Thoughts and Attitudes of some World Leaders
bruce@webpal.org
There are many world leaders not represented in the following. From their actions, we can guess at the philosophies and thoughts of:
Palestinian Leaders
The Religious Right in Israel
Hindu Fundamentalists in India
Shiite Fundamentalists in Iran
Sunni Fundamentalists in Iraq
The Members of Al Qaeda
The Central Bureaucracy of China
The Central Bureaucracy of India
and many, many others throughout the world
The world is not a very tolerant place - but the following is made up largerly of quotes from influential people in our own North American society.
The Politics of Power
"Power is the great aphrodisiac."
Henry Kissinger, New York Times,
January 19, 1971.
"We must find new lands from which we can easily obtain raw materials and
at the same time exploit the cheap slave labor that is available from the
natives of the colonies. The colonies would also provide a dumping ground
for the surplus goods produced in our factories."
Cecil Rhodes,
"founder" of Rhodesia
"... somehow, we find it hard to sell our values, namely that the rich
should plunder the poor."
former Secretary of State John Foster Dulles
"It is money, money, money! Not ideas, not principles, but money that
reigns supreme in American politics."
Senator Robert Byrd, West Virginia
"I want to scare the hell out of the rest of the world."
U.S. General Colin Powell
talking about U.S. military power
prior to the Gulf War in 1991
"Short, successful military adventures are as effective as the Super Bowl
in diverting people's attention from unpleasant truths."
John Stockwell,
former CIA official
"We need a common enemy to unite us."
Condoleeza Rice,
National Security Advisor, March 2000
" The people of the world genuinely want peace. Some day the leaders of the
world are going to have to give in and give, it to them."
Dwight Eisenhower,
U.S. president 1953-1961
"When we got organized as a country and we wrote a fairly radical
constitution with a radical bill of rights, giving a radical amount of
individual freedom to Americans, it was assumed that the Americans who had
that freedom would use it responsibly.... What's happened in America today
is too many people live in areas where there's no family structure, no
community structure and no work structure. And so there's a lot of
irresponsibility. And so a lot of people say there's too much personal
freedom. When personal freedom's being abused, you have to move to limit
it...."
President Bill Clinton
"Freedom is about authority. Freedom is about the willingness of every
single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion
about what you do."
NYC Mayor Rudolph Giuliani
"We are potentially the most dangerous agency in the country."
FBI Director Louis Freeh,
to the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime, 1997
"The major function of secrecy in Washington is to keep the U.S. people ...
from knowing what the nation's leaders are doing."
John Stockwell,
former CIA official and author
"How fortunate for governments that the people they administer don't
think."
Adolph Hitler
"You know the one thing that is wrong in this country? Everyone gets a
chance to have their fair say."
President Bill Clinton
"Others are engaging even in an ecotype of terrorism whereby they can
alter the climate, set off earthquakes, volcanoes remotely through the use
of electromagnetic waves... So there are plenty of ingenious minds out
there that are at work finding ways in which they can wreak terror upon
other nations...It's real, and that's the reason why we have to intensify
our [counterterrorism] efforts."
Secretary of Defense William Cohen
at an April, 1997, counterterrorism conference
sponsored by former Senator Sam Nunn
"If they do it, it's terrorism, if we do it, it's fighting for freedom."
a U.S. Ambassador in Central America
in the 1980s,
asked to explain how such U.S. actions
as the mining of Nicaragua's harbors
and bombing of airports
differed from the acts of terrorism
that the U.S. condemned around the world
"I am strongly in favor of using poisoned gas against uncivilized tribes.
The moral effect should be good...and it would spread a lively terror...."
Winston Churchill
commenting on the British use of poison gas
against the Iraqis after World War I
"[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
"I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due
to the irresponsibility of its people. The issues are much too important
for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves."
Henry Kissinger,
Secretary of State under Richard Nixon,
about Chile prior to the CIA overthrow
of the democratically elected government
of socialist President Salvadore Allende in 1973
"The great object of American foreign policy ought to be the restoration of
a more normal political world, a world in which those states possessing the
elements of great power once again play the role their power entitles them
to play."
Robert W. Tucker,
political scientist,
1980
" The greatest crime since World War II has been U.S. foreign policy."
