Michael Parenti

Michael Parenti (born 30 September 1933) is an American political scientist, historian and media critic.

Ideological orthodoxy so permeates the plutocratic culture, masquerading as "pluralism," "democracy," and the "open society," that it is often not felt as indoctrination. The worst forms of tyranny are those so subtle, so deeply ingrained, so thoroughly controlling as not even to be consciously experienced. So, there are Americans who are afraid to entertain contrary notions for fear of jeopardizing their jobs, but who still think they are "free."

Quotes

• The Third World is not poor. You don't go to poor countries to make money. There are very few poor countries in this world. Most countries are rich! The Philippines are rich! Brazil is rich! Mexico is rich! Chile is rich! Only the people are poor. But there's billions to be made there, to be carved out, and to be taken. There's been billions for 400 years! The capitalist European and North American powers have carved out and taken the timber, the flax, the hemp, the cocoa, the rum, the tin, the copper, the iron, the rubber, the bauxite, the slaves, and the cheap labour. They have taken out of these countries. These countries are not underdeveloped, they're overexploited!
  • From a 1986 lecture

• "Margaret Thatcher, who we all know is Ronald Reagan in drag."
  • University of Colorado, Boulder: "US interventionism, the 3rd world, and the USSR" April 15, 1986
• Our fear that Communism might someday take over most of the world blinds us to the fact that anti-communism already has.
  • The Anti-Communist Impulse (1970)

• In every class society that's ever existed, the ruling element does not rule nakedly. They always adorn their rule with myths, themes and symbols to justify their position at the apex of the social pyramid.
  • "The 1% Pathology And The Myth of Capitalism" October 19, 2012
• Someone once said that Margaret Thatcher satisfied the average Englishman's longing for the perfect dominatrix. No doubt about it, she could deliver pain. The Iron Lady should best be remembered as the Leather Lady. Indeed, today Thatcherism leaves its dreary imprint not only on the Conservative Party but---thanks also to Tony Blair---on a Labor Party that accepts most of her regressive policies.
  • "Requiem for a Dominatrix" (2013)
• For years the Dalai Lama was on the payroll of the CIA, an agency that has perpetrated killings against rebellious workers, peasants, students, and others in countries around the world. His eldest brother played an active role in a CIA-front group. Another brother established an intelligence operation with the CIA, which included a CIA-trained guerrilla unit whose recruits parachuted back into Tibet to foment insurgency. The Dalai Lama was no pacifist. He supported the U.S./NATO military intervention into Afghanistan, also the 78 days' bombing of Yugoslavia and the destruction of that country.
  • "The Nobel Peace Prize for War" (2014)
• In sum, the Nobel Peace Prize often has nothing to do with peace and too much to do with war. It frequently sees "peace" through the eyes of the western plutocracy. For that reason alone, we should not join in the applause.
  • "The Nobel Peace Prize for War" (2014)
• Nations that chart a self-defining course, seeking to use their land, labor, natural resources, and markets as they see fit, free from the smothering embrace of the US corporate global order, frequently become a target of defamation. Their leaders often have their moral sanity called into question by US officials and US media, as has been the case at one time or another with Castro, Noriega, Ortega, Qaddafi, Aristide, Milosevic, Saddam Hussein, Hugo Chavez, and others.
  • North Korea: "Sanity" at the Brink (2009)
• After years of encirclement and repeated rebuffs from Washington, years of threat, isolation, and demonization, the Pyongyang leaders are convinced that the best way to resist superpower attack and domination is by developing a nuclear arsenal. It does not really sound so crazy. As already mentioned, the United States does not invade countries that are armed with long-range nuclear missiles (at least not thus far). Having been pushed to the brink for so long, the North Koreans are now taking a gamble, upping the ante, pursuing an arguably “sane” deterrence policy in the otherwise insane world configured by an overweening and voracious empire.
  • North Korea: "Sanity" at the Brink (2009)

Democracy for the Few (2010 [1974]), sixth edition

The close relationship between politics and economics is neither neutral nor coincidental. Large governments evolve through history in order to protect large accumulations of property and wealth.

The slums are not the problem, they are the solution; they are the way capitalism deals with the surplus people of a market economy.

