Imperialism
Selected Quotations by A. J. Musti: An American Pacifist
The Sayings of A. J. Musti: An American Pacifist
Address to the Western World
The Address to the Western World is a powerful message given by the Hau de no sau nee (or traditional Six Nations Council at Onondaga) also called the Iroquois Confederacy, to the non-governmental organizations (NGOs) of the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland in September, 1977.
Ron Liskey
Winston Churchill
Winston Churchill is remembered by the people of England for leading Britain through “her finest hour,” and by most of the rest of the world as a murderous racist. Besides rousing a reluctant nation to war, he championed imperialism, white supremacism, the carpet bombing of cilivian cities, and networks of terrorizing concentration camps. Perhaps ignorant of Churchill’s legacy, and in an attempt to disassociate himself from his own draft-dodging past, President-Select George W Bush placed a bust of Churchill near his desk in the White House.
Carol Black
Carol Black
Schooling the World: The White Man’s Last Burden
If you wanted to change an ancient culture in a generation, how would you do it? You would change the way it educates its children.
5 Quotations on Imperialism
“There is no way to peace. Peace is the way.”
“The problem after a war is with the victor. He thinks he has just proved that war and violence pay. Who will now teach him a lesson?”
“We cannot have peace if we are only concerned with peace. War is not an accident. It is the logical outcome of a certain way of life. If we want to attack war, we have to attack that way of life.”
“In a world built on violence, one must be a revolutionary before one can be a pacifist.”
“Politically speaking, tribal nationalism (patriotism) always insists that its own people are surrounded by 'a world of enemies'---'one against all'---and that a fundamental difference exists between this people and all others. It claims its people to be unique, individual, incompatible with all others, and denies theoretically the very possibility of a common mankind long before it is used to destroy the humanity of man.”
“There is no way to peace. Peace is the way.”
Recommended Reading
Diminished Democracy
– Theda Skocpol
Cruel and Unusual
– Mark Crispin Miller
Democratic Realism
– Charles Krauthammer
The Age of Reform
– Richard Hofstadter
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Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid
– Jimmy Carter
Carter argues that Israel’s continued control and construction of illegal settlements has been the primary obstacle to a comprehensive peace agreement in the Middle East. That perspective, coupled with the use of the word Apartheid in the titular phrase ‘Peace Not Apartheid,’ and what critics said were errors and misstatements in the book, sparked an intense backlash. Carter has defended his book and countered that response to it ‘in the real world… has been overwhelmingly positive.‘Later events in the ongoing bombing, dispossession and occupation of Palestinian lands confirm Carter’s conclusions.
The Friendly Dictatorship
– Jeffrey Simpson
The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln
– Sean Wilentz
The War State: The Cold War Origins of the Military-Industrial Complex and the Power Elite, 1945-1963
– Michael Swanson
The End of Kings
– William Everdell
A Stream of Windows: Unsettling Reflections on Trade, Immigration, and Democracy
– Jagdish Bhagwati
V D Nabokov and the Russian Provisional Government, 1917
– V D Nabokov
The Unknown American Revolution: The Unruly Birth of Democracy and the Struggle to Create America
– Gary B. Nash
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Necessary Illusions
– Noam Chomsky
The Wheels of Commerce
– Fernand Braudel
People Before Profit
– Charles Derber
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We the People
– Thom Hartmann
The Dissent of the Governed
– Stephen L. Carter
Take Back Your Government
– Robert A. Heinlein
Hidden Power
– Charles Derber
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In Search of Fatima: A Palestinian Story
– Ghada Karmi
This widely acclaimed memoir draws you into the life of Ghada Karmi; a childhood spent in Palestine and a life of displacement and struggle in Britain. Here is the human cost of the loss of one’s home and the reshaping of one’s identity written with wit, humour and often heart-breaking insight.
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Blood in the Sand
– Stephen Bronner
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The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government
– David Talbot
Democracy and Development
– Adam Przeworski
The Master Switch
– Tim Wu
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August 1914
– Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Pericles of Athens and the Birth of Democracy
– Donald Kagan
Overcoming Zionism
– Joel Kovel
A call to transform Israel into a secular democracy. This book is fundamental for those who reject the unfortunate confusion between Jews, Judaism, Zionism and the State of Israel – a confusion which is the basis for systematic manipulation by the imperialist power system. It argues in favor of a single secular state for Israelis and Palestinians as the only democratic solution for the region.
Zionism creates a contradiction that eats at the soul and conscience of the Jewish people. The problem is that it is a moral and logical impossibility have a democratic state for only one ethnic group while excluding others. The notion of democracy derives from universal ideals based on universal human rights; it cannot exist where there is systematic inequality, and all the more so when the ‘others’ are the indigenous population.