Ramsey Clark,
former U.S. Attorney General
"A world in which others controlled the course of their own development ...
would be a world in which the American system would be seriously
endangered."
Benjamin Cohen
"We have come to recognize that there are potentially desirable limits to
economic growth. There are also potentially desirable limits to the
indefinite extension of political democracy...A government which lacks
authority ...will have little ability, short of cataclysmic crisis, to
impose on its people the sacrifices which may be necessary.."
1975 Trilateral Commission
Report on the Governability of Democracies
"Hitherto acceptable norms of human conduct do not apply. If the United
States is to survive, long-standing American concepts of 'fair play' must
be reconsidered. We must develop effective espionage and counterespionage
services and must learn to subvert, sabotage and destroy our enemies by
more clever, more sophisticated, and more effective methods than those used
against us. It may become necessary that the American people be made
acquainted with, understand and support this fundamentally repugnant
philosophy."
World War II Gen. James Doolittle
explaining in a secret 1954 report to President Eisenhower
why CIA covert operations were needed
and what they entailed.
From Katherine S. Olmstead's book -
Challenging the Secret Government, 1996
"Coming to grips with ... 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."
John Stockwell,
former CIA official and author
"Military intervention to maintain the global status quo will become a
constant feature of international relations, whether this is justified in
terms of fighting drugs, fighting terrorism, containing "rogue states,"
opposing "Islamic fundamentalism," or containing China."
Walden Bello,
sociologist and author,
International Socialist Review,
Aug/Sep 2001, p8
"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
"But what counter-insurgency really comes down to is the protection of the
capitalists back in America, their property and their privileges. U.S.
national security, as preached by U.S. leaders, is the security of the
capitalist class in the US, not the security of the rest of the people."
Philip Agee, CIA Diary, p562
"If we have to use force, it is because we are America. We are the
indispensable nation. We stand tall. We see further into the future."
Secretary of State Madelaine Albright
describing her vision of America's role in the world
"America must prevent other states "from challenging our leadership or
seeking to overturn the established political and economic order....We must
maintain the mechanisms for deterring potential competitors from even
aspiring to a larger regional or global role."
Pentagon's Defense Planning Guide for 1994-1999
" Scare the hell out of the American people."
Senator Arthur Vandenburg,
telling President Truman what the he needed to do
in order to to tax the American people
to pay for the weapons and covert activities of the U.S.
National Security State
"It is the function of the CIA to keep the world unstable, and to
propagandize and teach 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
"[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 two-war strategy is just a marketing device to justify a high
[military] budget."
Retired Air Force Chief of Staff, Merrill McPeak
"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 ..."
General Douglas MacArthur, 1957
"Just between you and me, shouldn't the World Bank be encouraging more
migration of the dirty industries to the LDCs (lesser developed countries)?
I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the
lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that.... I've
always thought that underpopulated countries in Africa are vastly under
polluted; their air quality is vastly inefficiently low compared to Los
Angeles or Mexico City."
Lawrence Summers
World Bank economist
and Deputy Secretary of Treasury,
in a 1991 internal memorandum
"... the United States has given frequent and enthusiastic support to the
overthrow of democracy in favor of "investor friendly" regimes. The World
Bank, IMF and private banks have consistently lavished huge sums on terror
regimes, following their displacement of democratic governments, and a
number of quantitative studies have shown a systematic positive
relationship between U.S. and IMF / World Bank aid to countries and their
violations of human rights."
Edward S. Herman,
economist and media analyst
"The whole fabric of society will go to wrack if we really lay hands of
reform on our rotten institutions. From top to bottom the whole system is a
fraud, all of us know it, laborers and capitalists alike, and all of us are
consenting parties to it."
Henry Adams,
American historian, 1838-1918
"Those who own the country ought to govern it."
John Jay,
American statesman
and first Chief Justice of US Supreme Court,
1745-1829
"If there are men in this country big enough to own the government of the
United States, they are going to own it."
Woodrow Wilson,
presidential candidate,1912
The Nation magazine,
July 3, 2000, p5
Corporate Government
"If the world operates as one big market, every employee will compete with
every person anywhere in the world who is capable of doing the same job.