• It may come as a surprise to some academics, but there is a marked relationship between economic power and political power.
  • Preface to the Sixth Edition, p. viii

• The close relationship between politics and economics is neither neutral nor coincidental. Large governments evolve through history in order to protect large accumulations of property and wealth.
  • Chapter 1, p. 4

• Profits are what you make when not working.
  • Chapter 2, p. 9

• America represents more than just an economic system; it is an entire cultural and social order, a plutocracy, a system of rule that is mostly by and for the rich. Most universities and colleges, publishing houses, mass circulation magazines, newspapers, television and radio stations, professional sports teams, foundations, churches, private museums, charity organizations, and hospitals are organized as corporations, ruled by boards of trustees (or directors or regents) composed overwhelmingly of affluent business people. These boards exercise final judgement over all institutional matters.
  • Chapter 3, p. 33

• Among the institutions of plutocratic culture, our educational system looms as one of the more influential purveyors of dominant values. From the earliest school year, children are taught to compete individually rather than work cooperatively for mutual benefit. Grade-school students are fed stories of their nation's exploits that might be more valued for their inspirational nationalism than for their historical accuracy. Students are instructed to believe in America's global virtue and moral superiority and to hold a rather uncritical view of American politico economic institutions.
  • Chapter 3, p. 35

• Ideological orthodoxy so permeates the plutocratic culture, masquerading as "pluralism," "democracy," and the "open society," that it is often not felt as indoctrination. The worst forms of tyranny are those so subtle, so deeply ingrained, so thoroughly controlling as not even to be consciously experienced. So, there are Americans who are afraid to entertain contrary notions for fear of jeopardizing their jobs, but who still think they are "free."
  • Chapter 3, p.37

• “Individualism” in the United States refers to privatized ownership, consumption and recreation. You are individualist in that you are expected to get what you can for yourself and not be too troubled by the problems faced by others. This attitude, considered inhuman in some societies, is labeled approvingly as “ambition” in our own and is treated as a quality of great social value.
  • Chapter 3, p.37

• Economically deprived groups are seen as a threat because they want more, and more for the have-nots might mean less for the haves.
  • Chapter 3, p. 38

• The desire to "make it," even at the expense of others, is not merely a wrong-headed at attitude but a reflection of the material conditions of capitalist society wherein no one is ever really economically secure except the superrich.
  • Chapter 3, p. 39

• It is ironic that people of modest means sometimes become conservative out of a scarcity fear bred by the very capitalist system they support.
  • Chapter 3, p. 44

• The Federalists also used bribes, intimidation, and fraud against opponents of the Constitution.
  • Chapter 4, p. 60

• Actually, the New Deal's central dedication was to business recovery rather than social reform.
  • Chapter 5, p. 71

• The rich have grown richer, but their tax rate has declined. The poor have grown poorer, but their taxes have increased.
  • Chapter 6, p. 81

• Twelve states in the Great Plains have a wind energy potential greater then the electric use of our entire nation.
  • Chapter 7, p. 118

• Capitalism's modus operandi is to produce and sell an ever expanding supply of goods and services for ever greater profits. But the earth is finite. So is its ability to absorb wastes and toxins. While food yields shrink, the world's population grows 90 million a year and the planet's life support systems move closer to catastrophe. An ever expanding capitalism and a fragile, finite ecology appear to be on a calamitous collision course.
  • Chapter 7, pp. 117

• The trick is to steal big.
  • Chapter 8, p. 127
• The police confront dangers and social miseries of a kind most of us can only imagine. They deal with the waste products of a competitive corporate society: the ill-fed, the ill-housed, the desperate, and the defeated. The slums are not the problem, they are the solution; they are the way capitalism deals with the surplus people of a market economy. And for all they cost the taxpayer in crime, police and welfare, the slums remain a source of profit for certain speculators, arsonists, realtors, big merchants, and others.
  • Chapter 8

• One mechanism of repression is the grand jury.
  • Chapter 9, p. 139

• Even though the crime rate has dropped in recent years, the United States has more police per capita then any other nation in the world.
  • Chapter 10, p. 173

• The two party electoral system performs the essential function of helping to legitimate the existing social order.
  • Chapter 11, p. 179

• Those who control the wealth of this society have an influence over political life far in excess of their number.
  • Chapter 12, p. 203

• There is a century-old saying, "The dollar votes more times than the man."
  • Chapter 13, p. 222

• The peculiar danger of executive power is that it executes.
  • Chapter 14, p. 259

