Philosophers From The United States

"Taxes forcibly transfer wealth from producers to legislators, who justify their expropriations under cover of law."

"The export of revolution at the behest of the Soviets has been transformed into the export of healthcare at the behest of the Cuban people. When I visited Cuba this past March, this was one of the areas of Cuban activity on which I focused—the delivery of first-class healthcare to impoverished people in Cuba, in Venezuela and elsewhere in South and Central America, and increasingly in sub-Saharan Africa."

"We could learn much from how the Cubans deliver healthcare particularly applicable to our rural areas and our inner cities where impoverished people predominate. And in the process, the contact would benefit Cubans. They would be able to study what is strong and robust about the U.S. healthcare system—the high technology components, for example—and at the same time learn that freedom and democracy are pretty good items too."

"As Colin Powell's right-hand man at the State Department, Larry Wilkerson seethed quietly during President Bush's first term. Yesterday, Colonel Wilkerson made up for lost time. He said the vice president and the secretary of defense created a "Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal" that hijacked U.S. foreign policy."

"Wilkerson won't say outright that he and Powell were deliberately snowed by intelligence reports tailored to fit a political push for war, but he has edged closer to that view, noting, "I've begun to wonder." It turns out that the administration relied on fabricators' claims about Hussein's illusory WMD programs and, in one case, an al Qaeda suspect whom the CIA turned over to alleged torturers in Egypt. "I kick myself in the ass," Wilkerson says. "How did we ever get to that place?""

"Let's examine just two of the extremely negative impacts of our almost half-century of failure vis-à-vis Cuba: The U.S. has reconciled with the Communist governments in China and Vietnam. We support dictators throughout Central Asia under the strategic mantra of "contact and influence is better than isolation". We talked to the Communist Soviet Union for the duration of the Cold War. But we cannot bring ourselves to deal with Havana and have maintained that failed policy for almost half a century. It is simply absurd to continue to do so."

"He is particularly appalled by U.S. treatment of enemy detainees, counting at least 100 deaths in custody during the course of the war on terrorism -- 27 of them ruled homicides. "Murder is torture," he says. "It's not torture lite.""

"When conformity is required, as it is in Christianity, what are the results? To begin with, the sacrifice of truth inevitably follows. One can be committed to conformity or one can be committed to truth, but not both. The pursuit of truth requires the unrestricted use of one's mind—the moral freedom to question, to examine evidence, to consider opposing viewpoints, to criticize, to accept as true only that which can be demonstrated—regardless whether one's conclusions conform to a particular creed."

"Those in government are especially susceptible to the corruption of power, because government is institutionalized coercion."

"Democrats need to get their act together... they need to do things like not just talk about prohibiting the president from using military force against Iran without congressional authorization. They need to scare the bejesus out of him if there’s any way to do that, and say, “We will cut everything off immediately if you use force against Iran without our permission.” And then they need to think hard about whether or not they’re going to give permission."

"Well, we’ve got 330 million Americans 280 million of whom I’m convinced, are ignorant, apathetic, fearful, etc, etc. And you tell them anything, and they’ll believe it. And if you give them the politics of fear, as a daily food, they will believe you. They will go along with you."

"As Herbert Spencer was to point out in the following century, feudal serfs were required to turn over one-third of their produce to their overlord. This means that any citizen who is required to pay a tax rate greater than one-third is worse off in this respect than the lowly serf."

"We have just, as we did with torture from 2002 to 2007, 2008, as we substantiated for the world that torture was OK, we have now OK’d the killing of recognized members of other states’ government. That’s what Soleimani was, no matter how heinous we may paint him... We have become the law of the jungle, rather than, as we have been since 1945, the greatest supporter of international law and the rule of law in general across the face of the globe. With torture and with killing other state recognized individuals of their government, we have become the tiger, the lion, the bear, the alligator in that jungle. It’s not a very, very good precedent to have set, as the Russians indicated. The Chinese have said similar things. It’s a terrible precedent to have set. America exists today to make war. How else do we interpret 19 straight years of war and no end in sight? It’s part of who we are. It’s part of what the American Empire is. We are going to lie, cheat and steal, as Pompeo is doing right now, as Trump is doing right now, as Tom Cotton is doing right now, and a host of other members of my political party, the Republicans, are doing right now. We are going to cheat and steal to do whatever it is we have to do to continue this war complex. That’s the truth of it. And that’s the agony of it."