Zionism creates a contradiction that eats at the soul and conscience of the Jewish people. The problem is that it is a moral and logical impossibility have a democratic state for only one ethnic group while excluding others. The notion of democracy derives from universal ideals based on universal human rights; it cannot exist where there is systematic inequality, and all the more so when the ‘others’ are the indigenous population.
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The Tragedy of American Diplomacy
– William Appleman Williams
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The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad
– Fareed Zakaria
Rights vs. Public Safety After 9/11
– Amitai Etzioni
Democracy and Economic Power: Extending the ESOP Revolution Through Binary Economics
– Patricia Hetter Kelso, Louis O. Kelso
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The Port Huron Statement
– Tom Hayden
A broad critique of the political and social system of the United States for failing to achieve international peace and economic justice. The writers took issue with the US government’s handling of the Cold War,both the existential threat of nuclear war, and the actual arms race. It also critiqued endemic racial discrimination, economic inequality, big business domination, trade union quiescence, and the cooption of political parties. It suggested a series of reforms: including the need to create genuine political parties, to attain greater democracy, to achieve more substantial involvement by workers in business management, and to enlarge the public sector with increased government welfare, including a “program against poverty.” The document advocated nonviolent civil disobedience to bring forth greater “participatory democracy.”
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Globalizing Civil Society
– David Korten
The American Statehouse
– Charles Goodsell
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Resurrecting Empire
– Rashid Khalidi
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The Death and Life of Dith Pran
– Sydney Schanberg
Recounts the experiences of Dith Pran, a Cambodian reporter who worked for the New York Times, and was captured by the Khmer Rouge when they took over Phnom Penh. This is the original book on which the movie and book, “The Killing Fields” was based.
Power Kills
– Rudolph Rummel
Empire
– Antonio Negri, Michael Hardt
Freedom and Time
– Jed Rubenfeld
History and Illusion in Politics
– Raymond Geuss
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War and Peace
– Leo Tolstoy
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The Wisdom of W.E.B. Du Bois
– W.E.B. Du Dois
Dilemmas of Democracy and Dictatorship
– Michael Radu
La Seconde Revolution Tranquille
– Gil Courtemanche
Looking for Palestine
– Najla Said
The daughter of the famous intellectual and outspoken Palestinian advocate Edward Said and a sophisticated Lebanese mother, Najla Said grew up in New York City, confused and conflicted about her cultural background and identity. Said knew that her parents identified deeply with their homelands, but growing up in a Manhattan world that was defined largely by class and conformity, she felt unsure about who she was supposed to be, and was often in denial of the differences she sensed between her family and those around her. She may have been born a Palestinian Lebanese American, but Said denied her true roots, even to herself–until, ultimately, the psychological toll of her self-hatred began to threaten her health.
The New Golden Rule
– Amitai Etzioni
New Communitarian Thinking
– Amitai Etzioni
Parliaments and Citizens in Western Europe
– Philip Norton, Baron Norton of Louth
Hearing the Other Side: Deliberative Versus Participatory Democracy
– Diana C. Mutz
Citizen and Subject
– Mahmood Mamdani
America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy
– Francis Fukuyama
The Policing of Politics in the Twentieth Century
– Mark Mazower
Resurrecting Empire
– Rashid Khalidi
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The European Dream
– Jeremy Rifkin
Political Man
– Seymour Martin Lipset
A Basic Call to Consciousness: The Hau De No Saw Nee Address to the Western World
– Mohawk Nation
Published: Geneva, Switzerland, Autumn 1977
What is presented here is nothing less audacious than a cosmogony of the Industrialized World presented by the most politically powerful and independent non-Western political body surviving in North America. It is, in a way, the modern world through Pleistocene eyes.
Terrorism for Humanity
– Ted Honderich
The Balfour Declaration
– Jonathan Schneer
Issued in London in 1917, the Balfour Declaration was one of the key documents of the twentieth century. It committed Britain to supporting the establishment in Palestine of ‘a National Home for the Jewish people,’ and its reverberations continue to be felt to this day. With new material retrieved from historical archives, Jonathan Schneer recounts in dramatic detail the public and private fight to depopulate and colonize a small strip of land in the Middle East
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Orientalism
– Edward W. Said
Discusses the situation of the Palestinians, including the history of the Nakba, the dispossession and scattering of the Palestinian diaspora, and the misrepresentation of the Palestinian cause in the Western world. Said also examines the development of Palestinian political movements, particularly the Palestine Liberation Organization led by his then friend, Yasser Arafat, and the changing perceptions of Palestinian groups towards the question of Jewish identity and Israeli statehood.