• Conservatives insist that government should be "run more like a business." One might wonder how that could be possible, since government does not market goods and services for the purpose of capital accumulation.
  • Chapter 15, p. 267

• The crucial role communists played in organizing industrial unions in the 1930s and struggling for social reforms, peace, and civil rights strengthened rather then undermined democratic forces.
  • Chapter 16, p. 298

• There is no such thing as unbiased or objective reporting of news. All reports and analyses are selective and inferential to some inescapable degree - all the more reason to provide a wider ideological spectrum of opinions and not let one bias predominate. If we consider censorship to be a danger to our freedom, then we should not overlook the fact that the media are already heavily censored by those who own or advertise in them. The very process of selection allows the politico-economic interests of the selector to operate as a censor.
  • Chapter 10 , p. 177
• The American two-party electoral system, with its ballyhoo and hoopla, its impresarios and stunt artists, is the greatest show on earth. Campaign time is show time, a veritable circus brought into our living rooms via television as a form of entertainment. The important thing is that the show must go on - because it is more than just a show. The two-party system electoral social order. It channels and limits political expression, and blunts class grievances. It often leaves little time for the real issues because it gives so much attention to the contest per se who will run? who is ahead? who will win the primaries? who will win the election? It provides the form of republican government with little of the substance. It fives the plutocratic system of appearance of popular participation while being run by and for a select handful of affluent contestants.
  • Chapter 11, p. 179

• It is not Socialism that subverts democracy, but democracy that subverts capitalism.
  • Chapter 17, p. 320

• There is a tradition of popular struggle in the United States that has been downplayed and ignored. It ebbs and flows but never ceases. Moved by a combination of anger and hope, ordinary people have organized, agitated, demonstrated, and engaged in electoral challenges, civil disobedience, strikes, sit-ins, takeovers, boycotts, and sometimes violent clashes with the authorities - for better wages and work conditions, a safer environment, racial and gender justice, and peace and nonintervention abroad. Against the heaviest odds, they have suffered many defeats but won some important victories, forcible extracting concessions and imposing reforms upon resistant rulers.
  • Chapter 17, p. 320

• Democracy is something more than a set of political procedures. To be worthy of its name, democracy should produce substantive outcomes that advance the health and well-being of the people.
  • Chapter 17, p. 320

• American socialism cannot be modeled on the former Soviet Union, China, Cuba, or other countries with different historical, economic, and cultural developments.
  • Chapter 17, p. 334

• There is nothing sacred about the existing system. All economic and political institutions are contrivances that should serve the interests of the people. When they fail to do so, they should be replaced by something more responsive, more just, and more democratic. Marx said this, and so did Jefferson. It is a revolutionary doctrine, and very much an American one.
  • Chapter 17, p. 335

Inventing Reality (1986)

• It may come as a surprise to discover that throughout most of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries, leading bourgeois philosophers and economists understood and openly stated, as did John Locke in 1690 that “government was created for the protection of property,” and Adam Smith in 1776 that civil authority “is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.”
  • Ch. 1: From Cronkite’s Complaint to Orwell’s Oversight, p. 2
• The withholding of labor by workers is called a strike, but not the withholding of capital by employers. The latter is never treated as a controversial disruption of the production process.
  • Ch. 5: Giving Labor the Business, p. 80

Against Empire (1995)

• Colonel Blimp is dead and buried, replaced by men in business suits.
  • Ch. 1, p. 15
• No country that pursues an independent course of development shall be allowed to prevail as a dangerous example to other nations.
  • Ch. 3, p. 43
• In sum, there is nothing irrational about spending three dollars of public money to protect one dollar of private investment—at least not from the perspective of the investors. To protect one dollar of their money, they will spend three, four, and five dollars of our money. In fact, when it comes to protecting their money, our money is no object.
  • Ch. 3. p. 61
• The few remaining communist governments, such as North Korea and Cuba, were no longer por­trayed as instruments of Moscow, but as evils in their own right.
  • Ch. 5, p. 79
• Countries with ostensibly democratic governments often mani­fest a markedly undemocratic state power.
  • Ch. 8, p. 141
• Conservative propaganda that is intended for mass consumption implicitly distinguishes between government and state. It invites peo­ple to see government as their biggest problem. At the same time, such propaganda encourages an uncritical public admiration for the state, its flag and other symbols, and the visible instruments of its power such as the armed forces.
  • Ch. 8, p. 145
• The “global economy” is another name for imperialism, and imperialism is a transnational form of capitalism. The essence of capitalism is to turn nature into commodities and commodities into capital. The live green earth is transformed into dead, gold bricks, with luxury items for the few and toxic slag heaps for the many. The glittering mansion overlooks a vast sprawl of shanty towns, wherein a desperate, demoralized humanity is kept in line with drugs, televi­sion, and armed force.
  • Ch. 11, p. 208

