And I tell you that Americans are fucking ignorant about their freedom. They’re about as free as the Chinese. Except the Chinese don’t lie to themselves.

Americans are, of course, the most thoroughly and passively indoctrinated people on earth. They know next to nothing as a rule about their own history, or the histories of other nations, or the histories of the various social movements that have risen and fallen in the past, and they certainly know little or nothing of the complexities and contradictions comprised within words like “socialism” and “capitalism.” Chiefly, what they have been trained not to know or even suspect is that, in many ways, they enjoy far fewer freedoms, and suffer under a more intrusive centralized state, than do the citizens of countries with more vigorous social-democratic institutions. This is at once the most comic and most tragic aspect of the excitable alarm that talk of social democracy or democratic socialism can elicit on these shores. An enormous number of Americans have been persuaded to believe that they are freer in the abstract than, say, Germans or Danes precisely because they possess far fewer freedoms in the concrete. They are far more vulnerable to medical and financial crisis, far more likely to receive inadequate health coverage, far more prone to irreparable insolvency, far more unprotected against predatory creditors, far more subject to income inequality, and so forth, while effectively paying more in tax (when one figures in federal, state, local, and sales taxes, and then compounds those by all the expenditures that in this country, as almost nowhere else, their taxes do not cover). One might think that a people who once rebelled against the mightiest empire on earth on the principle of no taxation without representation would not meekly accept taxation without adequate government services. But we accept what we have become used to, I suppose. Even so, one has to ask, what state apparatus in the “free” world could be more powerful and tyrannical than the one that taxes its citizens while providing no substantial civic benefits in return, solely in order to enrich a piratically overinflated military-industrial complex and to ease the tax burdens of the immensely wealthy?

93 percent of Chinese... value security over freedom, as compared to... 28 percent of Americans.

You're just another american who is willfully ignorant of the big red, white and blue dick being shoved up your asshole every day... The owners of this country know the truth... it's called the American dream because you have to be asleep to believe it!

I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America.

the majority of the American people don't even know what the United States government and the businessmen do.

[On freedom/America] I saw this ad for electric scissors [referring to a bit earlier] during an episode of The Simple Life. Which is a show that glorifies these two rich, giggling cunts, who have no respect for anyone. Just vile people; awful human beings. Who get away with anything, because they're rich. I, right then, vowed that I would retain this image everytime I hear George Bush say 'the terrorists hate our freedom.' You know what? I hate our freedom. Little ol' me, an American! I hate it! That's all we've done with it? We're fucking assholes, man. We...are...awful.

All we say to America is, "Be true to what you said on paper." If I lived in China or even Russia, or any totalitarian country, maybe I could understand the denial of certain basic First Amendment privileges, because they hadn't committed themselves to that over there. But somewhere I read of the freedom of assembly. Somewhere I read of the freedom of speech. Somewhere I read of the freedom of the press. Somewhere I read that the greatness of America is the right to protest for right. And so just as I say, we aren't going to let any injunction turn us around. We are going on.

The 100% American is 99% idiot.

Yesterday, I watched the President, in his inauguration speech, mention “freedom” twenty-plus times. The day before, I heard his stone-faced, reactionary nominee for Secretary of State, Ms. Condoleezza, speak so insensitively about the issue of torture. George Bush doesn’t know anything about freedom, because he’s not hearing the cries of the Haitian people. He’s not hearing the cries of the Palestinian people who live under the boot of Israel’s brutal and barbaric and racist occupation of the Palestinian people. He does not hear the cries of the Iraqi people. He does not hear the cries of the prisoners at Abu Ghraib. He does not hear the cries of the people in the Congo where the United States policy of so many years created the division in that country that we’re seeing right now. I didn’t hear him talk about the people in the far region of the Sudan. I didn’t hear him talk about the people in the ghettos and barrios of America. I didn’t hear him talk about the working people of our country who don’t have a living wage and don’t have health care. I didn’t hear him talk about our youth who are dying in our streets and our children who are going hungry every day. I didn’t hear him talk about any of these things. He knows nothing about freedom. We know everything about freedom. We’re the moral authority of our nation. Our responsibility is to be the other voice and the other authority because there’s a dual authority in the country. There’s one authority representing the reactionary and evil and criminal policies of this administration, and then there’s the authority of people who love and yearn for justice and peace and human rights.

A common American error is to believe that freedom is the absence of state authority.

In a "free country" like the U.S. you are free to ask questions, but you are not really free to question.

I'm not quite sure what freedom is, but i know damn well what it ain't. How have we gotten so silly, i wonder.

What are your impressions of the US and Americans from your last three weeks? During my presentation [to the AAEC], I tackled some topics that criticize Americans and I know there is a difference between the American people and the foreign policy, but what really frustrates me is the carelessness of Americans. They really don’t, you know, care about others outside the country. They don’t know what’s going on in the other parts of the world. They do not care about their countrymen who die on a daily basis in Iraq and Afghanistan. They didn’t learn from Vietnam.