Politik

"The one who fights according to the sense of 'sacred war' is spontaneously beyond every particularism and exists in a spiritual climate which, at any given moment, may very well give rise and life to a supra-national unity of action. This is precisely what occurred in the Crusades when Princes and Dukes of every land gathered in the heroic and sacred enterprise, regardless of their particular utilitarian interests or political divisions, bringing about for the first time a great European unity, true to the common civilisation and to the very principle of the Sacred Roman Empire."

"I am not an Athenian or a Greek, but a citizen of the world."

"The second solution is communitarianism, also baptised assimilation. It is a question of a compromise, inspired by the United States and rather unclear theories of intellectual ‘ethnopluralism’, Right-wing and Left-wing. People born abroad keep their ‘culture’, but adhere to a common ‘minimum’, a global Social Contract. Society becomes a pacific kaleidoscope, united by a soft and pacifying deus ex machina. This utopian vision, Rousseauian and adolescent, still defended by learned old fogies, who flirt just a little with apartheid (whence its partisans on the extreme Right) has been tried by all the European states. The result has been total failure. There has been no ‘assimilation’ of ‘ethnic communities’ cohabiting peacefully. On the contrary, ethnic civil war is just around the corner."

"Extolling the assimilation and integration of aliens while wanting to preserve and maintain their special characteristics, their original cultures, their memories and native mores. This is the communitarian illusion, one of the most harmful of all, which is particularly cherished by ‘ethno-pluralist’ intellectuals."

"Les temps ne sont pas difficiles: ils sont impossibles."

"'majoritarian' (a rhetorical and pejorative perversion of the word 'democratic')"

"Malheureuse France, malheureux roi!"

"Ultra-left and reactionary are often used as opposites, but extreme ideologies are never linear – they are circular. They all end up in the same place. Rigid. Sanctimonious. Intolerant."

"Dilator, spe longus, iners, avidusque futuri, Difficilis, querulus, laudator temporis acti Se puero, censor castigatorque minorum,"

"‘Majoritarianism’ is a vacuous word that left liberals use all the time."

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the Queen of France, then the Dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she just began to move in—glittering like the morning star, full of life, and splendour, and joy. Oh! what a Revolution! And what a heart must I have to contemplate without emotion that elevation and that fall! Little did I dream when she added titles of veneration to those of enthusiastic, distant, respectful love, that she should ever be obliged to carry the sharp antidote against disgrace concealed in that bosom; little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fallen upon her in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honour, and of cavaliers. I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished for ever."

"In a survey into the global media reports for three years 2020-22, we can find 8806 articles mentioning the word majoritarian or majoritarianism [….] in more than 80 percent of the cases, the Hindus of India are the guilty majority. Given the population of India being less than 18 percent of the world population, it takes an amazing amount of audacity to blame Hindu majoritarianism so disproportionately."

"The term ‘majoritarianism’ is used in India as a convenient way to demonise Hindus without any reference to first principles."

"The puzzle emerges: Why is the global media so sharp on the majoritarianism of the Hindus when the Hindus effectively enjoy less rights by the Indian constitution, judiciary and politics compared to the minorities?"

"All political movements are like this — we are in the right, everyone else is in the wrong. The people on our own side who disagree with us are heretics, and they start becoming enemies. With it comes an absolute conviction of your own moral superiority. There's oversimplification in everything, and a terror of flexibility."

"To survive, let alone flourish, liberal democracy needs the right’s support. It needs, that is, conservatives who accept liberal and democratic ground rules. Yet conservatism began life as an enemy of liberalism and never fully abandoned its reservations about democracy. Conservatism endured in modern politics by cooperating with liberalism and soon learned how to prevail in democracy. Liberal democracy of the kind that thrived in Western Europe and the United States after 1945 grew from that historic compromise by the right. When, as now, the right hesitates or denies its support, liberal democracy’s health is at risk. With the left in retreat, both intellectually and in party terms, the right commands politics at present. But which right is that? Is it the broadly liberal conservatism that underpinned liberal democracy’s post-1945 successes or an illiberal hard right claiming to speak for “the people”?"

"Look, I don’t see the world as something divided between right and left. And I don’t at all care who’s on the right or left or in the center. Even though we use them, even though I use them myself, these expressions have lost all meaning. I’m not interested in one label or the other—I’m only interested in solving certain problems, in getting where I want to go. I have certain objectives."