Dirty truths (1996), first edition

• 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.
  • 1 POLITICS AND ISSUES, Hidden Holocaust, USA, p. 2

• The dirty truth is that the rich are the great cause of poverty.
  • 1 POLITICS AND ISSUES, Creating The Poor, p. 21

• The dirty truth is that many people find fascism to be not particularly horrible.
  • 1 POLITICS AND ISSUES, Fascism In a Pinstriped Suit, p. 32

• 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.
  • 1 POLITICS AND ISSUES, Rollback, p. 46

• Revolutions are not push button affairs; rather, they evolve only if there exists a reservoir of hope and grievance that can be galvanized into popular action.
  • 1 POLITICS AND ISSUES, Making The World Safe For Hypocrisy, p. 64

• The real danger we face is not from terrorism, but what is being done under the pretext of fighting it.
  • 1 POLITICS AND ISSUES, The Terrorism Hype, p. 81

• Conservative pundits have a remarkable amount of free speech.
  • 1 POLITICS AND ISSUES, Free Speech-At A Price, p. 83

• Conservatives have nothing against incumbency when it is their people who are filling the slots.
  • 1 POLITICS AND ISSUES, Term Limits: Trick or Treat?, p. 92

• To complain about how the media are dominated by liberals, Limbaugh has an hour a day on network television, an hour on cable, and a radio show syndicated by over 600 stations.
  • 2 MEDIA AND CULTURE, The "Liberal Media" Myth, p. 98

• The mass media are class media.
  • 2 MEDIA AND CULTURE, Fabricating a "Cultural Democracy", p. 107

• Union busting has become a major industry with more than a thousand consulting firms teaching companies how to prevent workers from organizing and how to get rid of existing unions.
  • 2 MEDIA AND CULTURE, Giving Labor The Business, p. 122

• Maintaining silence about a dirty truth is another way of lying, a common practice in high places.
  • 2 MEDIA AND CULTURE, The Invisible Bloodbaths, p. 132

• Russia became a juicy chunk of the Third World, with immense reserves of cheap labor, a vast treasure of natural resources, and industrial assets to be sold off at giveaway prices.
  • 2 MEDIA AND CULTURE, Yeltsin's Coup And The Medias Alchemy, p. 140

• You will have no sensation of a leash around your neck if you sit by the peg. It is only when you stray that you feel the restraining tug.
  • 2 MEDIA AND CULTURE, Some Call It Censorship, p. 150

• The media have been tireless in their efforts to suppress the truth about the gangster state.
  • 3 CONSPIRACY: PHOBIA AND REALITY, The JFK Assassination I, p. 159

• To make the world safe for those who own it, politically active elements of the owning class have created a national security state that expends billions of dollars and enlists the efforts of vast numbers of people.
  • 3 CONSPIRACY: PHOBIA AND REALITY, The JFK Assassination II: p. 174

• 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.
  • 3 CONSPIRACY: PHOBIA AND REALITY, The JFK Assassination II: p. 189

• One does not have to be a Marxist to know there is something very wrong in this society.
  • 4 POLITICAL THEORY AND CONSCIOUSNESS, Political Science Fiction, p. 231

• When change threatens to rule, then the rules are changed.
  • 5 MISCELLANY AND MEMORABILIA, Struggles in Academe: A Personal Account, p. 248

• In the end I created a career of my own, concentrating on my writing and lecturing, reaching larger audiences than I would had I ended up with tenure and a full teaching load. It was Virginia Woolf who said that it is terrible to be frozen out of a sacred tradition-but even more terrible to be frozen into it.
  • 5 MISCELLANY AND MEMORABILIA, Struggles in Academe: A Personal Account, p. 252

Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism (1997)