"This (a war with Iran) would be a vicious, long-term guerrilla campaign waged by the Iranians over 10 or 15 years... And it would cost $2 trillion and lots of lives and more than anything else, it would require at least a half a million troops. No allies are going to join us. I’ll go to my grave regretting the death of every soldier and sailor, marine and airmen in Iraq and... three hundred thousand or so plus civilians and millions that have been displaced."

"I wouldn't characterize it the way Larry has, calling it a cabal...Now what Larry is suggesting in his comments is that very often maybe Mr. Rumsfeld and Vice President Cheney would take decisions in to the president that the rest of us weren't aware of. That did happen, on a number of occasions."

"The Christian theologian will never find a contradiction between the propositions of faith and reason, because it is his job to interpret them out of existence."

"If acorns start growing into theologians, or if women begin turning into pillars of salt, then we may wish to hypothesize about a supernatural influence. But until such time as nature becomes hopelessly unintelligible and unpredictable, we need look no further than nature itself for explanations."

"Through inculcating the notion that sacrifice is a virtue, Christianity has succeeded in convincing many people that misery incurred through sacrifice is a mark of virtue. Pain becomes the insignia of morality—and conversely, pleasure becomes the insignia of immorality. Christianity, therefore, does not say, ‘Go forth and be miserable.’ Rather, it says, ‘Go forth and practice the virtue of self-sacrifice.’ In practical terms, these commands are identical."

"Intellectually, every man is an island unto himself; no man can assume the responsibility of thinking for another. The virtue of rationality thus entails intellectual independence and the willingness to assume responsibility for one’s beliefs, choices, and actions."

"Reason is not one tool of thought among many, it is the entire toolbox. To advocate that reason be discarded in some circumstances is to advocate that thinking be discarded—which leaves one in the position of attempting to do a job after throwing away the required instrument."

"Christianity cannot erase man's need for pleasure, nor can it eradicate the various sources of pleasure. What it can do, however, and what it has been extremely effective in accomplishing, is to inculcate guilt in connection with pleasure. The pursuit of pleasure, when accompanied by guilt, becomes a means of perpetuating chronic guilt, and this serves to reinforce one's dependence on God. ** p. 308"

"The physical capacity to coerce others can never generate a moral obligation to obey the dictates of [government] power."

"To enumerate the particular details—the sufficient conditions—of a good society is effectively to prohibit individuality and social change. A planned society, a society in which sufficient conditions are politically determined and coercively imposed, is ‘closed’ to the spontaneous innovations of free association. We see this in the utopian writings of Plato and his many admirers. A utopian society is a perfect society, one that has been carefully designed by a wise and beneficent lawgiver. Any deviation from perfection must necessarily be for the worse, so social change—which in this scheme is but another name for social degeneration—must be arrested at all costs. And this, in turn, requires the suppression of individuality. The individual’s pursuit of happiness—that powerful and unpredictable agent of social change—must be subordinated for the sake of a good society, as specified in the utopian blueprint of sufficient conditions."

"A theory of necessary conditions will tend to generate a model of the open society, whereas a theory of necessary and sufficient conditions will tend to generate a model of the closed society. These conflicting models result from the inner logic of ideas. To offer a sketch of what is minimally necessary for a good society is to leave considerable room for diversity, variation, and change. But the available space for individuality will progressively decrease as additional details transform what had been a sketch into a veritable blueprint for the good society."

"It is my firm conviction that man has nothing to gain, emotionally or otherwise, by adhering to a falsehood, regardless of how comfortable or sacred that falsehood may appear. Anyone who claims, on the one hand, that he is concerned with human welfare, and who demands, on the other hand, that man must suspend or renounce the use of his reason, is contradicting himself."

"Government should only protect individual; beyond that it should leave individuals free to cultivate themselves, and thereby generate spontaneous cultural order."

"It is clear that 'social Darwinism' and 'survival of the fittest' were intended by Obama to evoke feelings of fear and disgust. It is highly doubtful that Obama knows anything about the history of these ideas, and it is even more doubtful that he cares. A concern for truth is not the coin of the political realm."

