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Face of Imperialism

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radical views that are outside the mainstream generally (but not always) are more reliable than the dominant view because they are more regularly challenged and tested against evidence. — location: 54 ^ref-64726

One crosses the lines beyond permissible opinion only at a risk to one’s intellectual reputation or even one’s career. — location: 71 ^ref-33439

empires are not innocent, absent-minded, accidental accretions. — location: 81 ^ref-60807

By imperialism I do not mean just power and dominion; I mean the process of transnational investment and capital accumulation. — location: 116 ^ref-38688

imperialism is defined as follows: the process whereby the dominant investor interests in one country bring to bear military and financial power upon another country in order to expropriate the land, labor, capital, natural resources, commerce, and markets of that other country. — location: 129 ^ref-45926

The purpose of the imperial killings is to prevent alternative, independent, self-defining nations from emerging—nations that might threaten the imperium’s hegemonic control, thereby jeopardizing its political-economic advantages. — location: 151 ^ref-30954

Iraqi ruler Saddam Hussein was pressing for a larger portion of the international oil market. In the eyes of the Western imperialists, Saddam was charting an independent course and was guilty of committing economic nationalism. — location: 160 ^ref-21263

US planes (with minor assistance from other NATO powers) destroyed more than 90 percent of Iraq’s electrical capacity, and much of its telecommunication systems including television and radio stations, along with its flood control, irrigation, sewage treatment, water purification, and hydroelectric systems. — location: 163 ^ref-20024

Do those who preside over the US empire believe in their own virtue? All people, parties, and national leaders believe in their own virtue. But even more so, more than anything else in the world, with the utmost dedication and ferocity, they believe in protecting and advancing their own material interests. And, as we shall see, they do whatever it takes to do so. — location: 195 ^ref-8966

General Douglas MacArthur had this to say about those who profess to guard our ramparts: “Our country is now geared to an arms economy which was bred in an artificially induced psychosis of war hysteria and nurtured upon an incessant propaganda of fear.” — location: 507 ^ref-8144

that the ideological and psychic motives, embraced with varying degrees of sincerity by individual policymakers, unfailingly serve the systemic interests of the dominant moneyed class. — location: 716 ^ref-47563

US political-corporate elites have long struggled to make the world safe for transnational capital accumulation; to attain control of the markets, lands, natural resources, and cheap labor of all countries; and to prevent the emergence of revolutionary socialist, populist, or even nationalist régimes that refuse to submit to this arrangement. — location: 717 ^ref-3832

another way the empire accumulates wealth and spreads poverty is by imposing international rulings misleadingly referred to as free trade and globalization. — location: 856 ^ref-49245

Under the banner of “free trade,” corporate property rights are elevated above all democratic rights. — location: 1042 ^ref-52468

the average Cuban has more access to Western news sources than the average American has to Cuban sources. — location: 1371 ^ref-45785

Millions of people want to flee capitalist countries like Mexico, Colombia, Pakistan, India, Nigeria, Poland, El Salvador, Haiti, Philippines, Indonesia, Macedonia, and others too numerous to list, but this is never treated as grounds for questioning the free market system that inflicts such misery upon them. — location: 1379 ^ref-4228

Imagine if the United States were thrown open to all Mexicans who wanted to come, with a guarantee of generous government monetary support. — location: 1381 ^ref-2575

a substantial majority of Cuban refugees applied for entry visas “more because of the deteriorating economic situation than a real fear of persecution.” — location: 1389 ^ref-46182

Cuba was condemned both for not allowing its citizens to leave and then for allowing them to go. — location: 1395 ^ref-13116

When forced to choose between democracy without capitalism or capitalism without democracy, the empire builders unhesitatingly embrace the latter, — location: 1435 ^ref-23480

North Korea’s repeated overtures, dating from the early 1990s, for a bilateral nonaggression pact with the United States, all rejected by Washington. — location: 1587 ^ref-30832

the United States has never attacked or invaded any nation that has a nuclear arsenal (except for the NATO bombing forays into Pakistan during the Afghanistan conflict). — location: 1590 ^ref-10381

After years of encirclement and demonization by Washington, the Pyongyang leaders were convinced that the best way to deter superpower aggression was by developing a nuclear arsenal. — location: 1625 ^ref-34982

The US policy has been to maintain and expand its own immense nuclear arsenal while pressuring other nations to refrain from developing such weapons. — location: 1655 ^ref-18434

The empire never has to abide by rules it imposes on others. — location: 1656 ^ref-33263

The US empire presides over the global unraveling of nature without so much as a plan of action. — location: 1913 ^ref-56670

To the extent the empire deals at all with the climate crisis, it is only to figure out new ways of making a profit off it. — location: 1915 ^ref-14404

In the face of all monopolistic ideological manipulation, people still develop a skepticism toward the official ideology. Reality is a problem for the ruling class. Reality has to be constantly finessed and misrepresented because reality is radical. — location: 1937 ^ref-57867

The empire is only as secure as the lies it can sell. — location: 1942 ^ref-61917

By becoming aware of this, we have a better chance of moving against the tide and resisting the deadening hand of free market plutocracy, a better chance of exposing the dominant imperial paradigm for the suffocating dirty little box that it really is, a better chance to build a real and viable democracy amid a family of nations in a peaceful and sustainable world. — location: 1943 ^ref-57803