“For our last number I’d like to ask your help. The people in the cheaper seats clap your hands. And the rest of you, if you’d just rattle your jewellery.” -John Lennon (The Beatles at the Prince of Wales Theatre in London for the Royal Command Performance, Nov.4, 1963.)
"Governments may think and say as they like, but force cannot be eliminated, and it is the only real and unanswerable power. We are told that the pen is mightier than the sword, but I know which of these weapons I would choose."
“usurpations … established only on a precarious and abusive right … having been acquired only by force, force could take them away without having grounds for complaint.”
… a deliberate policy of creating refugees wherever possible. An Army general … explained the idea to me as follows: “You’ve got to dry up the sea the guerrillas swim in — that’s the peasants — and the best way to do that is blast the hell out of their villages so they’ll come into our refugee camps. No villages, no guerrillas: simple.”
"Apologists for state violence understand very well that the general public has no real stake in imperial conquest and domination. The public costs of empire may run high, whatever the gains to dominant social and economic groups. Therefore the public must be aroused by jingoist appeals, or at least kept disciplined and submissive, if American force is to be readily available for global management.
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In short, there are ideologically permissible forms of opposition to imperial aggression. One may criticize the intellectual failures of planners, their moral failures, and even the generalized and abstract "will to exercise dominion" to which they have regrettably, but so understandably succumbed. But the principle that the United States may exercise force to guarantee a certain global order that will be "open" to the penetration and control of transnational corporations - that is beyond the bounds of polite discourse."
In reality, states never repay their debt. They roll it over, meaning they defer repayment endlessly, paying only the interest on the loans. As long as they can keep doing this, they remain solvent. It helps to think of public debt as a hole in the ground next to a mountain representing the nation’s total income.
Awareness of the facts might threaten the social order, protected by a carefully spun web of pluralist mysticism, faith in the benevolence of our pure-hearted leadership, and general superstitous belief.
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