THIRD WORLD TRAVELER puts up articles
and book excerpts
that offer an alternative view to the U.S. mainstream media
about the state of American democracy, media, and foreign policy,
and about the impact of the actions
of the United States government, transnational corporations, international
financial institutions, and the corporate media,
on democracy, social and economic justice, human rights, and war
and peace,
in the Third World.
THIRD WORLD TRAVELER also provides
information and links to aid international travelers.
Visitors are encouraged
to buy the books and subscribe to the magazines,
to ask their libraries to put them on their shelves and their
bookstores to stock them, to visit the websites,
and to tell others about the wealth of information that these
independent news sources provide.
For, without public awareness of and support for independent progressive
authors, publications, and websites,
this much-needed information may not continue to be available.
"The news and the truth
are not the same thing. "
Walter Lippmann
"No people can be both
ignorant and free."
Thomas Jefferson
"We were not born critical
of existing society. There was a moment in our lives (or a month,
or a year) when certain facts appeared before us, startled us,
and then caused us to question beliefs that were strongly fixed
in our consciousness - embedded there by years of family prejudices,
orthodox schooling, imbibing of newspapers, radio, and television."
Howard Zinn
"During times of universal
deceit, telling the truth is revolutionary."
George Orwell
"The media serve the interests
of state and corporate power, which are closely interlinked, framing
their reporting and analysis in a manner supportive of established
privilege and limiting debate and discussion accordingly."
Noam Chomsky
"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
"There is nothing puzzling ... about
America's gratuitously aggressive foreign policy... What an aggressive
foreign policy accomplishes by slow degrees, a state of war accomplishes
in a trice. Overnight [war] kills reform, overnight it transforms
insurgents into traitors and the Republic into an imperiled realm.
Overnight it strangles free politics, distracts and overawes the
citizenry. Overnight it blasts public hope."
Walter Karp
"The enormous gap between
what US leaders do in the world and what Americans think their
leaders are doing is one of the great propaganda accomplishments
of the dominant political mythology."
Michael Parenti
"We have about 50% of
the world's wealth but only 6.3% of its population.... 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 daydreaming, 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 cease to talk about vague and 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, U.S. State Department
memo, 1948
"What's public opinion?
It's the education system plus the media."
Mark Green, President of Air America
radio
"In many respects, we
now live in a society that is only formally democratic, as the
great mass of citizens have minimal say on the major public issues
of the day, and such issues are scarcely debated at all in any
meaningful sense in the electoral arena."
Robert McChesney
"You can always hear the
people who are willing to sacrifice somebody else's life. They're
plenty loud and they talk all the time. You can find them in churches
and schools and newspapers and legislatures and congress. That's
their business. They sound wonderful. Death before dishonor. This
ground sanctified by blood. These men who died so gloriously.
They shall not have died in vain. Our noble dead."
Dalton Trumbo, author
of the book "Johnny Got His Gun"
"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
"The American public has
become so conditioned by crises, by warnings, by words, that there
are few, other than the young, who protest against what is happening."
Senator J. William Fulbright
"Throughout the twentieth
century and into the beginning of the twenty-first, the United
States repeatedly used its military power, and that of its clandestine
services, to overthrow governments that refused to protect American
interests. Each time, it cloaked its intervention in the rhetoric
of national security and liberation. In most cases, however, it
acted mainly for economic reasons-specifically to establish, promote
and defend the right of Americans to do business around the world
without interference."
Stephen Kinzer
Augusto Pinochet - Chile, "Papa
Doc" Duvalier - Haiti, Efrain Rios Montt - Guatemala, Park
Chung-hee - South Korea, King Fahd - Saudi Arabia
P W Botha - South Africa, Sani
Abacha - Nigeria, Rafael Trujillos - Dominican Republic, General
Suharto - Indonesia, Fulgencio Batista - Cuba
Shah Pahlevi - Iran, Mobuto Sese
Seko - Zaire, Ferdinand Marcos - Philippines, Anastasio Somoza
- Nicaragua
King Hassan II - Morocco, Pol
Pot - Cambodia, Hosni Mubarak - Egypt, Saddam Hussein - Iraq
What if everything you know about
September 11th is a lie?
"Why of course the people
don't want war... That is understood. But after all it is the
leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it is always
a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy,
or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship
...Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the
bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to
tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists
for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger."
Hermann Goering
"The people will believe
what the media tells them they believe."
George Orwell
" The United States is evolving into
an a corporate oligarchy that merely wears the trappings of a
democracy."
