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They can fool most of the people most of the time and use fair words to cloak their foul words with great skill, but their days in power are coming to an end now. Like good soldiers under corrupt leadership, standing valiantly in support of tyranny, they are on the wrong side of history. Those who are blind today, will eventually come to see.

• The really dangerous American fascists are not those who are hooked up directly or indirectly with the Axis. The FBI has its finger on those.
• The dangerous American fascist is the man who wants to do in the United States in an American way what Hitler did in Germany in a Prussian way.
• The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information...
• With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public.
• American fascism will not be really dangerous until there is a purposeful coalition among the cartelists, the deliberate poisoners of public information...
• Fascism is a worldwide disease... greatest threat to the United States will come after the war... within the United States itself.
  • H.A.W. in 1944, quoted by Thom Hartmann in Fascists Compete To Own America, Common Dreams, (30 April 2018)

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• Of the tyrant, spies & informers are the principal instruments. War is his favorite occupation, for the sake of engrossing the attention of the people, & making himself necessary to them as their leader.
  • Aristotle
• The secret of freedom lies in educating people, whereas the secret of tyranny is in keeping them ignorant.
  • Maximilien Robespierre
• If wars can be started with lies, they can be stopped with truth.
  • Assange

War is a racket. It always has been. Smedley Butler (USMC)

• Truth is coming & it can't be stopped.
  • Snowden

• The world we live in is ruled by insiders... one of the first things said to me by a very high ranking American official.. when I was minister... you have a choice. You can be an insider or an outsider. If you are an outsider you'll retain your right to say anything you want, whatever you believe in but know that you're going to be persecuted, you're going to be villified and you'll be jettisoned. … On the other hand, you can chose to be an insider, to play the game... if you chose to be an insider you'll be given information that outsiders don't have, you'll be given... an opportunity... to make some... small tiny changes within the inside, but the one rule that you must respect, is that insiders do not tell outsiders the truth, and they do not turn against other insiders
  Julian [Assange]... created the technology that allowed the outsiders to get a glimpse within... and this is why he's being persecuted this way and one of the worst aspects of this persecution from a feminist perspective is that he's been accused of a crime for which he's never been charged, that turns progressives against feminists and feminists against progressives. This attempt by the establishment to turn progressives against themselves in order to prosecute someone who has... revealed their crimes is a heinous crime in itself..."
  • Yanis VarouFakis, First they came for Assange: Yanis Varoufakis Srećko Horvat, Bozar, Brussels, | DiEM25 Youtube(quote begins @ 1:02:40)(19 June 2016)

• Recently, those who have criticized the actions of the U.S. Government (myself included) have been called “anti-American.”...The term “anti-American” is usually used by the American establishment to discredit... its critics. Once someone is branded anti-American, the chances are that he... will be judged before they are heard, and the argument will be lost in the welter of bruised national pride.
  But what does the term “anti-American” mean? Does it mean... that you’re opposed to freedom of speech?... That you have a quarrel with giant sequoias?...that you don’t admire the hundreds of thousands of American citizens who marched against nuclear weapons, or the thousands of war resisters who forced their government to withdraw from Vietnam?...that you hate all Americans?
  This sly conflation of America’s culture, music, literature, the breathtaking physical beauty of the land, the ordinary pleasures of ordinary people with criticism of the U.S. government’s foreign policy (about which, thanks to America’s “free press”, sadly most Americans know very little) is a deliberate and extremely effective strategy.
  To call someone “anti-American”, indeed to be anti-American, (or... anti-Indian or anti-Timbuktuan) is not just racist, it’s a failure of the imagination. An inability to see the world in terms other than those the establishment has set out for you... If you don’t love us, you hate us... If you’re not with us, you’re with the terrorists.
  • Arundhati Roy: Come September, Speech at the Lensic Performing Arts Center, Santa Fe, NM, USA

Re: American exceptionalism

• In 2010, 80 percent of Americans polled by Gallup said the U.S. is the "greatest country" in the world. Of the 20 wealthy "democracies," the U.S. citizens were the most proud of their nationality and most supportive of attacking other countries without the U.N.'s consent. Younger generations were less likely to share these beliefs.
  So what is the reality? When we look at the indices of economic, social, health and even the level of "democracy," the U.S. comes out behind other countries... According to the World Health Organization (WHO), the U.S. comes in 31st for life expectancy. The World Bank found that for equitable distribution in wealth, the U.S. ranks 147 out of 152 countries. In December 2017, the UN Special Rapporteur for Extreme Poverty in the United States found that the U.S. has highest youth poverty rate across the 36 Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development countries.... The UN Rapporteur also found that the U.S. ranks 36th in water and sanitation and has the highest incarceration rate in the world. What about education? The Programme for International Student Assessment found that U.S. students rank 38 out of 71 countries.
  • Carolyn Bninski: American exceptionalism harms all of humanity, Longmont Times-Call, (24 September 2018)

