Evaluating countries is senseless and I would never put things in those terms, but that some of America’s advances, particularly in the area of free speech, that have been achieved by centuries of popular struggle, are to be admired.
The criminalization of Black life was something specific to the United States in the post-Reconstruction period and there’s something like it happening today with mass incarceration, directed largely against black males.
I choose to live in what I think is the greatest country in the world, which is committing horrendous terrorist acts and should stop.
If the principle is, “Let’s not get lethal substances out to the public”, the first one you’d go after is tobacco. The next one you’d go after is alcohol. Way down the list you’d get to cocaine, and sort of invisibly low you’d get to marijuana.
In the United States, the political system is a very marginal affair. There are two parties, so-called, but they’re really factions of the same party, the Business Party.
Putting it in plain terms, the general public must be reduced to its traditional apathy and obedience, and driven from the arena of political debate and action, if democracy is to survive.
The only way we can put a permanent end to terrorism is to stop participating in it.
The responsibility of the writer as a moral agent is to try to bring the truth about matters of human significance to an audience that can do something about them.
The Irish sea is a chasm, and it just depends who’s been holding the whip for 800 years and who’s been under it for 800 years.
Clinton, Kennedy, they all carried out mass murder, but they didn’t think that that was what they were doing – nor does Bush. You know, they were defending justice and democracy from greater evils.
Modern China; one also finds many things that are really quite admirable.
It makes sense to work towards a better world, but it doesn’t make any sense to have illusions about what the real world is.
The US intervened in the Philippines to uplift and christianize the backward people, killing a couple of hundred thousand of them and destroying the place. The same thing happened in Haiti, the same thing happened with other countries.
There is no reason to accept the doctrines crafted to sustain power and privilege, or to believe that we are constrained by mysterious and unknown social laws.
Real schools ought to provide people with techniques of self-defense, but that would mean teaching the truth about the world and about the society, and schools couldn’t survive very long if they did that.
It is a privilege to join the campaign to support Bradley Manning for his courage and integrity in serving his country by helping make the government accountable to its citizens, and to inform the world of what its people should know.
Some of the most moving experiences I’ve had are just in black churches in the South, during the Civil Rights Movement, where people were getting beaten, killed, really struggling for the most elementary rights.
I don’t think that experience is a very useful or convincing attribute for a sensible foreign policy. Henry Kissinger had a lot of experience.
International relations bears more than a slight resemblance to the mafia.
If a child from an Amazonian hunter-gatherer tribe comes to Boston, is raised in Boston, that child will be indistinguishable in language capacities from my children growing up here, and vice versa.