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Conservatives are fond of telling us what a wonderful, happy, prosperous nation this is. The only thing that matches their love of country is the remarkable indifference they show toward the people who live in it.

Michael Parenti

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Michael Parenti
Age: 91
Born: 1933
Born: January 1
Historian
Journalist
Political Scientist
New York City
New York
Political
Telling
Live
Toward
Country
Nation
Matches
Thing
Wonderful
Fond
Love
Nations
Conservatives
People
Happy
Prosperous
Show
Indifference
Shows
Remarkable

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Archbishop Romero of El Salvador was a member of the Salvadoran aristocracy. He could not have risen to the top of the church hierarchy otherwise. But after he began voicing critical remarks about the war and concerned comments about the poor, he was assassinated.
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A huge national security state has developed in the United States since World War II. Its function is to buttress anticommunist, procapitalist governments and undermine and destroy popular movements whenever possible.
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When change threatens to rule, then the rules are changed.
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The worst forms of tyranny, or certainly the most successful ones, are not those we rail against but those that so insinuate themselves into the imagery of our consciousness, and the fabric of our lives, as not to be perceived as tyranny.
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The dirty truth is that many people find fascism to be not particularly horrible.
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Generosity toward the lower classes historically has never been an important part of upper-class awareness.
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The first atrocity, the first war crime committed in any war of aggression by the aggressors is against the truth.
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Only by establishing military supremacy were the European and North American colonizers able to eliminate the crafts and industries of Third World peoples, control their markets, extort tribute, undermine their cultures, destroy their villages, steal their lands and natural resources, enslave their labor, and accumulate vast wealth.
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It is ironic that people of modest means sometimes become conservative out of a scarcity fear bred by the very capitalist system they support.
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Ecology's implications for capitalism are too momentous for the capitalist to contemplate. The plutocrats are more wedded to their wealth than to the Earth upon which they live, more concerned with the fate of their fortunes than with the fate of humanity. The present ecological crisis has been created by the few at the expense of the many.
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Every ruling class has wanted only this: all the rewards and none of the burdens. The operational code is: we have a lot we can get more we want it all.
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You see there are people who believe the function of the police is to fight crime, and that's not true, the function of the police is social control and protection of property.
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The Federalists also used bribes, intimidation, and fraud against opponents of the Constitution.
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The US government is usually on the wrong side against the poor and downtrodden, because the wrong side is the right side, given the class interests upon which the [US] policy is fixed.
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The peculiar danger of executive power is that it executes.
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One mechanism of repression is the grand jury.
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One finds fortunes built on slave labor, indentured labor, prison labor, immigrant labor, female labor, child labor, and scab labor - backed by the lethal force of gun thugs and militia. 'Old money' is often little more than dirty money laundered by several generations of possession.
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