Profound Quotes

"Neither is it that US foreign policy is cruel because American leaders are cruel. It's that our leaders are cruel because only those willing to be inordinately cruel and remorseless can hold positions of leadership in the foreign policy establishment; it might as well be written into the job description. People capable of expressing a full human measure of compassion and empathy toward faraway powerless strangers - (let alone American soldiers - 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." From 'Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower' by William Blum

From "9-11, Six Years Later": "If one looks at the credentials of skeptics compared to the credentials of defenders of the official line, it is impossible to dismiss skeptics as kooks. There are many people with strong imaginations on the Internet, but serious skeptics stick to known facts, known violations of standard procedures and the laws of physics. The vast majority of the people who call skeptics "kooks" are themselves ignorant of physics and have little comprehension of the improbability that such an attack could succeed without either the complicity or complete failure of government agencies. " Paul Craig Roberts

"Cowardice asks the question, 'Is it safe?' Expediency asks the question, 'Is it politic?' Vanity asks the question, 'Is it popular? But, conscience asks the question, 'Is it right?' And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular but one must take it because one's conscience tells one that it is right." Martin Luther King, Jr.

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Who Needs Clean Water? « P U L S E

“Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.”

Who Needs Clean Water?

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Correctly characterizing the Gaza strip in a typology of repressive institutions isn’t easy. Without question, it’s a refugee camp, but a quite developed refugee camp, and some of its inhabitants have been there for 60 years. When refugees stay refugees for six decades, they’re still refugees, but they’re locked in a “prison for the stateless.”

Actually, in Gaza, “zoo” used to be the more precise descriptor: the sole goal was to keep the inhabitants, or most of them “alive, with an eye to how outsiders might see them.” Freedom was never at issue. Amidst the savagery of Cast Lead and its mounting consequences, zoo may now be a passé metaphor. It’s hard to argue that Israel’s overwhelming concern is how the outside world sees Gaza. Concern for outsiders’ opinions doesn’t lead one to call a massacre “impressive… [its] timing brilliant” in your country’s leading liberal newspaper. Nor to chants calling for the slaughter of Palestinians in city squares.

Concentration camp could no longer be polemical but rather descriptive. In a concentration camp one herds a population into a dense, tightly controlled space. Human beings come to serve instrumental purposes. One controls survival by controlling inputs—food, water, caring only slightly about the inhabitants, sometimes not at all. Some will surely die, and that’s hardly a concern. They’ll die of disease, as at Andersonville. Sometimes they die because one kills them. Sometimes “sometimes” becomes often.

Who Needs Clean Water? « P U L S E.

September 25th, 2009 | Category: Uncategorized | Leave a comment |

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