• Fascism historically has been used to secure the interests of large capitalist interests against the demands of popular democracy. Then and now, fascism has made irrational mass appeals in order to secure the rational ends of class domination.
  • Table of Contents, Fascism
• Some writers stress the "irrational" features of fascism. By doing so, they overlook the rational politico-economic functions that fascism performed. Much of politics is the rational manipulation of irrational symbols. Certainly, this is true of fascist ideology, whose emotive appeals have served a class-control function.
  • Rational Fascism, p. 11
• Fascism is a false revolution. It cultivates the appearance of popular politics and a revolutionary aura without offering a genuine revolutionary class content. It propagates a "New Order" while serving the same old moneyed interests. Its leaders are not guilty of confusion, but of deception. That they work hard to mislead the public does not mean they themselves are misled.
  • Rational Fascism, p. 17
• During the Cold War, the anti-communist ideological framework could transform any data about existing communist societies into hostile evidence. If the Soviets refused to negotiate a point, they were intransigent and belligerent; if they appeared willing to make concessions, this was but a skillful ploy to put us off our guard. By opposing arms limitations, they would have demonstrated their aggressive intent; but when in fact they supported most armament treaties, it was because they were mendacious and manipulative. If the churches in the USSR were empty, this demonstrated that religion was suppressed; but if the churches were full, this meant the people were rejecting the regime’s atheistic ideology. If the workers went on strike (as happened on infrequent occasions), this was evidence of their alienation from the collectivist system; if they didn’t go on strike, this was because they were intimidated and lacked freedom. A scarcity of consumer goods demonstrated the failure of the economic system; an improvement in consumer supplies meant only that the leaders were attempting to placate a restive population and so maintain a firmer hold over them. If communists in the United States played an important role struggling for the rights of workers, the poor, African-Americans, women, and others, this was only their guileful way of gathering support among disfranchised groups and gaining power for themselves. How one gained power by fighting for the rights of powerless groups was never explained. What we are dealing with is a nonfalsifiable orthodoxy, so assiduously marketed by the ruling interests that it affected people across the entire political spectrum.
  • Left anti-communism, p. 41
• The overthrow of communism gave a green light to the unbridled exploitative impulses of Western corporate interests. No longer needing to convince workers that they live better than their counterparts in Russia, and no longer constrained by a competing system, the corporate class is rolling back the many gains that working people in the West have won over the years. Now that the free market, in its meanest form, is emerging triumphant in the East, so will it prevail in the West.
  • Left anti-communism, p. 58
• Having never understood the role that existing communist powers played in tempering the worst impulses of Western capitalism and imperialism, and having perceived communism as nothing but an unmitigated evil, the left anti-communists did not anticipate the losses that were to come. Some of them still don't get it.
  • Left anti-communism, p. 58
• During the years of Stalin's reign, the Soviet nation made dramatic gains in literacy, industrial wages, health care, and women's rights. These accomplishments usually go unmentioned when the Stalinist era is discussed. To say that "socialism didn't work" is to ignore that it did. In Eastern Europe, Russia, China, Mongolia, North Korea, and Cuba, revolutionary communism created a life for the mass of people that was far better than the wretched existence they had endured under feudal lords, military bosses, foreign colonizers, and Western capitalists. The end result was a dramatic improvement in the living conditions for hundreds of millions of people on a scale never before or since witnessed in history.
  • Stalin's Fingers, pp. 84-85
• With the socialist ethic giving way to private greed, corruption assumed virulent new forms in the post-Communist nations. Officials high and low are on the take, including the police. The Russian security minister calculated that one-third of Russian nickel shipped out of the country was stolen. Among those enjoying "staggering profits" from this plunder were Shell Oil and British Petroleum (Washington Post, 2/2/93). In April 1992, the chairman of Russia's central bank admitted that at least $20 billion had been illegally taken out of the country and deposited in Western banks (Nation, 4/19/93).
  • The Free Market Paradise Goes East (II), p. 111
• Street crime has also increased sharply (New York Times, 5/7/96). In the former Soviet Union, women and elderly who once felt free to sit in parks late at night now dare not venture out after dark. Since the overthrow of communism in Hungary, thefts and other felonies have nearly tripled and there has been a 50 percent increase in homicides (NPR, 2/24/92). The police force in Prague today is many times greater than it was under communism, when "relatively few police were needed" (New York Times, 12/18/91). How odd that fewer police were needed in the communist police state than in the free-market paradise.
  • The Free Market Paradise Goes East (II), p. 112
• If anything, the breakup of the communist states has brought a colossal victory for global capitalism and imperialism, with its correlative increase in human misery, and a historic setback for revolutionary liberation struggles everywhere. There will be harder times ahead for even modestly reformist national governments, as the fate of Panama and Iraq have indicated. The breakup also means a net loss of global pluralism and more intensive socio-economic inequality throughout the world.
  • The Free Market Paradise Goes East (II), p. 120
• Seizing upon anything but class, U.S. leftists today have developed an array of identity groups centering around ethnic, gender, cultural, and life-style issues. These groups treat their respective grievances as something apart from class struggle, and have almost nothing to say about the increasingly harsh politico-economic class injustices perpetrated against us all.
  • Anything But Class: Avoiding the C-Word, p. 151
• At the same time, the rise in pollution and population has given us acid rain, soil erosion, silting of waterways, shrinking grasslands, disappearing water supplies and wetlands, and the obliteration of thousands of species, with hundreds more on the endangered list.
  • Anything But Class: Avoiding the C-Word, p. 155
• Putting an end to the population explosion will not of itself save the ecosphere, but not ending it will add greatly to the dangers the planet faces. The environment can sustain a quality of life for just so many people.
  • Anything But Class: Avoiding the C-Word, p. 155
• An ever-expanding capitalism and a fragile, finite ecology are on a calamitous collision course. It is not true that the ruling politico-economic interests are in a state of denial about this. Far worse than denial, they are in a state of utter antagonism toward those who think the planet is more important than corporate profits. So they defame environmentalists as "eco-terrorists," "EPA gestapo," "Earth Day alarmists," tree huggers," and purveyors of "Green hysteria" and "liberal claptrap."
  • Anything But Class: Avoiding the C-Word, p. 156