"Rightist ideas are only truly magnetic if they are absolutely pure; Leftist ideas, on account of their materialistic and heretic essence, never demand perfection. Mediocrity is the death of every Rightist movement, but it is the very air in which Leftism thrives. A totalitarian leader who betrays practically every point of his party program hardly shakes the faith of his fanatical followers, but mediocre monarchs, Popes, and prelates have destroyed the old order."

"Conservative or rightist extremist movements have arisen at different periods in modern history, ranging from the Horthyites in Hungary, the Christian Social Party of Dollfuss in Austria, Der Stahlhelm and other nationalists in pre-Hitler Germany, and Salazar in Portugal, to the pre-1966 Gaullist movements and the monarchists in contemporary France and Italy. The right extremists are conservative, not revolutionary. They seek to change political institutions in order to preserve or restore cultural and economic ones, while extremists of the centre and left seek to use political means for cultural and social revolution. The ideal of the right extremist is not a totalitarian ruler, but a monarch, or a traditionalist who acts like one. Many such movements in Spain, Austria, Hungary, Germany, and Italy have been explicitly monarchist. The supporters of these movements differ from those of the centrists, tending to be wealthier, and more religious, which is more important in terms of a potential for mass support."

"[I]f you look at history, there has always been some share of American and European populations - usually between 15 and 30 percent - who have supported right-wing populist nationalism. Know-Nothing nativists in the 19th century. The jingoistic nationalism around World War I. The Christian Front and American pro-Nazi sympathizers in the 1930s. McCarthyism. The John Birch Society. For all of American history, there has been a reactionary far-right movement in America, often animated by fundamentalist religion, obsessed with the populist fever dream that the real America is being undermined by shadowy outsiders within. It is the "paranoid style of American politics," as Richard Hofstadter observed in the McCarthy Era. And it has never gone away. Roughly the same percentage of people in European countries today support hard-right, know-nothing, anti-intellectual nativist populists: neo-fascists in Italy, Orban's nationalists in Hungary, anti-immigrant reactionaries in France."

"There was a strange aftertaste to many of the calls for grand social reform in 2020. As the coronavirus crisis overtook us, the left wing on both sides of the Atlantic, at least that part that had been fired up Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders, was going down to defeat. The promise of a radicalized and reenergized left, organized around the idea of the Green New Deal, seemed to dissipate amidst the pandemic. It fell to governments mainly of the center and the right to meet the crisis. They were a strange assortment. Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and Donald Trump in the United States experimented with denial. For them climate skepticism and virus skepticism went hand in hand. In Mexico, the notionally left-wing government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador also pursued a maverick path, refusing to take drastic action. Nationalist strongmen like Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, Narendra Modi in India, Vladimir Putin in Russia, and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey did not deny the virus, but relied on their patriotic appeal and bullying tactics to see them through. It was the managerial centrist types who were under most pressure. Figures like Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer in the United States, or Sebastián Piñera in Chile, or Cyril Ramaphosa in South Africa, Emmanuel Macron, Angela Merkel, Ursula von der Leyen, and their ilk in Europe. They accepted the science. Denial was not an option. They were desperate to demonstrate that they were better than the 'populists.' To meet the crisis, very middle-of-the-road politicians ended up doing very radical things. Most of it was improvisation and compromise, but insofar as they managed to put a programmatic gloss on their responses—whether in the form of the EU's Next Generation program or Biden's Build Back Better program in 2020—it came from the repertoire of green modernization, sustainable development, and the Green New Deal."

"If I tell the world that a right-wing, fascist way of doing things doesn't work, no one will listen to me. So I'm going to make a perfect fascist world: everyone is beautiful, everything is shiny, everything has big guns and fancy ships, but it's only good for killing fucking bugs!"

"Listen, there are some significant bloody issues on the right wing that we have to fix, because if we don't you're going to alienate the living crap out of women."

"The refusal by the Trump administration to release the files and videos amassed during investigations into the activities of the pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, should put to rest the absurd idea, embraced by Trump supporters and gullible liberals, that Trump will dismantle the Deep State. Trump is part of, and has long been part of, the repugnant cabal of politicians – Democrat and Republican – billionaires and celebrities who look at us, and often underage girls and boys, as commodities to exploit for profit or pleasure."