Robert Kaplan
"[I] never saw a foreign
intervention that the [New York] Times did not support, never
saw a fare increase or a rent increase or a utility rate increase
that it did not endorse, never saw it take the side of labor in
a strike or lockout, or advocate a raise for underpaid workers.
And don't let me get started on universal health care and Social
Security. So why do people think the Times is liberal?"
veteran New York Times reporter
John Hess
"Our leaders are cruel
because only those willing to be inordinately cruel and remorseless
can hold positions of leadership in the foreign policy establishment.
People capable of expressing a full human measure of compassion
and empathy toward faraway powerless strangers do not become president
of the United States, or vice president, or secretary of state,
or national security adviser or secretary of the treasury. Nor
do they want to."
William Blum
"The twentieth century
has been characterized by three developments of great political
importance: the growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power,
and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting
corporate power against democracy."
Alex Carey
"Paramount among the responsibilities
of a free press is the duty to prevent any part of the government
from deceiving the people..."
Hugo Black, Supreme Court Justice
"Television is altering
the meaning of "being informed" by creating a species
of information that might properly be called disinformation...
Disinformation does not mean false information. It means misleading
information - misplaced, irrelevant, fragmented or superficial
information - information that creates the illusion of knowing
something, but which in fact leads one away from knowing."
Neil Postman
"What chiefly governs
the [U.S.] military budget is the need to spend enormous sums
of money in a useless way. The allegedly powerful Pentagon is
simply a receptacle for wasteful expenditure, just as a city dump
is the receptacle for the refuse of a city."
Walter Karp
"From 1945 to 2003, the
United States attempted to overthrow more than 40 foreign governments,
and to crush more than 30 populist-nationalist movements fighting
against intolerable regimes. In the process, the US bombed some
25 countries, caused the end of life for several million people,
and condemned many millions more to a life of agony and despair."
William Blum
"Conceit, arrogance and
egotism are the essentials of patriotism.... Patriotism assumes
that our globe is divided into little spots, each one surrounded
by an iron gate. Those who had the fortune of being born on some
particular spot, consider themselves better, nobler, grander,
more intelligent than the living beings inhabiting any other spot.
It is, therefore, the duty of everyone living on that chosen spot
to fight, kill, and die in the attempt to impose his superiority
upon all others."
Emma Goldman
"No form of government,
once in power, can be trusted to limit its own ambition, to extend
freedom and to wither away. This means that it is up to the citizenry,
those outside of power, to engage in permanent combat with the
state, short of violent, escalatory revolution, but beyond the
gentility of the ballot-box, to insure justice, freedom and well
being."
Howard Zinn
"If fascism ever came
to the United States, it would be wrapped in an American flag."
Huey Long
" With unfailing consistancy,
U.S. intervention has been on the side of the rich and powerful
of various nations at the expense of the poor and needy. Rather
than strengthening democracies, U.S. leaders have overthrown numerous
democratically elected governments or other populist regimes in
dozens of countries ... whenever these nations give evidence of
putting the interests of their people ahead of the interests of
multinational corporate interests."
Michael Parenti
"A patriot must always
be ready to defend his country against his government."
Edward Abbey
"Americans are too broadly
underinformed to digest nuggets of information that seem to contradict
what they know of the world ... Instead, news channels prefer
to feed Americans a constant stream of simplified information,
all of which fits what they already know. That way they don't
have to devote more air time or newsprint space to explanations
or further investigations... Politicians and the media have conspired
to infantilize, to dumb down, the American public. At heart, politicians
don't believe that Americans can handle complex truths, and the
news media, especially television news, basically agrees."
Tom Fenton, former CBS foreign
correspondent
"When the full and true
story of Jean-Bertrand Aristide is finally told, it will portray
a noble and humble man who gave of himself honorably to serve
the interests of all the people of Haiti. His only failure was
his inability to overcome the brutal and corrupt power of the
U.S. and its determination to see him fail. "
Stephen Lendman
" Americans cannot teach
democracy to the world until they restore their own."
William Greider
"The war against terrorism
quickly became a cover for the war against democratic dissent."
Michael Parenti
What Can I Do?
[Ariel Sharon - Israel, King Fahd
- Saudi Arabia, Shah Pahlevi - Iran, Saddam Hussain - Iraq]
"You don't need a totalitarian
dictatorship like Hitler's to get by with murder ... you can do
it in a democracy as long as the Congress and the people Congress
is supposed to represent don't give a damn?"
William Shirer
ARTICLES
" In the councils of government,
we must guard against unwarranted influence, whether sought or
unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for
the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist."
