Among the most salient properties of failed states is that they do protect their citizens from violence and perhaps even destruction, or that decision-makers regard such concerns as lower in priority than the short-term power and wealth of the state’s dominant sectors. Another characteristic of failed states is that they are outlaw states whose leaderships dismiss international law and treaties with contempt. Such instruments may be binding on others but not on the outlaw state. ibid.
An invisible network of prisons and detention centres into which thousands of suspects have disappeared without trace since the War on Terror began … Unknown numbers of suspects have been sent by rendition to countries where torture is virtually guaranteed. ibid.
Basic services deteriorated even more than they had under the sanctions: hospitals regularly ran out of the most basic medicines; the facilities are in horrid shape. ibid.
The Lancet study estimating 100,000 probable deaths by October 2004 elicited enough comment in England so that the government had to issue an embarrassing denial but in the United States virtual silence prevailed. ibid.
Halliburton: the biggest recipient of Iraqi funds. ibid.
A viable non-proliferation regime depends crucially on the implementation of the obligation to disarm nuclear weapons as well as the obligation not to acquire them. ibid.
The logic of the annexation of Texas was essentially that attributed to Saddam Hussein when he conquered Kuwait. ibid.
[Adam] Smith held that the principle architects of global policy, our merchants and manufacturers, have sought to ensure their own interests are most peculiarly attended to however grievous the impacts on others. ibid.
The war on drugs also had an important domestic component much like the war on crime: it served to frighten the domestic population into obedience as domestic policies were being implemented to benefit extreme wealth at the expense of the large majority. ibid.
Failed states need not be weak. ibid.
Washington firmly supported Pinochet’s regime of violence and terror and had no slight role in its initial triumph. ibid.
The United States has the right to make them suffer by economic strangulation: Eisenhower approved economic sanctions in the expectation that if the Cuban people are hungry they will throw Castro out. Kennedy agreed that the embargo would hasten Fiden Castro’s departure as a result of the rising discomfort among hungry Cubans. Along with expanding the embargo Kennedy initiated a major terrorist campaign designed to bring the terrors of the Earth to Cuba. ibid.
The threat of democracy was not overcome until the 1965 Suharto coup and the huge slaughter that immediately followed establishing one of the most brutal regimes of the late twentieth century. There was no further concern about democracy or about awesome human rights violations and war crimes. Suharto remained ‘our kind of guy’ as the Clinton administration described him. ibid.
United States sought to block Iraqi democracy … The one thing every Iraqi agrees upon is that occupation should end soon which would be in direct conflict with the US objective of constructing a US-friendly democracy that would allow America to replace its military presence in Saudi Arabia with one in Iraq that would allow America to keep shaping the regional balance of power … Democracy would be welcomed as long as it is the traditional top-down kind. ibid.
71% of people rarely gets safe clean water; 47% never have enough electricity; 70% say their sewage system rarely works; and 40% of southern Iraqis are unemployed … 80% of Iraqis favoured near-term US troop withdrawal. ibid.
The most horrendous car bombing in Beirut in 1985 a huge explosion killing 80 people and wounding 200 mostly women and girls leaving the mosque exit where the bomb was placed, the attack aimed at a Muslim cleric was traced to the CIA. ibid.
Intifada: in its first month Israel killed 75 Palestinians … in response mostly to stone throwing using US helicopters to attack apartment complexes and other civilian targets. Clinton responded by making the biggest deal in a decade to send new military helicopters to Israel. The US population was protected from that information by the press. ibid.
It was not the villain Arafat who was the prime obstacle to the realization of a Palestinian state but rather the United States and Israel. ibid.
The perils of democracy: Madison asked them to consider what would happen in England if elections were open to all classes of people – the population would then use its voting rights to distribute land more equitably. To ward off such injustice, he recommended arrangements to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority … Aristotle and Madison posed essentially the same problem but drew opposite conclusions: Madison’s solution was to restrict democracy while Aristotle’s was to reduce inequality. ibid.
80% regard universal health care as more important than holding down taxes. ibid.
The US prison population is the highest in the world … Over half of those in federal prisons are there for drug-related crimes. ibid.
Render the US [health] system the most inefficient in the industrial world with costs far higher than the average for industrial OECD societies and some of the worst health outcomes. ibid.
The United States is an enlightened state by definition; its attack dog is an enlightened state as long as it follows orders, and anyone else who enlists in the crusade is an enlightened state; everyone else is a rogue state. Noam Chomsky, Dorothy lecture September 1999, ‘Sovereignty and World Order’
Any state that has any degree of power regards itself as uniquely admirable or magnificent and doesn’t understand why the rest of the world doesn’t perceive our angelic character. Noam Chomsky, lecture 16th August 2017, ‘The Alien Perspective on Humanity’, Youtube 51.14
Private lives should be no business of the State. The State is bad enough as it is. It cannot educate or medicate or feed the people; it cannot do anything but kill the people. No State like that do we want prying into our private lives. Gore Vidal, cited Gert Jonkers, ‘Gore Vidal the Fantastic Man’, Butt no. 20 April 2007
Welcome to Luton: it’s the birthplace of militant Islam. Divided States I: Europe, Tommy Robinson, History 2019
Muslims have essentially become the new Jews. ibid. commentator
EDL mobilised a new generation of activists who were just focusing on Islam. ibid.
The worst refugee crisis in central Europe for a generation. ibid. news
According to the UN, over 5 million Syrians have been forced to flee their country since the war began in 2011. ibid. caption
The AfD gained 94 seats in the German parliament. ibid. caption
September 11th: David Cameron has been in Leeds preaching to businessmen the virtues of what he calls the Smart State. This seems to be a state that gets away with doing as little as possible for its citizens. And shuffling as many responsibilities as he can on to whomever thinks can make a profit out of them … I can see the state as maternal: I don’t think that’s foolish. Alan Bennett’s Diaries, BBC 2020
The more corrupt the state, the more laws. Publius Cornelius Tacitus