"The academic who lives comfortably in his professional enclave, secure in the belief that his corner of the cognitive world is the entire universe, has little need for philosophy, which he regards as a descent into idle speculation. Philosophy, for this academic, is an irritating enterprise, one that might call into question his most cherished assumptions."

"There can be no knowledge of what is good for man apart from knowledge of reality and human nature, and there is no manner in which this knowledge can be acquired except through reason. To advocate irrationality is to advocate that which is destructive to human life."

"Can there be someone better to keynote and get the award than Colonel Wilkerson with his 31 years’ military service that goes back to the Vietnam War, spans the birth-to-burial of the “Powell Doctrine” (and its supposed lessons learned from the Vietnam tragedy), and contains his first-hand insights into the egregious errors made by the Bush Administration in launching and waging the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? Wilkerson has stood by his earlier description of Cheney and Rumsfeld as having formed a cabal to hijack the decision-making process: “I’m worried and I would rather have the discussion and debate in the process we’ve designed than I would a diktat from a dumb strongman... I’d prefer to see the squabble of democracy to the efficiency of dictators.”"

"The battalion commander ordered Wilkerson and his unit to engage in “recon by fire” — basically firing from their helicopters into brushy areas, tree lines, hootches (as Vietnamese peasant homes were known) or other structures, in an attempt to draw enemy fire and initiate contact. Knowing that, too many times, this led to innocent civilians being wounded or killed, Wilkerson told the ground commander that his troops would only fire on armed combatants. “To hell with your free fire zone,” he said. A “trigger-happy” Cobra pilot under his command then entered the verbal fray on the radio, siding with the battalion commander. With that, as Wilkerson described it that day, he maneuvered his own helicopter between the Cobra gunship and the free fire zone below. “You shoot, you’re gonna hit me,” he said over his radio. “And if you hit me, buddy, I’m gonna turn my guns up and shoot you.”"

"What happened that day at the U.N.? Powell did not talk about it much, but his friend and confidant Lawrence Wilkerson did. In an interview around the height of the Iraq War, in 2006, Wilkerson, who had been Powell’s chief of staff, told me that Powell had been deeply suspicious of the George W. Bush Administration’s efforts to push the country into war... In the lead-up to the presentation in New York, Powell and Wilkerson huddled with the nation’s top two intelligence officials at the C.I.A. headquarters—the agency’s director, George Tenet, and John McLaughlin, his deputy—to review the evidence that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction. The four men spent several days in Tenet’s office, with Wilkerson, a former platoon commander in Vietnam, sleeping on the office couch."

"Since 1998, Wilkerson has devoted himself to helping at-risk children at Macfarland in the name of Colin Powell, whom he refers to as "my boss" and "the general." Wilkerson works tirelessly to keep them in the club and to secure scholarships for them at private high schools. Yet these days he and Powell are estranged: This program represents the last remnant of a long, deep friendship between them. Like ex-spouses in an uneasy detente, "we decided we'd just communicate over the kids," says Wilkerson, sounding pained by the situation."

"He came to national prominence in October 2005 when — having left his post as chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell earlier in the year — he laid bare some of the secrets of the Bush White House as he had experienced them. He had been inside the halls of power as the invasion and occupation of Iraq took shape. In Bush’s second term, on the outside, he found that he had had enough. The American people, he thought, had a right to know just how their government was really working, and so offered them this vision of the Bush administration in action: “[S]ome of the most important decisions about U.S. national security — including vital decisions about postwar Iraq — were made by a secretive, little-known cabal. It was made up of a very small group of people led by Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.” In the years since, Wilkerson, a retired Army colonel, has not been reticent, especially when it came to “the militarization of America’s foreign policy” and the practice of extraordinary rendition (the kidnapping of terror suspects and their deliverance into the hands of regimes ready and willing to torture them)."

"Powell resigned from the Bush administration in 2004 and never really owned up to what he had done... He was unable to admit the truth that his chief of staff Lawrence Wilkerson now acknowledges. “I participated in a hoax on the American people, the international community, and the United Nations Security Council,” Wilkerson has said."

"Religion has had the disastrous effect of placing vitally important concepts, such as morality, happiness and love, in a supernatural realm inaccessible to man’s mind and knowledge."

"We have damaged our reputation in the world and thus reduced our power. We were once seen as the paragon of law; we are now in many corners of the globe the laughing stock of the law."

