Michael Parenti Quotes

For years the Dalai Lama was on the payroll of the CIA, an agency that has perpetrated killings against rebellious workers, peasants, students, and others in countries around the world. His eldest brother played an active role in a CIA-front group. Another brother established an intelligence operation with the CIA, which included a CIA-trained guerrilla unit whose recruits parachuted back into Tibet to foment insurgency. The Dalai Lama was no pacifist. He supported the U.S./NATO military intervention into Afghanistan, also the 78 days' bombing of Yugoslavia and the destruction of that country.

Conservative pundits have a remarkable amount of free speech.

The crucial role communists played in organizing industrial unions in the 1930s and struggling for social reforms, peace, and civil rights strengthened rather than undermined democratic forces.

Some critics complain that the press is sensationalistic and intrusive. In fact, the media’s basic modus operandi is evasive rather than invasive. More common than the sensationalistic hype is the artful avoidance.

Standard histories of the Cold War assume that the Soviet Union exercised a lockstep control over the docile “satellite nations,” the latter being little more than puppets within a monolithic “Soviet Bloc.” The new documents throw a different light on the relationship between Moscow and its allies. Communist leaders in Poland, Hungary, East Germany, Cuba, Afghanistan, and elsewhere “could and did act in pursuit of their own interests, sometimes goading the Kremlin into involvements it did not want.”

Revolutions are not push button affairs; rather, they evolve only if there exists a reservoir of hope and grievance that can be galvanized into popular action.

Like most other people, Gibbon tended to perceive reality in accordance with the position he occupied in the social structure. As a gentleman scholar, he produced what elsewhere I have called "gentlemen's history," a genre heavily indebted to an upper class ideological perspective. In 1773, we find him beginning a work on his magus opus, A History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, while settled in a comfortable town house tended by half-a-dozen servants. Being immersed in what he called the "decent luxuries," and saturated with his own upper-class prepossession, Edward Gibbon was able to look kindly upon ancient Rome's violently acquisitive aristocracy. He might have produced a much different history had he been a self-educated cobbler, sitting in a cold shed, writing into the wee hours after a long day of unrewarding toil. No accident that the impoverished laborer, even if literate, seldom had the agency, agency to produce scholarly tomes.

Capitalism's modus operandi is to produce and sell an ever expanding supply of goods and services for ever greater profits. But the earth is finite. So is its ability to absorb wastes and toxins. While food yields shrink, the world's population grows 90 million a year and the planet's life support systems move closer to catastrophe. An ever expanding capitalism and a fragile, finite ecology appear to be on a calamitous collision course.

With the socialist ethic giving way to private greed, corruption assumed virulent new forms in the post-Communist nations. Officials high and low are on the take, including the police. The Russian security minister calculated that one-third of Russian nickel shipped out of the country was stolen. Among those enjoying "staggering profits" from this plunder were and (, 2/2/93). In April 1992, the chairman of Russia's central bank admitted that at least $20 billion had been illegally taken out of the country and deposited in Western banks (, 4/19/93).

The real danger we face is not from terrorism, but what is being done under the pretext of fighting it.

Russia became a juicy chunk of the Third World, with immense reserves of cheap labor, a vast treasure of natural resources, and industrial assets to be sold off at giveaway prices.

Throughout the ages, in keeping with their ideological proclivities, gentlemen historians have tended to dismiss the populares of the Roman Republic as self aggrandizing demagogues who affronted constitutional principles by encroaching upon the Senate's domain.

The trick is to steal big.

Something has got to be done about the internal combustion engine before it does something irreversible to us—assuming it already has not. It is not a rational and survivable form of technology. Its social, ecological, and human costs are far greater than any benefit it brings.

It is never explained why God could not have freely granted us redemption and salvation, assuming we were deemed worthy of it, without contriving to have some of us brutalize and murder his son.