The War on Terror

"This is the most information-intensive war you can imagine... We're going to lie about things."
- an unnamed Pentagon war planner quoted by Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post, 9/24/01

Islam

[I]t is often said that Islam was 'spread by the sword'.

This is not the whole story, however. From the time of Muhammad onwards, Muslim agents worked to promote the 'Message of the Prophet'; likewise, recorded instances of conquered peoples being forced to accept Islam are the exception, not the rule...

While conversion to Islam was not discouraged in the first century of conquest, it wasan't greatly encouraged either - largely because Muslims were exempt from the jizya tax. If the newly conquered countries had been converted en masse, the Arab empire would have rapidly drained of revenue. Tolerance was the norm instead, and Christians, Jews and some Zoroastrians became ahl-adh-dhimma - protected peoples.
- Justin Wintle, The Rough Ruide History of Islam, p. 52-53

Government

Look, if you think any American official is going to tell you the truth, then you're stupid. Did you hear that? - stupid.
- Arthur Sylvester, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs, 1965




[American leaders] are perhaps not so much immoral as they are amoral. It's not that they take pleasure in causing so much death and suffering. It's that they just don't care ... the same that could be said about a sociopath. As long as the death and suffering advance the agenda of the empire, as long as the right people and the right corporations gain wealth and power and privilege and prestige, as long as the death and suffering aren't happening to them or people close to them ... then they just don't care about it happening to other people, including the American soldiers whom they throw into wars and who come home - the ones who make it back alive - with Agent Orange or Gulf War Syndrome eating away at their bodies. American leaders would not be in the positions they hold if they were bothered by such things.
- William Blum




This [the U.S. Constitution] is likely to be administered for a course of years and then end in despotism... when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic government, being incapable of any other.
- Benjamin Franklin

If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.
- Joseph Goebbels, German Minister of Propaganda, 1933-1945

Immigration

Submerged cultures

A culture can be submerged without an immigrant presence. But an immigrant presence will have only a faint, and usually beneficial, effect unless the number of imigrants is very large, or their culture powerfully dominant...

A culture can be submerged without an immigrant presence...

[H]ardly a household in Britain is not now pestered by trick-or-treat extortions on 31 October...

There nevertheless is such a thing as a country's being submerged by immigration. Britain would indeed be in no position to complain of being swamped, even if any real danger of its being so existed. In two former British colonies the colonial authorities positively encouraged immigration that bade fair to submerge - or swamp - the native population: in Malaya and in Fiji...

Why does a nation have a right not to be submerged? Each person's sense of who he is derives from many circumstances: his occupation, his ideals and his beliefs, but also from the customs and language he shares with those about him...

[I]t is an injustice that immigration should ever be allowed to swell to a size that threatens the indigenous population with being submerged. It is very seldom that there is a genuine danger of this. It can happen, as we already noted, under colonial regime indifferent to the wishes of the inhabitants of a territory it governs. It can also happen when a government is determined to obliterate a minority, and sets about it, not by massacre, or not just by massacre, but by systematically settling large numbers in its territory who do not share the culture of the original inhabitants. Examples from recent times are East Timor and Tibet.
- Michael Dummett, On Immigration and Refugees, p.14-15, 17, 20

Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Article 13.
(1) Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state.
(2) Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.




CONVENTION RELATING TO THE STATUS OF STATELESS PERSONS

Adopted on 20 September 1954 by a Conference of Plenipotentiaries convened by Economic and Social Council resolution 526 A (XVII) of 26 April 1954
ENTRY INTO FORCE: 6 June 1960, in accordance with article 39


Article 7. - Exemption from reciprocity

1. Except where this Convention contains more favorable provisions, a Contracting State shall accord to stateless persons the same treatment as is accorded to aliens generally.

2. After a period of three years' residence, all stateless persons shall enjoy exemption from legislative reciprocity in the territory of the Contracting States.

3. Each Contracting State shall continue to accord to stateless persons the rights and benefits to which they were already entitled, in the absence of reciprocity, at the date of entry into force of this Convention for that State.

Article 16. - Access to courts

1. A stateless person shall have free access to the courts of law on the territory of all Contracting States.

2. A stateless person shall enjoy in the Contracting State in which he has his habitual residence the same treatment as a national in matters pertaining to access to the courts, including legal assistance and exemption from cautio judicatum solvi.


Article 26. - Freedom of movement

Each Contracting State shall accord to stateless persons lawfully in its territory the right to choose their place of residence and to move freely within its territory, subject to any regulations applicable to aliens generally in the same circumstances.


Article 27. - Identity papers

The Contracting States shall issue identity papers to any stateless person in their territory who does not possess a valid travel document.

Article 28. - Travel documents

The Contracting States shall issue to stateless persons lawfully staying in their territory travel documents for the purpose of travel outside their territory, unless compelling reasons of national security or public order otherwise require, and the provisions of the schedule to this Convention shall apply with respect to such documents. The Contracting States may issue such a travel document to any other stateless person in their territory; they shall in particular give sympathetic consideration to the issue of such a travel document to stateless persons in their territory who are unable to obtain a travel document from the country of their lawful residence.


Article 31. - Expulsion

1. The Contracting States shall not expel a stateless person lawfully in their territory save on grounds of national security or public order.

2. The expulsion of such a stateless person shall be only in pursuance of a decision reached in accordance with due process of law. Except where compelling reasons of national security otherwise require, the stateless person shall be allowed to submit evidence to clear himself, and to appeal to and be represented for the purpose before competent authority or a person or persons specially designated by the competent authority.