Isms

• Awareness is the light of life. Anything done outside awareness leads to destruction. All thoughts which lead you to selfishness lead you away from awareness. In awareness there is no memory. Memory is only in the mind. All struggle and care is in the mind, never in awareness. Suffering, depression and craving for drugs are all states of mind. Awareness sets you free and allows you to enjoy life. When awareness is still dormant, 'isms' control mind, spirit and body and create divisions. This is maya.. illusion. When awareness controls and guides you, 'isms' cannot come close to you. Awareness can even make a king give up his kingdom, Maitreya teaches. Privileges divide, denying oneness to the entity within you. 'Isms' are not thrown away all at once. They are steps on the way. Awareness controls the pace of evolution.
  • The art of Self-realization

Looking_Backward, 2000-1887,' by Edward Bellamy (1888) Excerpts from the WQ page:

• The next of the great wastes was that from competition. The field of industry was a battlefield as wide as the world, in which the workers wasted, in assailing one another, energies which, if expended in concerted effort, as to-day, would have enriched all. As for mercy or quarter in this warfare, there was absolutely no suggestion of it. To deliberately enter a field of business and destroy the enterprises of those who had occupied it previously, in order to plant one's own enterprise on their ruins, was an achievement which never failed to command popular admiration.
  • Ch. 22.

• The producers of the nineteenth century were not, like ours, working together for the maintenance of the community, but each solely for his own maintenance at the expense of the community. If, in working to this end, he at the same time increased the aggregate wealth, that was merely incidental. It was just as feasible and as common to increase one's private hoard by practices injurious to the general welfare. One's worst enemies were necessarily those of his own trade, for, under your plan of making private profit the motive of production, a scarcity of the article he produced was what each particular producer desired.
• Ch. 22

• Their system of unorganized and antagonistic industries was as absurd economically as it was morally abominable. Selfishness was their only science, and in industrial production selfishness is suicide. Competition, which is the instinct of selfishness, is another word for dissipation of energy, while combination is the secret of efficient production; and not till the idea of increasing the individual hoard gives place to the idea of increasing the common stock can industrial combination be realized, and the acquisition of wealth really begin. Even if the principle of share and share alike for all men were not the only humane and rational basis for a society, we should still enforce it as economically expedient, seeing that until the disintegrating influence of self-seeking is suppressed no true concert of industry is possible.'
  • Ch. 22.

• My friends, if you would see men again the beasts of prey they seemed in the nineteenth century, all you have to do is to restore the old social and industrial system, which taught them to view their natural prey in their fellow-men, and find their gain in the loss of others. No doubt it seems to you that no necessity, however dire, would have tempted you to subsist on what superior skill or strength enabled you to wrest from others equally needy.
  • Ch. 26.

• Even the ministers of religion were not exempt from this cruel necessity. While they warned their flocks against the love of money, regard for their families compelled them to keep an outlook for the pecuniary prizes of their calling. Poor fellows, theirs was indeed a trying business, preaching to men a generosity and unselfishness which they and everybody knew would, in the existing state of the world, reduce to poverty those who should practice them, laying down laws of conduct which the law of self-preservation compelled men to break.
  • Ch. 26.

• Stores! stores! stores! miles of stores! ten thousand stores to distribute the goods needed by this one city, which in my dream had been supplied with all things from a single warehouse, as they were ordered through one great store in every quarter, where the buyer, without waste of time or labor, found under one roof the world's assortment in whatever line he desired. There the labor of distribution had been so slight as to add but a scarcely perceptible fraction to the cost of commodities to the user. The cost of production was virtually all he paid. But here the mere distribution of the goods, their handling alone, added a fourth, a third, a half and more, to the cost. All these ten thousand plants must be paid for, their rent, their staffs of superintendence, their platoons of salesmen, their ten thousand sets of accountants, jobbers, and business dependents, with all they spent in advertising themselves and fighting one another, and the consumers must do the paying. What a famous process for beggaring a nation!
  • Ch. 28.

• Could they be reasoning beings, who did not see the folly which, when the product is made and ready for use, wastes so much of it in getting it to the user? If people eat with a spoon that leaks half its contents between bowl and lip, are they not likely to go hungry?
  • Ch. 28.

• Presently, too, as I observed the wretched beings about me more closely, I perceived that they were all quite dead. Their bodies were so many living sepulchres. On each brutal brow was plainly written the hic jacet of a soul dead within.
  • Ch. 28.