The Third Way and Its Critics
– Anthony Giddens
The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness: A Vindication of Democracy and a Critique of Its Traditional Defenders
– Reinhold Niebuhr
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The Peloponnesian War
– Thucydides
The first history book.
Waves of Democracy
– John Markoff
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African Studies in Social Movements and Democracy
– Mahmood Mamdani
Secret Trials and Executions
– Barbara Olshansky
Jacksonian Democracy in New Hampshire, 1800-1851
– Donald B. Cole
The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere
– Jürgen Habermas
The Mainspring of Human Progress
– Henry Grady Weaver
Democracy and Populism
– John Lukacs
Ten Days That Shook the World
– John Reed
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Out of Place
– Edward W. Said
From one of the most important intellectuals of our time comes an extraordinary story of exile and a celebration of an irrecoverable past. A fatal medical diagnosis in 1991 convinced Edward Said that he should leave a record of where he was born and spent his childhood, and so with this memoir he rediscovers the lost Arab world of his early years in Palestine, Lebanon, and Egypt.
I Saw Ramallah
– Mourid Barghouti
Barred from his homeland after the ‘Six-Day War’ in 1967, the poet Mourid Barghouti spent thirty years in exile–shuttling among the world’s cities, yet secure in none of them; separated from his family for years at a time; never certain whether he was a visitor, a refugee, a citizen, or a guest. As he returns home for the first time since the Israeli occupation, Barghouti crosses a wooden bridge over the Jordan River into Ramallah and is unable to recognize the city of his youth. Sifting through memories of the old Palestine as they come up against what he now encounters in this mere ‘idea of Palestine,’ He discovers what it means to be deprived not only of a homeland but of ’the habitual place and status of a person.’
Never at War
– Spencer R. Weart
The Powers and Aims of Western Democracy
– William Milligan Sloane
The Story of American Freedom
– Eric Foner
Predator Nation: Corporate Criminals, Political Corruption, and the Hijacking of America
– Charles H. Ferguson
The State and the Economy Under Capitalism
– Adam Przeworski
How valid is the Marxian theory of imperialism? This book traces the historical development of the theory of imperialism, the internationalisation of capital and theories of capitalist nation-state formation.
The book’s starting thesis is that state-capitalism is a system in which scarce resources are privately owned, yet under current capitalist systems, property is institutionally separated from authority. As a result, there are two mechanisms by which resources are allocated and distributed: the market and the state.
In the market, productive resources—capital, land, and labor capacity—are allocated by capitalist owners and the distribution of consumption results from decentralized interactions. Yet the state can also allocate and distribute, and it can act on those same resources that constitute private property. Not only can states tax and transfer but they can regulate the relative costs and benefits associated with private decisions. Thus, inherent in state capitalism is a permanent tension between the capitalists’ desires for wealth accumulation and and the democratic or social-welfare goals of the state.
The book’s starting thesis is that state-capitalism is a system in which scarce resources are privately owned, yet under current capitalist systems, property is institutionally separated from authority. As a result, there are two mechanisms by which resources are allocated and distributed: the market and the state.
In the market, productive resources—capital, land, and labor capacity—are allocated by capitalist owners and the distribution of consumption results from decentralized interactions. Yet the state can also allocate and distribute, and it can act on those same resources that constitute private property. Not only can states tax and transfer but they can regulate the relative costs and benefits associated with private decisions. Thus, inherent in state capitalism is a permanent tension between the capitalists’ desires for wealth accumulation and and the democratic or social-welfare goals of the state.
Mein Kampf (My Fight)
– Adolf Hitler
Required reading for all would-be fascists, and those who seek to understand and resist. Hitler originally wanted to call his book Viereinhalb Jahre (des Kampfes) gegen Lüge, Dummheit und Feigheit, or Four and a Half Years (of Struggle) Against Lies, Stupidity and Cowardice. Max Amann, head of the Franz Eher Verlag and Hitler’s publisher, is said to have suggested the much shorter “Mein Kampf”.
Although Hitler originally wrote Mein Kampf for the at that time small group of followers of National Socialism, it grew in popularity after he rose to power. Hitler had made about 1.2 million Reichsmarks from the book by 1933 (equivalent to €4,714,299 in 2009), when the average annual income of a teacher was about 4,800 Marks (equivalent to €18,857 in 2009). He accumulated a tax debt of 405,500 Reichsmark (roughly in 2015 1.4 million EUR) from the sale of about 240,000 copies before he became chancellor in 1933 (at which point his debt was waived).
