George Bernard Shaw | Every faltering regime
"Every faltering regime has tried to bind its subjects by war as a last resort."
George Bernard Shaw
Zitate
George Orwell | Narrative Essays
“Every war when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac. In our time political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting. Political language...is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidarity to pure wind. War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it. Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception. War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength. (On the manipulation of language for political ends.) We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men. If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear. In times of universal deceit, telling the truth will be a revolutionary act.”
George Orwell
NATO | Cognitive Warfare
"[....]Cognitive warfare is achieved by integrating cyber, information, psychological, and social engineering capabilities. Exploiting information technology, it seeks to create confusion, false representations, and uncertainty with a deluge of information over-abundance or misinformation. This is achieved by focusing attention on false targets, causing distraction, introducing false narratives, radicalizing individuals, and amplifying social polarization to muster the cognitive effects needed to achieve short-term and long-term objectives."
NATO
Frederick B Hodges | everything we have is for our benefit
"The reason we have troops overseas in Germany is not to protect Germans, everything we have is for our benefit."
Frederick Benjamin „Ben“ Hodges
Lester Neil Smith | It’s often been observed that the first casualty of war is the truth
"It's often been observed that the first casualty of war is the truth. But that's a lie, too, in its way. The reality is that, for most wars to begin, the truth has to have been sacrificed a long time in advance."
Lester Neil Smith
Robert McNamara | Killing 50% to 90% of the people of 67 Japanese cities
"Killing 50% to 90% of the people of 67 Japanese cities and then bombing them with two nuclear bombs is not proportional, in the minds of some people, to the objectives we were trying to achieve."
Robert McNamara
Cardinal John Murphy Farley Archbishop of New York, calls horse and rider
"The war that is being prepared will be a battle between international capital and the ruling dynasties. Capital wishes to have no one over it, knows no God or Lord, and wishes to have all states ruled as a great banking business. Their profit shall become the sole guide of the rulers ... Business ... one and only."
Cardinal John Murphy Farley Archbishop of New York
Lenin | The highest art of war
"The highest art of war is to avoid military engagements altogether and defeat the enemy by destroying his moral principles, his religion, his culture and his traditions. When a country has been demoralized in that way it can be taken over without a single shot being fired."
Vladimir Iljitsch Lenin
Baron Arthur Ponsonby | 10 principles of war propaganda
Wir wollen den Krieg nicht
Das gegnerische Lager trägt die Verantwortung
Der Führer des Gegners ist ein Teufel
Wir kämpfen für eine gute Sache
Der Gegner kämpft mit unerlaubten Waffen
Der Gegner begeht mit Absicht Grausamkeiten, wir nur versehentlich
Unsere Verluste sind gering, die des Gegners enorm
Künstler und Intellektuellen unterstützen unsere Sache
Unsere Mission ist heilig
Wer unsere Berichterstattung in Zweifel zieht, ist ein Verräter.
Smedley Darlington Butler | Beautiful ideals were painted for our boys
"Beautiful ideals were painted for our boys who were sent out to die. The was the "war to end wars." This was the "war to make the world safe for democracy." No one told them that dollars and cents were the real reason. No one mentioned to them, as they marched away, that their going and their dying would mean huge war profits. No one told these American soldiers that they might be shot down by bullets made by their own brothers here. No one told them that the ships on which they were going to cross might be torpedoed by submarines built with United State patents. They were just told it was to be a "glorious adventure". Thus, having stuffed patriotism down their throats, it was decided to make them help pay for the war, too. So, we gave them the large salary of $30 a month! All that they had to do for this munificent sum was to leave their dear ones behind, give up their jobs, lie in swampy trenches, eat canned willy (when they could get it) and kill and kill and kill...and be killed"
Smedley Darlington Butler
Paul Felix Lazarsfeld | The power of radio
"The power of radio can be compared only with the power of the atomic bomb."
Paul Felix Lazarsfeld
Thích Nhất Hạnh | In order to rally people, governments need enemies
"In order to rally people, governments need enemies. They want us to be afraid, to hate, so we will rally behind them. And if they do not have a real enemy, they will invent one in order to mobilize us."
Thích Nhất Hạnh
Haris Silajdžić | if you kill a quarter-of-a-million people, you’re invited to a peace conference
"If you kill one person, you're prosecuted. If you kill ten people, you're famous; if you kill a quarter-of-a-million people, you're invited to a peace conference."
Haris Silajdžić
Benjamin Netanjahu | must support Hamas and the transfer of money to Hamas
"Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state must support Hamas and the transfer of money to Hamas [...] This is part of our strategy to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank"
Benjamin Netanjahu
Bertolt Brecht | When crimes begin to pile up they become invisible
"When crimes begin to pile up they become invisible. When sufferings become unendurable the cries are no longer heard. The cries, too, fall like rain in summer."