3. The Contracting States shall allow such a stateless person a reasonable period within which to seek legal admission into another country. The Contracting States reserve the right to apply during that period such internal measures as they may deem necessary.

Article 32. - Naturalization

The Contracting States shall as far as possible facilitate the assimilation and naturalization of stateless persons. They shall in particular make every effort to expedite naturalization proceedings and to reduce as far as possible the charges and costs of such proceedings.

Refugees

The principal is frequently proclaimed by politicians that every state has an unrestricted right to determine whom it shall admit within its frontiers. In proclaiming it, they usually fail to make explicit mention of the exception to which they are bound by international law to which they have subscribed, the duty of a state to admit refugees, or, rather, not to send them back to the countries from which they have fled. This needs to be understood as obliging a state to which a refugee has applied for asylum not to send him or her anywhere from which he or she may be returned to that country, but only to a land where refuge will be offered.

- Michael Dummett, On Immigration and Refugees, p.31




1951 Geneva Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees
(28 July 1951)


Article 1
Definition of the term "Refugee"

A. For the purposes of the present Convention, the term "refugee" shall apply to any person who:

(2) ...[has] a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country; or who, not having a nationality and being outside the country of his former habitual residence as a result of such events, is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to return to it.

Democracy

Whether what the majority wants should prevail depends on how oppressive it is to those who do not want it, and how oppressive what they want would be to the majority.
- Michael Dummett, On Immigration and Refugees, p. 13




The fact that we've been a great democracy doesn't mean we will automatically keep being one if we keep waving the flag.
- Norman Mailer




Democracy is not about trust; it is about distrust. It is about accountability, exposure, open debate, critical challenge, and popular input and feedback from the citizenry. It is about responsible government. We have to get our fellow Americans to trust their leaders less and themselves more, trust their own questions and suspicions, and their own desire to know what is going on.
- Michael Parenti




They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
- Benjamin Franklin




The crisis of modern democracy is a profound one. Free elections, a free press and an independent judiciary mean little when the free market has reduced them to commodities available on sale to the highest bidder.
- Arundhati Roy




To oppose the policies of a government does not mean you are against the country or the people that the government supposedly represents. Such opposition should be called what it really is: democracy, or democratic dissent, or having a critical perspective about what your leaders are doing. Either we have the right to democratic dissent and criticism of these policies or we all lie down and let the leader, the Fuhrer, do what is best, while we follow uncritically, and obey whatever he commands. That's just what the Germans did with Hitler, and look where it got them."
- Michael Parenti




If the test of patriotism comes only by reflexively falling into lockstep behind the leader whenever the flag is waved, then what we have is a formula for dictatorship, - not democracy... But the American way is to criticize and debate openly, not to accept unthinkingly the doings of government officials of this or any other country.
- Michael Parenti

Imperialism

The U.S. planned "an integrated policy to achieve military and economic supremacy for the United States".
- Memorandum of the War and Peace Studies Project of the Council on Foreign Relations, with State Department participation, 19 October 1940




The measure of our victory will be the measure of our domination after victory...(The US must secure areas) strategically necessary for world control.
- Isaiah Bowman, Council on Foreign Relations, 1942




[W]e have about 50% of the world's wealth but only 6.3% of its population. This disparity is particularly great as between ourselves and the peoples of Asia. In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives. We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world-benefaction.

...We should dispense with the aspiration to "be liked" or to be regarded as the repository of a high-minded international altruism. We should stop putting ourselves in the position of being our brothers' keeper and refrain from offering moral and ideological advice. We should cease to talk about vague and--for the Far East--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, Former Head of the US State Department Policy Planning Staff, February 1948




The U.S. "must cultivate a mental view toward world settlement after this war which will enable us to impose our own terms, amounting perhaps to a Pax Americana." - General George V. Strong, "Petroleum Policy of the United States,"
-Memorandum of U.S. Department of State, April 11, 1944, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1944, Vol. V



The right to first-class citizenship entails the right to what is called 'self-government': it rules out imperialism. An unfashionable view which is nevertheless sometimes expressed is that people have a right to be governed well, but that, granted that they are governed well, they can have no legitimate objection to whoever it is that governs them.... The mere fact that authority resides in aclass of foreigners suffices to humiliate all those subject to that authority by making them feel themselves to be second-class citizens in their own lands.
- Michael Dummett, On Immigration and Refugees, p. 11



[Ronald] Reagan ... was most definitely a global empire builder, a servant of the corporatocracy... He would cater to the men who shuttled back and forth from corporate CEO offices to bank boards and into the halls of government. He would serve the men who appeared to serve him but who in fact ran the government - men like Vice President George H. W. Bush, Secretary of State George Shultz, Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, Richard Cheney, Richard Helms, and Robert McNamara. He would advocate what those men wanted: an America that controlled the world and all its resources, a world that answered to the commands of that America, a U.S. military that would enforce the rules as they were written by America, and an international trade and banking system that supported America as CEO of the global empire."
- John Perkins

But we didn't come this far because we are made of sugar candy. Once upon a time we uh, elbowed our way onto and into this continent by giving smallpox infected blankets to Native Americans. Yes, that was biological warfare. And we used every other weapon we could get our hands on to grab this land from whomever and we grew prosperous. And yes, we greased the skids with the sweat of slaves.
- Paul Harvey, "radio legend"