Hitler began to distance himself from the book after becoming chancellor of Germany in 1933. He dismissed it as “fantasies behind bars” that were little more than a series of articles for the Völkischer Beobachter, and later told Hans Frank that “If I had had any idea in 1924 that I would have become Reich chancellor, I never would have written the book.” Nevertheless, Mein Kampf was a bestseller in Germany during the 1930s. During Hitler’s years in power, the book was in high demand in libraries and often reviewed and quoted in other publications. It was given free to every newlywed couple and every soldier fighting at the front. By 1939 it had sold 5.2 million copies in eleven languages. By the end of the war, about 10 million copies had been sold or distributed in Germany.
Although Hitler originally wrote Mein Kampf for the at that time small group of followers of National Socialism, it grew in popularity after he rose to power. Hitler had made about 1.2 million Reichsmarks from the book by 1933 (equivalent to €4,714,299 in 2009), when the average annual income of a teacher was about 4,800 Marks (equivalent to €18,857 in 2009). He accumulated a tax debt of 405,500 Reichsmark (roughly in 2015 1.4 million EUR) from the sale of about 240,000 copies before he became chancellor in 1933 (at which point his debt was waived).
Hitler began to distance himself from the book after becoming chancellor of Germany in 1933. He dismissed it as “fantasies behind bars” that were little more than a series of articles for the Völkischer Beobachter, and later told Hans Frank that “If I had had any idea in 1924 that I would have become Reich chancellor, I never would have written the book.” Nevertheless, Mein Kampf was a bestseller in Germany during the 1930s. During Hitler’s years in power, the book was in high demand in libraries and often reviewed and quoted in other publications. It was given free to every newlywed couple and every soldier fighting at the front. By 1939 it had sold 5.2 million copies in eleven languages. By the end of the war, about 10 million copies had been sold or distributed in Germany.
- A variety of restrictions, annotations or special circumstances apply in many countries.
- The U.S. government seized the copyright in September 1942 during the Second World War under the Trading with the Enemy Act
- The government of Bavaria, in agreement with the federal government of Germany, refused to allow any copying or printing of Mein Kampf in Germany. It also opposed copying and printing in other countries, but with less success.
- Under German copyright law, the entire text entered the public domain on January 1, 2016, 70 years after the author's death.
- In 1999, the Simon Wiesenthal Center documented that the book was available in Germany via major online booksellers such as Amazon and Barnes & Noble. After a public outcry, both companies agreed to end these sales to addresses in Germany.
- In March 2020, Amazon banned sales of new and second-hand copies, and several other Nazi publications, on its platform.
Civility: Manners, Morals, and the Etiquette of Democracy
– Stephen L. Carter
The Russian Tradition
– Tibor Szamuely
Never Again
– Rudolph Rummel
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Dark Times
– Ken Coates
The Revolt of the Elites
– Christopher Lasch
Corporation Nation
– Charles Derber
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Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy
– Noam Chomsky
Young America
– Edward L. Widmer
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The Origins of Totalitarianism
– Hannah Arendt
Published: 1951
Arendt explores the institutions and operations of totalitarian movements, focusing on two major forms of totalitarian government in our time–Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia–which she recognizes as two sides of the same coin, rather than opposing philosophies of Right and Left. From this vantage point, she discusses the evolution of classes into masses, the role of propaganda in dealing with the nontotalitarian world, the use of terror, and the nature of isolation and loneliness as preconditions for total domination.
The Origins of Totalitarianism begins with the rise of anti-Semitism in Europe in the 1800s and continues with an examination of European colonial imperialism from 1884 to the outbreak of World War I, and then traces the emergence of racism as an ideology, and its modern application as an “ideological weapon for imperialism”, by the Boers during the Great Trek (1830s–40s) in the early 19th century.
Arendt argues that totalitarianism was a “novel form of government,” that “differs essentially from other forms of political oppression known to us such as despotism, tyranny and dictatorship” in that it applied terror to subjugate mass populations rather than just political adversaries.
Arendt also theorized that, owing to its peculiar ideology, “totalitarianism has discovered a means of dominating and terrorizing human beings from within”
She further contends that Jewry was not the operative factor in the Holocaust, but merely a convenient proxy, and that totalitarianism in Germany was, in the end, about terror and consistency, not eradicating Jews only. This is consistent with recent research indicating that Hitler greatly admired and emulated US methods for the extermination of Native Americans and the subjugation of enslaved Africans. A key concept is the application of Kant’s phrase “Radical Evil”, which she applied to the people who created and carried out such tyranny and their depiction of their victims as “Superfluous People”.