There are lots of them and many of them are hungry."
Andrew Grove, president of Intel Corp.,
in his book "High Output Management"
"A considerable proportion of the developed world's prosperity rests on
paying the lowest possible prices for the poor countries' primary products
and on exporting high-cost capital and finished goods to those countries.
Continuation of this kind of prosperity requires continuation of the
relative gap between developed and underdeveloped countries - it means
keeping poor people poor. Increasingly, the impoverished masses are
understanding that the prosperity of the developed countries and of the
privileged minorities in their own countries is founded on their poverty."
Philip Agee,
CIA Diary, p595
"The dream of the corporate empire builders is being realized. The global
system is harmonizing standards across country after country - down toward
the lowest common denominator. Although a few socially responsible
businesses are standing against the tide with some limited success, theirs
is not an easy struggle. We must not kid ourselves. Social responsibility
is inefficient in a global free market, and the market will not long abide
those who do not avail of the opportunities to shed the inefficient. And we
must be clear as to the meaning of efficiency. To the global economy,
people are not only increasingly unnecessary, but they and their demands
for a living wage are a major source of economic inefficiency. Global
corporations are acting to purge themselves of this unwanted burden. We are
creating a system that has fewer places for people."
David Korten,
economist and internationalist
"We are entering a new phase in human history - one in which fewer and
fewer workers will be needed to produce the goods and services for the
global population."
Jeremy Rifkin,
economist
"As an economy measures performance in terms of the creation of money,
people become a major source of inefficiency. "
David Korten,
economist and internationalist
"Corporations have been enthroned .... An era of corruption in high places
will follow and the money power will endeavor to prolong its reign by
working on the prejudices of the people... until wealth is aggregated in a
few hands ... and the Republic is destroyed."
Abraham Lincoln,
American president, 1861- 1865
"American capitalism, based as it is on exploitation of the poor, with its
fundamental motivation in personal greed, simply cannot survive without
force - without a secret police force. Now, more than ever, each of us is
forced to make a conscious choice whether to support the system of minority
comfort and privilege with all its security apparatus and repression, or
whether to struggle for real equality of opportunity and fair distribution
of benefits for all of society, in the domestic as well as the
international order. It's harder now not to realize that there are two
sides, harder not to understand each, and harder not to recognize that like
it or not we contribute day in and day out either to the one side or to the
other."
Philip Agee,
CIA Diary, p597
"A criminal is a person with predatory instincts who has not sufficient
capital to form a corporation."
Howard Scott
On the Media:
"Our job is to give people not what they want, but what we decide they
ought to have."
Richard Salent,
Former President CBS News.
"One cannot wage war under present conditions without the support of public
opinion, which is tremendously molded by the press and other forms of
propaganda."
General Douglas MacArthur
"Public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment nothing can fail.
Without it nothing can succeed. He who molds opinion is greater than he who
enacts laws."
Abraham Lincoln
"You furnish the pictures and I'll furnish the war."
publisher William Randolph Hearst's
attributed instructions to artist Frederic Remington
in Havana, Cuba.
"One of the intentions of corporate-controlled media is to instill in
people a sense of disempowerment, of immobilization and paralysis. Its
outcome is to turn you into good consumers. It is to keep people isolated,
to feel that there is no possibility for social change."
David Barsamian,
journalist and publisher
"Propaganda is to a democracy what violence is to a dictatorship."
William Blum, Rogue State
" I have the greatest admiration for your propaganda. Propaganda in the
West is carried out by experts who have had the best training in the world
in the field of advertising and have mastered the techniques with
exceptional proficiency ... Yours are subtle and persuasive; ours are crude
and obvious ... I think that the fundamental difference between our worlds,
with respect to propaganda, is quite simple. You tend to believe yours ...
and we tend to disbelieve ours. "
a Soviet correspondent
based five years in the U.S.
"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 Herman,
Z magazine Dec 1999 p38
Final Views:
"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,
from her book Trilateralism
"Since it was created in 1995, the WTO has ruled that every environmental,
health, or safety policy it has reviewed is an illegal trade barrier."
Public Citizen report,
titled 'Whose Trade Organization?
Corporate Globalization and the Erosion of Democracy."