"I will totally obliterate the deep state. I will fire the unelected bureaucrats and shadow forces who have weaponized our justice system like it has never been weaponized before. And I will put the people back in charge of this country again."

"For a generation, the people who saw something like an American deep state—even if they rarely called it that—resided on the left, not the right. The 9/11 attacks triggered the rapid growth of an opaque security and intelligence machine often unaccountable to the civilian legal system. In the 2000s, the critique focused on a “war machine” of military and intelligence officials, defense contractors and neoconservative ideologues who, in some versions, took orders directly from Vice President Dick Cheney. In the Obama era, the focus shifted to the eerie precision of “targeted killings” by drones, and then the furor over Snowden, the ex-National Security Agency contractor whose 2013 leaks exposed the astonishing reach of the government’s surveillance. “There’s definitely a deep state,” Snowden told the Nation in 2014. “Trust me, I’ve been there.”"

"Political scientists and foreign policy experts have used the term deep state for years to describe individuals and institutions who exercise power independent of—and sometimes over—civilian political leaders... Beneath the politics of convenience is the reality that a large segment of the U.S. government really does operate without much transparency or public scrutiny, and has abused its awesome powers in myriad ways."

"Ordinary Americans frequently ask why politicians and government officials appear to be so obtuse, rarely recognizing what is actually occurring in the country. That is partly due to the fact that the political class lives in a bubble of its own creation, but it might also be because many of America’s leaders actually accept that there is an unelected, un-appointed, and unaccountable presence within the system that actually manages what is taking place behind the scenes. That would be the American deep state."

"For the police and intelligence agencies, the propensity to operate in secret is a sine qua non for the deep state, as it provides cover for the maintenance of relationships that under other circumstances would be considered suspect or even illegal... As all governments—sometimes for good reasons—engage in concealment of their more questionable activities, or even resort to out and out deception, one must ask how the deep state differs. While an elected government might sometimes engage in activity that is legally questionable, there is normally some plausible pretext employed to cover up or explain the act... But for players in the deep state, there is no accountability and no legal limit. Everything is based on self-interest, justified through an assertion of patriotism and the national interest."

"This is how election results are disputed in a banana republic."

"If it were not for the inherent checks and balances of the U.S. Constitution we would have a banana republic."

"I have heard arguments about whether it was Milton Friedman or Gore Vidal who first came up with this apt summary of a collusion between the overweening state and certain favored monopolistic concerns, whereby the profits can be privatized and the debts conveniently socialized, but another term for the same system would be "banana republic.""

"What are the main principles of a banana republic? A very salient one might be that it has a paper currency which is an international laughingstock: a definition that would immediately qualify today’s United States of America."

"Another feature of a banana republic is the tendency for tribal and cultish elements to flourish at the expense of reason and good order. Did it not seem quite bizarre, as the first vote on the rescue of private greed by public money was being taken, that Congress should adjourn for a religious holiday—Rosh Hashanah—in a country where the majority of Jews are secular? What does this say, incidentally, about the separation of religion and government?"

"In a banana republic, the members of the national legislature will be (a) largely for sale and (b) consulted only for ceremonial and rubber-stamp purposes some time after all the truly important decisions have already been made elsewhere."

"In a recent posting on The New York Times's Web site, Paul Krugman said that the United States was now reduced to the status of a banana republic with nuclear weapons. This is a variation on the old joke about the former Soviet Union ("Burkina Faso with rockets"). It’s also wrong: in fact, it’s the reverse of the truth."

"National Endowment for Democracy President Carl Gershman took to the op-ed page of The Washington Post in late September 2013 to declare that Ukraine was now “the biggest prize” and represented an important interim step toward eventually toppling Putin in Russia. Gershman, who is essentially a neocon paymaster dispensing $100 million a year in U.S. taxpayers’ money to activists, journalists and various other operatives, wrote: “Russians, too, face a choice, and Putin may find himself on the losing end not just in the near abroad but within Russia itself.”"