The book is regularly listed as one of the best non-fiction books of the 20th century, however due to her couragious recognition that similar forces were at work in Zionist Israel and Capitalist America, her ideas are often ignored or misquoted in corporate media and mainstream academic research.
The Origins of Totalitarianism begins with the rise of anti-Semitism in Europe in the 1800s and continues with an examination of European colonial imperialism from 1884 to the outbreak of World War I, and then traces the emergence of racism as an ideology, and its modern application as an “ideological weapon for imperialism”, by the Boers during the Great Trek (1830s–40s) in the early 19th century.
Arendt argues that totalitarianism was a “novel form of government,” that “differs essentially from other forms of political oppression known to us such as despotism, tyranny and dictatorship” in that it applied terror to subjugate mass populations rather than just political adversaries.
Arendt also theorized that, owing to its peculiar ideology, “totalitarianism has discovered a means of dominating and terrorizing human beings from within”
She further contends that Jewry was not the operative factor in the Holocaust, but merely a convenient proxy, and that totalitarianism in Germany was, in the end, about terror and consistency, not eradicating Jews only. This is consistent with recent research indicating that Hitler greatly admired and emulated US methods for the extermination of Native Americans and the subjugation of enslaved Africans. A key concept is the application of Kant’s phrase “Radical Evil”, which she applied to the people who created and carried out such tyranny and their depiction of their victims as “Superfluous People”.
The book is regularly listed as one of the best non-fiction books of the 20th century, however due to her couragious recognition that similar forces were at work in Zionist Israel and Capitalist America, her ideas are often ignored or misquoted in corporate media and mainstream academic research.
Resurrecting Empire
– Rashid Khalidi
Politics Lost: From RFK to W: How Politicians Have Become Less Courageous and More Interested in Keeping Power Than in Doing What’s Right for America
– Joe Klein
Democracia Y Mercado
– Adam Przeworski
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The Question of Palestine
– Edward W. Said
Published: 1979
For a long time, Edward Said was the most high-profile and internationally recognized of Palestinian intellectuals. His untimely death in 2003 was a blow for Palestinian advocacy, especially in the US, where few Palestinian voices are allowed to rise to general public awareness.
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The New Industrial State
– John Kenneth Galbraith
The War Prayer
– Mark Twain
Written in 1905 in response to the Spanish-American War and the subsequent US colonial attack on the Philippines.
- His family feared The War Prayer would be considered sacrilegious. Twain's publisher and other friends also discouraged him from publishing. Mindful of possible public reactions, Twain self-censored the story until after his death. Twain's illustrator Dan Beard asked him if he would publish it, and Twain replied, "No, I have told the whole truth in that, and only dead men can tell the truth in this world. It can be published after I am dead."
The Global Third Way Debate
– Anthony Giddens
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Gaza in Crisis: Reflections on Israel’s War Against the Palestinians
– Noam Chomsky and Ilan Pappé
In Gaza in Crisis, Noam Chomsky and Ilan Pappé, two of the issue’s most insightful and prominent critical voices, survey the fallout from Israel’s conduct in Gaza and place it into the context of Israel’s longstanding occupation of Palestine.
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World Revolution of Westernization: The Twentieth Century in Global Perspective
– Theodore H. Von Laue
The Paradox of American Democracy: Elites, Special Interests, and the Betrayal of Public Trust
– John Judis
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A People’s History of the United States
– Howard Zinn
A 1980 nonfiction book presenting a long-neglected side of history that avoids the typical “nationalist glorification of country”. Zinn does not hide or sugarcoat the many tragedies of US history. The book is assigned in many high schools and colleges across the United States, and has inspired in a quiet revolution in the field of historical research, which now commonly includes previously ignored stories.
In a 1998 interview, Zinn said his goal in writing the book was to inspire a “quiet revolution”. “Not a revolution in the classical sense of a seizure of power, but rather from people beginning to take power from within the institutions. In the workplace, the workers would take power to control the conditions of their lives."
In a 1998 interview, Zinn said his goal in writing the book was to inspire a “quiet revolution”. “Not a revolution in the classical sense of a seizure of power, but rather from people beginning to take power from within the institutions. In the workplace, the workers would take power to control the conditions of their lives."
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On Palestine
– Noam Chomsky and Ilan Pappé
An erudite and nuanced account of Palestine’s history. First published in 2015, it is an essential guide to understanding the shifting situation and is itself a sequel to their acclaimed book, Gaza in Crisis.