History as Mystery (1999)

• Too often, however, history is written and marketed in such a way as to be anything but liberating. The effect is not to enlighten, but to enforce the existing political orthodoxy. Those who control the present take great pains to control our understanding of the past.
  • Prologue: Against the Mainstream
• Much written history is an ideologically safe commodity.
  • Prologue: Against the Mainstream
• This established familiarity and unanimity of bias is frequently treated as “objectivity”.
  • Prologue: Against the Mainstream
• In contrast, orthodoxy can rest on its own unstated axioms and mystifications, remaining heedless of marginalized critics who are denied a means of reaching mass audiences. Orthodoxy promotes its views through the unexamined repetition that comes with monopoly control of the major communication and educational systems.
  • Prologue: Against the Mainstream
• That a religious belief is propagated by its lower clergy and ordinary adherents does not make it any less the hierarchy’s dictum. Indeed, such lower echelon transmission is an essential factor in maintaining the belief’s hegemony.
  • Ch. 1, Section: Mainstream Orthodoxy
• The important thing is not just to identify specific historical events—as might a quiz show contestant—but to think intelligently and critically about them, and be able to relate them to broader social relations.
  • Ch. 1, Section: The Hunt for Real History
• To say that schools fail to produce an informed, critically minded, democratic citizenry is to overlook the fact that schools were never intended for that purpose.
  • Ch. 1, Section: The School as a Tool
• Contrary to conventional wisdom, class conflict in feudal times was not a rarity but a constant. Even in the early Middle Ages, various kinds of peasant resistance probably occurred more frequently than we realize: sabotage, fleeing the manor, violating prohibitions, and refusing to pay dues or perform certain services or abide by particular regulations.
  • Ch. 3, Section: The Myth of the Devout Peasant
• Standard histories of the Cold War assume that the Soviet Union exercised a lockstep control over the docile “satellite nations,” the latter being little more than puppets within a monolithic “Soviet Bloc.” The new documents throw a different light on the relationship between Moscow and its allies. Communist leaders in Poland, Hungary, East Germany, Cuba, Afghanistan, and elsewhere “could and did act in pursuit of their own interests, sometimes goading the Kremlin into involvements it did not want.”
  • Ch. 4, Section: Cold War in the Archives
• Throughout its history, the CIA has resorted to every conceivable crime and machination to make the world safe for the Fortune 500, using false propaganda, economic warfare, bribery, rigged elections, sabotage, demolition, theft, collusion with organized crime, narcotics trafficking, death squads, terror bombings, torture, massacres, and wars of attrition.
  • Ch. 4, Section: Classified History, USA
• If the founders of the American Historical Association could visit a contemporary campus, they might be puzzled by the swarthy complexions among the professors, they might wonder at the strange-sounding Celtic, Latin, or Semitic names, but the flavor, the atmosphere of college life would not be unfamiliar to them.
  • Ch. 5, Section: An “Aristocratic Profession”
• Indeed, what really bothers those who endlessly carp about the campus tyranny of “political correctness” is not the orthodoxy of the politically correct “tyrants” but their departure from orthodoxy, their willingness to critically explore gender, ethnic, and class topics in ways that normally are treated as taboo.
  • Ch. 5, Section: Purging the Reds
• In their eagerness to neutralize themselves, scholars tend to neutralize the subject matter. But history is never neutral. And relatively little of it is purely stochastic and accidental. While we need not assume there is a grand design to all that happens, we cannot rule out human agency, human intent, and political interests that are purposive in their actions. Such history does not come off as very “gentlemanly” in the patrician sense, nor very nuanced—if by “nuanced” we mean the academically trained ability to mute and dilute the brute realities of political economy and class power.
  • Ch. 5, Section: Publishing and “Privishing”
• To conclude, history is not just what the historians say it is, but what government agencies, corporate publishing conglomerates, chain store distributors, mass media pundits, editors, reviewers, and other ideological gatekeepers want to put into circulation. Not surprisingly, the deck is stacked to favor those who deal the cards.
  • Ch. 5, Section: Marketing the Right Stuff
• Whether a leader is acting with admirable “firmness” or “aggressive rigidity” in a situation will often depend on the political values and views of the observer.
  • Ch. 7, Section: Depoliticizing the Political
• History has many unanswered questions, but it is no mystery as such—except for those who make it so.
  • Afterword

