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I’m so sick of arming the world and then sending troops over to destroy the fucking arms. You know what I mean? We keep arming these little countries then we go and blow the shit out of them. We’re like the bullies of the world. We’re like Jack Palance in the movie Shane throwing the pistol at the sheep herder’s feet. Bill Hicks, Revelations, Dominion Theatre, London
Not only will America go to your country and kill all your people, they’ll come back twenty years later and make a movie about how killing your people made their soldiers feel sad. Frankie Boyle
The group’s figurehead is Brutus. His relationship to Caesar is particularly complex. Rome Revealed s1e1: Killing Caesar, National Geographic 2010
He even moves through Rome without a bodyguard. ibid.
They gather in the meeting-house of Pompey’s theatre. ibid.
The last blow is struck by Brutus – Caesar’s one-time friend. ibid.
This was perhaps Octavian’s greatest tribute – completing the job that Caesar had begun. In 27 B.C. he was crowned Emperor. He was crowned Caesar Augustus. ibid.
40 years ago under Kennedy, Brazil also had a populist president … At that time the Kennedy administration organised a military coup … It had a domino effect throughout the continent. Noam Chomsky, lecture Merrimack College, ‘The Onslaught Against Freedom and Democracy Led by the Bush Administration Reactionaries’
Indonesia was supposed to be in this new [post-war] world order granted a kind of nominal independence … In Indonesia there were essentially three forces: one was President Sukarno, the leader of the nationalists movement who was an independent nationalist and therefore already unacceptable, then there was a mass-based popular party – the Indonesian communist party, which was needless to say totally unacceptable, and thirdly there was the army which more or less shared US aims. Noam Chomsky, leture MOMA 16th November 1992 on East Timor
The CIA began to support right-wing parties – that didn’t work. They supported an insurrection in 1957/58 – that was put down. The US then turned to a classic technique for overthrowing civilian government – one that’s used over and over again – namely, cut off any aid or assistance or support to the government but maintain, even increase, military aid. ibid.
1965 and then Suharto took over and then came this huge bloodbath … The biggest bloodbath since the holocaust. ibid.
East Timor: The silence began in December 1975 with the Indonesian invasion: from then on there’s a sharp decline in coverage – it reaches zero, zero literally in the United States and Canada, in 1978 which is the year in which the atrocities peaked, and in which in fact Jimmy Carter took some time off from his sermons about human rights to increase US aid to Indonesia because they were actually running out of arms in the war against this tiny country. ibid.
Britain stepped up its military sales to Indonesia. ibid.
We like to forget the history, Iranians don’t. In 1953, The United States and Britain overthrew the parliamentary government [in Iran] and installed a brutal dictator … In 1979, the population overthrew the dictator. And since then the United States has been essentially torturing Iran: first tried the military coup, and then supported Saddam Hussein during Iraq’s invasion of Iran which killed hundreds of thousands of people, and after that United States started imposing harsh sanctions on Iran. Noam Chomsky, cited The Real News November 2007
In preceding months the armed forces conducted a campaign of political violence, including assassination of union leaders and other extrajudicial executions, leaving tortured and mutilated bodies by roadsides for the first time. Noam Chomsky, Deterring Democracy
In the case of Guatemala and Chile it was necessary to resort to economic strangulation, subversion, and military force to overthrow the democratic regimes and establish the preferred regional standards. ibid.
The UN Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (CEPAL) reports that the percentage of the Guatemalan population living in extreme poverty increased rapidly after the establishment of democracy in 1985: from 45 per cent in that year to 76 per cent in 1988. ibid.
At another ‘human farm’ in Guatemala, babies ranging from eleven days old to four months old had been found. The director of the farm, at the time of his arrest, declared that the children ‘were sold to American or Israeli families whose children needed organ transplants at the cost of $75,000 per child’. ibid.
The nightmare was restored in a coup organized by the CIA, with the cooperation of Guatemalan officers who betrayed their country in fear of the regional superpower ... With regular US support, the regime of terror and torture and disappearance has been maintained, peaking in the late 1960s with direct US government participation. ibid.
The successful intervention under Kennedy to block a democratic election, the direct US participation in murderous counterinsurgency campaigns under Lyndon Johnson, the continuing supply of arms to Guatemala through the late 1970s (contrary to illusory claims) and the reliance on our Israeli mercenary state to fill any gaps when congressional restrictions finally took effect. ibid.
When Woodrow Wilson invaded Mexico and Hispaniola (Haiti and the Dominican Republic) – where his warriors murdered and destroyed, reestablished virtual slavery, demolished the political system, and placed the countries firmly in the hands of US investors – these actions were in self-defence against the Huns. ibid.
In Bolivia, also a recipient of US military aid and hailed as a great success story, the military does not match its Peruvian and Colombian colleagues in the scale of state terror, but there was no US reaction to the declaration of a state of emergency by the President of Bolivia, following by the jailing of ‘hundreds of union leaders and teachers who he said threatened his Government’s anti-inflation policies with their wage demands’. ibid. Joseph Treaster of The New York Times
A military coup took place in 1964. A 1980 coup was carried out with the assistance of Klaus Barbie, who had been sent to Bolivia when he could no longer be protected in France, where he had been working under US control to repress the anti-Fascist resistance, as he had done under the Nazis. ibid.
In July 1990, President Cossiga of Italy called for an investigation of charges aired over state television that the CIA had paid Licio Gelli to foment terrorist activities in Italy in the late 1960s and 1970s. Gelli was Grandmaster of the secret Propaganda Due (P2) Masonic lodge and had long been suspected of a leading role in terrorism and other criminal activities. In those years, according to a 1984 report of the Italian Parliament, P2 and other neo-fascist groups, working closely with elements of the Italian military and secret services, were preparing a virtual coup to impose an ultra-right regime and to block the rising forces of the left. ibid.
In 1954 the United States overthrew the first democratic government in Guatemala, installed a brutal dictatorship that carried out horrendous crimes and ultimately a virtual genocide … all with the strong support of the Reagan administration. Noam Chomsky, lecture 7th June 2011, ‘The Evolving Global Order: Prospects and Opportunities’
In February 2004 the two traditional torturers of Haiti – France and the United States – combined to back a military coup and send President Aristide off to Africa. The US denies him permission to return to the entire region. Noam Chomsky
1965: A military coup in Indonesia, the Suharto coup, led to an extraordinary massacre, what The New York Times called a staggering mass slaughter killed hundreds of thousands of people mostly landless peasants, destroyed the only mass political party and opened the country up to western exploitation: euphoria in the west was so enormous that it couldn’t be contained; The New York Times describing the staggering mass slaughter – it called it ‘a gleam of light in Asia’. Noam Chomsky, lecture Centre for Popular Economics 2012, ‘Who Owns the World?’, Youtube 59.02
Nicaragua, 2001: The United States radically intervened in the election and warned Nicaragua that the Untied States would not accept the wrong outcome … all of this passes without comment. Noam Chomsky, lecture New York 2002, ‘The History and Hypocrisy of the War on Terror’
Nicaraguans were thus informed very explicitly that only a vote for the US candidate would end the US terror and the illegal economic warfare. The Intellectual class in the United States and Britain and other places went along continuing to suppress the US version of the peace process with the diligence that’s required on important affairs of state. Noam Chomsky, lecture London 1993, ‘500 Years of Western Imperialism’