"Cobra pilots and some of my colleagues in the Loach platoon (during the Vietnam War) treated that as a license to shoot anything that moved: wild boar, tigers, elephants, people. It didn’t matter... I personally followed the rules.. that had been ingrained in me by my parents, by my schools, by my church, and by the U.S. Army in classes about the Geneva Conventions and what we called the law of land warfare. I had been taught and I firmly believed when I took the oath of an officer and swore to support and defend the Constitution, that American soldiers were different and that much of their fighting strength and spirit came from that difference and that much of that difference was wrapped up in our humaneness and our respect for the rights of all."

"I am astonished at the failures of our intelligence community over the-- last decade in particular. We failed to predict the demise of the Soviet Union. We failed to predict the Indian nuclear test in 1998. We bombed a Chinese embassy in Belgrade in 1999. We failed to detect the five year planning cycle of al Qaeda, the operatives who conducted 9/11. And we failed in terms of predicting Iraq's WMDs. So we have a significant problem in this nation with our intelligence community."

"We've had a decision that the Constitution as read by Alberto Gonzales, John Yoo and a few other very selected administration lawyers doesn't pertain the way it has pertained for 200-plus years. A very ahistorical reading of the Constitution... This is not the way America was intended to be run by its founders and it is not the interpretation of the Constitution that any of the founders as far as I read the Federalist Papers and other discussions about their views would have subscribed to. This is an interpretation of the constitution that is outlandish and as I said, clearly ahistorical."

"If you're unilaterally declaring Kyoto dead, if you're declaring the Geneva Conventions not operative, if you're doing a host of things that the world doesn't agree with you on and you're doing it blatantly and in their face, without grace, then you've got to pay the consequences."

"This (George W. Bush regime) is really a very inept administration... As a teacher who's studied every administration since 1945, I think this is probably the worst ineptitude in governance, decision-making and leadership I've seen in 50-plus years. You've got to go back and think about that. That includes the Bay of Pigs, that includes -- oh my God, Vietnam. That includes Iran-contra, Watergate... My wife would probably shoot me if I headed to the ballot box with a Republican vote again. This is not a Republican administration, not in my view. This is a radical administration."

"He (Colin Powell) walked into my office, and he said to me... 'I wonder what will happen if we put half a million troops on the ground, and scour Iraq from one corner to the other, and find no weapons of mass destruction?' And he left that rhetorical question hanging in the air as he went back into his office."

"I can tell you that having been intimately involved in the preparation of Secretary Powell for his five February 2003 presentation at the UN Security Council, neither of those dissents in any fashion or form were registered with me or the Secretary by the DCI, George Tenent, by the DDCI, John McLaughlin, or by any of their many analysts who were in the room with us for those five, six days and nights at the Central Intelligence Agency... In fact it was presented in the firmest language possible that the mobile biological labs and the sketches we had drawn of them for the Secretary's presentation were based on the iron clad evidence of multiple sources."

"The idea of an object is the idea of its effects, of what it will do, and of what will happen to it, under various conditions."

"The philosophy of Hegel shares two traits with the thought of the great moderns who preceded him: a conscious concern with method, and the application of method to the construction of a philosophical system. In these respects Hegel profited by the efforts of his predecessors, in that he saw clearly the great common danger of method and system; namely, that both have a tendency to narrowness."

"The observer who follows, from a distance, events in contemporary Germany experiences above all a feeling of disbelief."

"Philosophy is the attempt to formulate principles or categories which the philosopher already possesses, in common with everyone else, but in an unformulated state."

"Many observers, including myself, had long since ceased to believe there ever was any serious intention on the part of Israel to permit a meaningful Palestinian state to come into being alongside Israel; successive far-Right election victories have exposed the true face and end game of the Israeli Right — endlessly enabled by the charade of the so-called US “peace process.”"

"This latest act of “foreign policy by assassination” will be largely rejected by most in the world. Only a few craven Gulf kings and princes and Israel will applaud it. And worst of all, the US has now taken one more giant step towards convincing the world that the US has indeed become a “rogue nation” no longer willing to follow the rules of international law and procedure—and wisdom—that it claims to lead.... This was a blatantly political assassination, and, in the calculations of most practitioners of international law it was an act of war. One can only imagine the US response to a similar Iranian assassination of a top US regional commander."