• As I looked, horror struck, from one death's head to another, I was affected by a singular hallucination. Like a wavering translucent spirit face superimposed upon each of these brutish masks I saw the ideal, the possible face that would have been the actual if mind and soul had lived.

• I was moved with contrition as with a strong agony, for I had been one of those who had endured that these things should be. Therefore now I found upon my garments the blood of this great multitude of strangled souls of my brothers. The voice of their blood cried out against me from the ground. Every stone of the reeking pavements, every brick of the pestilential rookeries, found a tongue and called after me as I fled: What hast thou done with thy brother Abel?
  • Ch. 28.

• Do you not know that close to your doors a great multitude of men and women, flesh of your flesh, live lives that are one agony from birth to death? Listen! their dwellings are so near that if you hush your laughter you will hear their grievous voices, the piteous crying of the little ones that suckle poverty, the hoarse curses of men sodden in misery turned half-way back to brutes, the chaffering of an army of women selling themselves for bread. With what have you stopped your ears that you do not hear these doleful sounds?
  • Ch. 28.

• The folly of men, not their hard-heartedness, was the great cause of the world's poverty. It was not the crime of man, nor of any class of men, that made the race so miserable, but a hideous, ghastly mistake, a colossal world-darkening blunder.
  • Ch. 28.

• Looking Backward was written in the belief that the Golden Age lies before us and not behind us.
  • Author's postscript.

• • Learn more:
• Edward_Bellamy#Looking_Backward,_2000-1887_(1888)

Quotes from 1984, by George Orwell

• The Party taught that the proles were natural inferiors who must be kept in subjection, like animals, by the application of a few simple rules.

• It was not necessary to know much. So long as they continued to work and breed, their other activities were without importance. Left to themselves, like cattle turned loose upon the plains of Argentina, they had reverted to a style of life that appeared to be natural to them, a sort of ancestral pattern. They were born, they grew up in the gutters, they went to work at twelve, they passed through a brief blossoming-period of beauty and sexual desire, they married at twenty, they were middle-aged at thirty, they died, for the most part, at sixty. Heavy physical work, the care of home and children, petty quarrels with neighbours, films, football, beer, and above all, gambling, filled up the horizon of their minds. To keep them in control was not difficult.

• A few agents of the Thought Police moved always among them, spreading false rumours and marking down and eliminating the few individuals who were judged capable of becoming dangerous.

• It was not desirable that the proles should have strong political feelings. All that was required of them was a primitive patriotism which could be appealed to whenever it was necessary to make them accept longer working-hours or shorter rations.

• The capitalists owned everything in the world, and everyone else was their slave. They owned all the land, all the houses, all the factories, and all the money. If anyone disobeyed them they could throw them into prison, or they could take his job away and starve him to death. When any ordinary person spoke to a capitalist he had to cringe and bow to him, and take off his cap and address him as ‘Sir’.

• ‘If there is hope,’ he had written in the diary, ‘it lies in the proles.’ The words kept coming back to him, statement of a mystical truth and a palpable absurdity.

• In a way, the world-view of the Party imposed itself most successfully on people incapable of understanding it.They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening. By lack of understanding they remained sane. They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them no harm, because it left no residue behind, just as a grain of corn will pass undigested through the body of a bird.

• The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labour. War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent...

• In principle the war effort is always so planned as to eat up any surplus that might exist after meeting the bare needs of the population. In practice the needs of the population are always underestimated, with the result that there is a chronic shortage of half the necessities of life; but this is looked on as an advantage. It is deliberate policy to keep even the favoured groups somewhere near the brink of hardship, because a general state of scarcity increases the importance of small privileges and thus magnifies the distinction between one group and another....

• The consciousness of being at war, and therefore in danger, makes the handing-over of all power to a small caste seem the natural, unavoidable condition of survival.

• In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance.

• War, it will be seen, accomplishes the necessary destruction, but accomplishes it in a psychologically acceptable way. In principle it would be quite simple to waste the surplus labour of the world by building temples and pyramids, by digging holes and filling them up again...

• But this would provide only the economic and not the emotional basis for a hierarchical society. What is concerned here is not the morale of masses, whose attitude is unimportant so long as they are kept steadily at work, but the morale of the Party itself. Even the humblest Party member is expected to be competent, industrious, and even intelligent within narrow limits, but it is also necessary that he should be a credulous and ignorant fanatic...

• It does not matter whether the war is actually happening, and, since no decisive victory is possible, it does not matter whether the war is going well or badly. All that is needed is that a state of war should exist.

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• Are always welcome.