President Dwight Eisenhower
" If an American is concerned
only about his nation, he will not be concerned about the peoples
of Asia, Africa, or South America. Is this not why nations engage
in the madness of war without the slightest sense of penitence?
Is this not why the murder of a citizen of your own nation is
a crime, but the murder of citizens of another nation in war is
an act of heroic virtue? "
Martin Luther King, Jr.
"The goal of conservative
rulers around the world, led by those who occupy the seats of
power in Washington, is the systematic rollback of democratic
gains, public services, and common living standards around the
world."
Michael Parenti
"Those in power are blind
devotees to private enterprise. They accept that degree of socialism
implicit in the vast subsidies to the military-industrial-complex,
but not that type of socialism which maintains public projects
for the disemployed and the unemployed alike."
William O. Douglas, former U.S.
Supreme Court Justice
"While free markets tend
to democratize a society, unfettered capitalism leads invariably
to corporate control of government."
Robert Kennedy. Jr.
"We have thrown away the
most valuable asset we had -- the individual's right to oppose
both flag and country when he believed them to be in the wrong.
We have thrown it away; and with it, all that was really respectable
about that grotesque and laughable word, Patriotism."
Howard Zinn
"Who needs censorship
when we have self-censorship. When news is being withheld, or
neutralized, at best, how can we expect anything but cynicism
from those who read our daily papers? Maybe the reason many aren't
buying newspapers isn't that they can get information for free
on the Internet, but because they don't believe what they read,
and how can they?"
Jane Lyn Stahl
"The Middle East is center
of the world's energy resources... That's been an axiom of U.S.
foreign policy, that it must control Middle East energy resources.
It is not a matter of access ... the issue has always been control.
Control is the source of strategic power."
Noam Chomsky
"fascism - A system of
government that exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right,
typically through the merging of state and business leadership,
together with belligerent nationalism."
The American Heritage Dictionary,
1983
"The United States has
only one party - the property party. It's the party of big corporations,
the party of money. It has two right wings; one is Democrat and
the other is Republican."
Gore Vidal
"The United States is
a society in which people not only can get by without knowing
much about the wider world but are systematically encouraged not
to think independently or critically and instead to accept the
mythology of the United States as a benevolent, misunderstood
giant as it lumbers around the world trying to do good."
Robert Jensen
BOOKS
Mark Hertzgaard
Carl Boggs
"We live in a nation hated
abroad and frightened at home. A place in which we can reasonably
refer to the American Republic in the past tense. A country that
has moved into a post-constitutional era, no longer a nation of
laws but an autocracy run by law breakers, law evaders and law
ignorers. A nation governed by a culture of impunity ... a culture
in which corruption is no longer a form of deviance but the norm.
We all live in a Mafia neighborhood now."
Sam Smith
"Free and responsible
government by popular consent just can't exist without an informed
public."
Bill Moyers
"To criticize one's country
is to do it a service .... Criticism, in short, is more than a
right; it is an act of patriotism - a higher form of patriotism,
I believe, than the familiar rituals and national adulation."
U.S. Senator J. William Fulbright
"The point of public relations
slogans like "Support our troops" is that they don't
mean anything... That's the whole point of good propaganda. You
want to create a slogan that nobody's going to be against, and
everybody's going to be for. Nobody knows what it means, because
it doesn't mean anything. Its crucial value is that it diverts
your attention from a question that does mean something: Do you
support our policy? That's the one you're not allowed to talk
about."
Noam Chomsky
"Media manipulation in
the U.S. today is more efficient than it was in Nazi Germany,
because here we have the pretense that we are getting all the
information we want. That misconception prevents people from even
looking for the truth."
Mark Crispin Miller
"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
[put - TWT COMMENT/QUESTION
- in Subject line]
"For the last fifty years
we've been supporting right-wing governments, and that is a puzzlement
to me...I don't understand what there is in the American character...
that almost automatically, even when we have a liberal President,
we support fascist dictatorships or are tolerant towards them."
William Shirer
4 million people
visited Third World Traveler in 2006
"Expecting FOX News to
report real news is about as silly as waiting for George Bush
and Dick Cheney to tell the truth... Americans care, but it's
tough to care when you don't know what's going on. That ignorance
is what the warmakers count on and what the corporate media delivers."
Amy Goodman
View Documentaries
"Every government is run
by liars, and nothing they say should be believed."
I.F. Stone
("Fair Use" Notice: Third World Traveler contains
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Antonia Juhasz
on Iraqi Oil - interview June 6th, 2007
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