(from The Progressive magazine,
January 2000, p 8)
" We are witnessing an unprecedented transfer of power from people and
their governments to global institutions whose allegiance is to abstract
free-market principle, and whose favored citizens are soulless corporate
entities that have the power to shape and break nations."
Joel Bleifuss,
In These Times magazine,
September 2001, p1
"F[***] your Parliament and your Constitution. We pay a lot of good
American dollars to the Greeks, Mr. Ambassador. If your Prime Minister
gives me talk about Democracy, Parliament and Constitutions, he, his
Parliament, and his Constitution may not last very long."
President Lyndon Johnson
to a Greek Ambassador, 1970s
"Get some new lawyers"
U.S. Secretary of State Madeline Albright
said to British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook
when he told her he was informed that
the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia
was illegal under international law.
"This program is the fixed, determined and approved policy of the government
of the United States."
Senator Joseph S. Clark
speaking on the floor of the Senate, March 1, 1962,
about PL 87-297,
which calls for the disbanding of all armed forces,
and the prohibition of their re-establishment
in any form whatsoever
"Our task of creating a socialist America can only succeed when those who
would resist us have been totally disarmed."
Sara Brady,
Chairwoman of Handgun Control,
to Sen. Howard Metzenbaum,
The National Educator,
January 1994
"We can't be so fixated on our desire to preserve the rights of ordinary
Americans."
Bill Clinton,
U.S.A. Today,
11 March 1993
"Whatever the price of the Chinese Revolution, it has obviously succeeded
not only in producing more efficient and dedicated administration, but also
in fostering high morale and community of purpose. The social experiment in
China under Chairman Mao's leadership is one of the most important and
successful in human history."
David Rockefeller,
statement in 1973 about Mao Tse-tung
in The New York Times,
August 10, 1973
"War to the hilt between communism and capitalism is inevitable. Today, of
course, we are not strong enough to attack. Our time will come in thirty or
fifty years. To win, we shall need the element of surprise. The Western
world will need to be put to sleep. So we shall begin by launching the most
spectacular peace movement on record. There shall be electrifying overtures
and unheard of concessions. The capitalist countries, stupid and decadent,
will rejoice to cooperate to their own destruction. They will leap at
another chance to be friends. As soon as their guard is down, we shall smash them with our clenched fist."
Dmitrii Z. Manuilskii,
Lenin School of Political Warfare,
Moscow, 1931
"I want to extend condolences to the families of those who died in the
service of the United Nations."
Al Gore,
as he traveled to Marrakech, Morocco,
for the signing of the new world trade agreement.
Gore appeared hours after U.S. planes
enforcing an allied 'no fly' zone over northern Iraq
accidentally shot down two helicopters,
killing 15 Americans and 11 foreign officials.
The Los Angeles Times,
June 12, 1994
"The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to
rule."
H. L. Mencken
"The only hope for the world is to make sure there is not another United
States: We can't let other countries have the same number of cars, the
amount of industrialization, we have in the U.S. We have to stop these third
world countries right where they are. And it is important to the rest of the
world to make sure that they don't suffer economically by virtue of our
stopping them."
Michael Oppenheimer,
Environmental Defense Fund
"Human beings, as species, have no more value than slugs."
John Davis,
editor of Earth First Journal
"We've got to ride the global-warming issue. Even if the theory of global
warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing - in terms of economic
policy and environmental policy."
Timothy Wirth, former U.S. Senator (D-Colo.),
presently with the United Nations
"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed - and
hence clamorous to be led to safety - and menacing it with an endless series
of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."
H. L. Mencken
"If I were reincarnated, I would wish to be returned to earth as a killer
virus to lower the human population levels."
Prince Phillip
of Great Britain,
World Wildlife Fund
"Isn't the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations
collapse? Isn't it our responsibility to bring about?"
Maurice Strong,
Head of the 1992 Earth Summit
in Rio de Janeiro
"We reject the idea of private property."
Peter Berle,
president of the National Audubon Society
"The historical experience of socialist countries has sadly demonstrated
that collectivism does not do away with alienation but rather increases it,
adding to it a lack of basic necessities and economic inefficiency."
Pope John Paul II
"America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves."
Abraham Lincoln