In every country in the world, killing human beings is condemned. The Buddhist precept of non-killing extends even further, to include all living beings.
When you drop bombs on the enemy, you drop those same bombs on yourself, your own country.
I suppose more than anything, it’s the way of life in this part of the country that influences my writing. In Eastern North Carolina, with the exception of Wilmington, most people live in small towns.
I was fair-skinned in a country that’s about the outdoors.
The United States in many ways resembles a Third World country – far more elevated, but it has many of those structural characteristics: the extreme inequality of wealth, the deterioration of infrastructure because it only serves poor people, predatory operations, huge corruption, and so on.
There clearly is a serious race problem in the country. Just take a look at what’s happening to African American communities. For example wealth, wealth in African American communities is almost zero. The history is striking.
Every predecessor has used mercenaries, often drawn from the country that they’re attacking, like England ran India with Indian mercenaries. You take them from one place and send them to kill people in the other place. That’s the standard way to run imperial wars.
Well, they really didn’t have to worry, because the way power politics works, the World Court can’t do anything. Look, there’s one country in the world at the moment which has refused to accept World Court decision-that’s the United States. Is anybody going to do anything about it?
Anyone who studies declassified documents soon becomes aware that government secrecy is largely an effort to protect policy makers from scrutiny by citizens, not to protect the country from enemies.
In the years of the Reagan-Bush administration alone, about 1.5 million people were killed by South Africa just in the surrounding countries. Forget what was happening in South Africa and Namibia.
States are violent institutions. The government of any country, including ours, represents some sort of domestic power structure, and it’s usually violent. States are violent to the extent that they’re powerful, that’s roughly accurate.
When I arrived in Laos and found young Americans living there, out of free choice, I was surprised. After only a week, I began to have a sense of the appeal of the country and its people – along with despair about its future.
The country was founded on the principle that primary role of government is to protect property from the majority, and so it remains.
Radical Islamist extremists surely hope that an attack on Iraq will kill many people and destroy much of the country, providing recruits for terrorist actions.
Mexico is a pretty poor country, but they are maintaining a free, high quality public education system, not for everyone of course but pretty substantial.
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.
I choose to live in what I think is the greatest country in the world, which is committing horrendous terrorist acts and should stop.
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.
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.
From the late 1940s, into and through the ’50s, there developed a complex interaction between federal government, state and local government, real-estate interests, commercial interests and court decisions, which had the effect of undermining the mass transit system across the country.