"The U.S. employed all its traditional tactics leading up to the coup in 2014. The U.S. National Endowment for Democracy (NED) has partially taken over the CIA's role in grooming opposition candidates, parties and political movements, with an annual budget of $100 million to spend in countries around the world. The NED made no secret of targeting Ukraine as a top priority, funding 65 projects there, more than in any other country. The NED's neoconservative president, Carl Gershman, called Ukraine "the biggest prize" in a Washington Post op-ed in September 2013, as the U.S. operation there prepared to move into its next phase."

"Trump’s budget for the coming fiscal year proposes to gut the National Endowment for Democracy by cutting two-thirds of its budget. The endowment is one of the main instruments by which the United States subverts and undermines foreign governments. In a less Orwellian world, it might be called the “National Endowment for Attacking Democracy.” Cutting the budget would signal that we are re-thinking our policy of relentlessly interfering in the politics of other countries."

"Democracy involves the right of the people freely to determine their own destiny. The exercise of this right requires a system that guarantees freedom of expression, belief and association, free and competitive elections, respect for the inalienable rights of individuals and minorities, free communications media, and the rule of law."

"It was Reagan who began the realignment of American politics, making the Republicans into internationalist Jeffersonians with his speech in London at the Palace of Westminster in 1982, which led to the creation of the National Endowment for Democracy and the emergence of democracy promotion as a central goal of United States foreign policy."

"The empire for its part was working away in secret. For several years the CIA and its “legal” arm, the International Agency for Development (USAID), were training cadres and organizing groups inside the various dissident sectors in Nicaraguan society. The object was to attack, discredit and defeat the Sandinista government. They were working through organizations like National Endowment for Democracy (NED), Freedom House, Heritage Foundation, and the Albert Einstein Institute. They wanted to show the world and particularly our America that being revolutionary is a venal sin. Similarly, acting on behalf of masses of people is a crime against humanity."

"Man, I think most white people and Black people are great people. I really believe that in my heart, but I think our system is set up where our politicians, whether they’re Republicans or Democrats, are designed to make us not like each other so they can keep their grasp of money and power. They divide and conquer... Whether they’re Republicans or Democrats...their only job is, ‘Hey, let’s make these people not like each other. We don’t live in their neighborhoods, we all got money, let’s make the whites and Blacks not like each other, let’s make rich people and poor people not like each other, let’s scramble the middle class."

"Racism and ethnic differences allow the power structure to exploit the masses of workers in this country, because that's the key by which they maintain their control. To divide the people and conquer them is the objective of the power structure. It's the ruling class, the very small minority, the few avaricious, demagogic hogs and rats who control and infest the government. The ruling class and their running dogs, their lackeys, their bootlickers, their Toms and their black racists, their cultural nationalists - they're all the running dogs of the ruling class. These are the ones who help to maintain and aid the power structure by perpetuating their racist attitudes and using racism as a means to divide the people. But it's really the small, minority ruling class that is dominating, exploiting, and oppressing the working and laboring people."

"The world is nearly all parcelled out, and what there is left of it is being divided up, conquered and colonised."

"The existence side by side of the hostile creeds is one of the strongest points in our political position in India."

"The oligarchy understands that a “divide-and-conquer” strategy gives them more room to get what they want without opposition... oligarchies cannot hold on to power forever... When a vast majority of people come to view an oligarchy as illegitimate and an obstacle to their wellbeing, oligarchies become vulnerable. As bad as it looks right now, the great strength of this country is our resilience. We bounce back. We have before. We will again. In order for real change to occur – in order to reverse the vicious cycle in which we now find ourselves – the locus of power in the system will have to change. The challenge we face is large and complex, but we are well suited for the fight ahead. Together, we will dismantle the oligarchy. Together, we will fix the system."

"Racism is used by those with wealth and power to divide those with neither, so they won’t see where all the wealth and power have gone."

"Like ruling classes throughout history, Nader argues, our contemporary Republican and Democratic parties use a divide-and-conquer strategy to “deliberately undermine organic solidarities” across lines of race, gender, and class."

"The greatest weapon that the colonial powers have used in the past against our people has always been divide-and-conquer. America is a colonial power. She has colonized 22 million Afro-Americans by depriving us of first-class citizenship, by depriving us of civil rights, actually by depriving us of human rights. She has not only deprived us of the right to be a citizen, she has deprived us of the right to be a human being, the right to be recognized and respected as men and women."