietnamese casualties would you estimate that there were during the Vietnam war? The average response on the part of Americans today is about 100,000. The official figure is about two million. The actual figure is probably three to four million. The people who conducted the study raised an appropriate question: What would we think about German political culture if, when you asked people today how many Jews died in the Holocaust, they estimated about 300,000? What would that tell us about German political culture?”

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“Our current prison state has the dual effect of getting rid of a superfluous population of basically unskilled workers (with a close race-class correlation), and also demonizing them... The drug war is basically for this - It has nothing to do with drugs, but it has plenty to do with criminalizing an unwanted population and scaring everybody else.”

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“What can one say about a country where a museum of science in a great city can feature an exhibit in which people fire machine guns from a helicopter at Vietnamese huts, with a light flashing when a hit is scored? What can one say about a country where such an idea can even be considered? You have to weep for this country.”

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Book:American Power and the New Mandarins
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“It is ... necessary to whip up the population in support of foreign adventures. Usually the population is pacifist, just like they were during the First World War. The public sees no reason to get involved in foreign adventures, killing, and torture. So you have to whip them up. And to whip them up you have to frighten them.”

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Book:Media Control: The Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda
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“Our yearning for democracy is accompanied by a no less profound yearning for peace. And the media also faced the task of historical engineering to establish this required truth. We therefore have phenomena called 'peace missions' and the 'peace process'. These are terms that apply to whatever the United States happens to be doing or advocating at some moment... in short, 'War is Peace'.”

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