Bertolt Brecht
Harry S. Truman | Bait and bleed
"If we see that Germany is winning, we ought to help Russia, and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany, and that way let them kill as many as possible, although I don't want to see Hitler victorious under any circumstances."
Harry S. Truman
Albert Einstein | That a man can take pleasure
„That a man can take pleasure in marching in formation to the strains of a band is enough to make me despise him. He has only been given his big brain by mistake; a backbone was all he needed. This plague-spot of civilization ought to be abolished with all possible speed. Heroism by order, senseless violence, and all the pestilent nonsense that does by the name of patriotism--how I hate them! War seems to me a mean, contemptible thing: I would rather be hacked in pieces than take part in such an abominable business. And yet so high, in spite of everything, is my opinion of the human race that I believe this bogey would have disappeared long ago, had the sound sense of the nations not been systematically corrupted by commercial and political interests acting through the schools and the Press.“
Albert Einstein
Sergej Lawrow | „Master of the house“ of NATO and EU sits in Washington
"Both Nato and the European Union have resigned themselves to the fact that their ‘master of the house’ is in Washington and in Washington they have decided that the world must now be monopolar, they talk about that all the time."
Sergej Lawrow
Hastings Lionel Baron Ismay | NATO has three tasks
„to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down“
Hastings Lionel Baron Ismay
Gore Vidal | We are the United States of Amnesia
"We are the United States of Amnesia, we learn nothing because we remember nothing."
Gore Vidal
Stefan Zweig | The tales of gouged-out eyes
"The tales of gouged-out eyes and severed hands which appear on the third or fourth day of every war filled the newspapers. They did not know, those innocents who spread such lies, that the accusation of every possible cruelty against the enemy is as much war materiel as are munitions and planes, and that they are systematically taken out of storage at the beginning of every war. War does not permit itself to be coordinated with reason and righteousness. [...] Shakespeare was banned from the German stage, Mozart and Wagner from the French and English concert halls, German professors declared that Dante had been Germanic, the French that Beethoven had been a Belgian, intellectual culture was requisitioned without scruple from the enemy countries like grain and ore. [...] After a few weeks, determined to escape this dangerous mass psychosis, I moved to a rural suburb to commence my personal war in the midst of war, the struggle against the betrayal of Reason by the current mass passion."
Stefan Zweig
Michael Jackson | Sadly, sadly, we live in a state of fear
“Sadly, sadly, we live in a state of fear. Everyday we hear of war on the news, on the radio and television and the newspapers, always of war. We hear of nations hurting each other, of neighbours hurting each other, of families hurting each other and the children killing each other. We must learn to live and love each other before its too late. We have to stop! We have to stop the prejudice, we have to stop the hating, we have to stop living in fear of our own neighbours. [...] Together … together we can make a change of the world. Together we can help to stop racism. Together we can help to stop prejudice. We can help the world live without fear. Its our only hope, without hope we are lost.”
Michael Jackson
Lysander Spooner | The greatest of all crimes are the wars
"The greatest of all crimes are the wars that are carried on by governments, to plunder, enslave, and destroy mankind."
Lysander Spooner
Anatoliy Golitsyn | Believers think ideology is dying or already dead
"Believers think ideology is dying or already dead and that Gorbachev has abandoned the class struggle and taken the 'capitalist road'. They do not realise that 'perestroika' is an expression of ideological strategy and a practical means of reviving ideology. It is not the abandonment of class struggle but a finesse to secure the defeat of the capitalist democracies by the use of capitalist weapons. The class struggle will yet have its bloody feasts. The Western elite believe they are helping the cause of democracy. In fact they are financing their own demise and digging their own graves. The tragedy is that they will probably not see it until it is too late."
Anatoliy Golitsyn
Paul Valéry | War: a massacre of people who don’t know
„War: a massacre of people who don't know each other for the profit of people who know each other but don't massacre each other.“
Paul Valéry
Benjamin Franklin | War is when the government tells you who the bad guy is.
"War is when the government tells you who the bad guy is. Revolution is when you decide that for yourself"
Benjamin Franklin
Julian Assange | when asked “Who do you think is the number-one enemy?”
„Our number-one enemy is ignorance. And I believe that is the number-one enemy of everyone. It’s not understanding what is actually going on in the world. It’s only once you start to understand that you can make effective decisions and effective plans. Now the question is: who is promoting this ignorance? […] It is bad media. It really is my opinion that the media in general are so bad we have to question whether the world wouldn’t be better off without them all together. They’re so distortive to how the world actually is that the result is we see wars and we see corrupt governments continue on. One of the hopeful things that I have discovered is that nearly every war that has started in the past 50 years has been a result of media lies. The media could have stopped it if they had searched deep enough — if they hadn’t reprinted government propaganda — they could have stopped it. But what does that mean? Well, that means, basically, populations don’t like wars. Populations have to be fooled into wars. Populations don’t willingly, with open eyes, enter into war. So, if we have a good media environment, we might also have a peaceful environment.“
Julian Assange