The Assassination of Julius Caesar: A People's History of Ancient Rome (2003)

• Caesar’s sin, I shall argue, was not that he was subverting the Roman constitution—which was an unwritten one—but that he was loosening the oligarchy’s overbearing grip on it. Worse still, he used state power to effect some limited benefits for small farmers, debtors, and urban proletariat, at the expense of the wealthy few.
  • Introduction
• They have yet to consider that republicanism might largely be a cloak for oligarchic privilege—as it often is to this day—worn grudgingly by the elites as long as it proved serviceable to their interests.
  • Introduction
• Here is a story of latifundia and death squads, masters and slaves, patriarchs and subordinated women, self-enriching capitalists and plundered provinces, profiteering slumlords and urban rioters. Here is a struggle between the plutocratic few and the indigent many, the privileged versus the proletariat, featuring corrupt politicians, money-driven elections, and the political assassination of popular leaders. I leave it to the reader to decide whether any of this might resonate with the temper of our own times.
  • Introduction
• The writing of history has long been a privileged calling undertaken within the church, royal court, landed estate, affluent town house, government agency, university, and corporate-funded foundation.
  • Ch. 1
• An imperialism without imperialists, a design of conquest devoid of human agency or forethought, such a notion applies neither to Rome nor to any other empire in history.
  • Ch. 1
• Those who think Roman slavery was such a benign institution have not explained why fugitive slaves were a constant problem. Owners did not lightly countenance the loss of valuable property. They regularly used chains, metal collars, and other restraining devices. Slaves who fled were hunted down and returned to irate masters who were keen to inflict a severe retribution.
  • Ch. 1
• Like most other people, Gibbon tended to perceive reality in accordance with the position he occupied in the social structure. As a gentleman scholar, he produced what elsewhere I have called "gentlemen's history," a genre heavily indebted to an upper class ideological perspective. In 1773, we find him beginning a work on his magus opus, A History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, while settled in a comfortable town house tended by half-a-dozen servants. Being immersed in what he called the "decent luxuries," and saturated with his own upper-class prepossession, Edward Gibbon was able to look kindly upon ancient Rome's violently acquisitive aristocracy. He might have produced a much different history had he been a self-educated cobbler, sitting in a cold shed, writing into the wee hours after a long day of unrewarding toil. No accident that the impoverished laborer, even if literate, seldom had the agency, agency to produce scholarly tomes.
  • Ch. 1
• Throughout the ages, in keeping with their ideological proclivities, gentlemen historians have tended to dismiss the populares of the Roman Republic as self aggrandizing demagogues who affronted constitutional principles by encroaching upon the Senate's domain.
  • Ch. 4
• While unsparingly praised by generations of classicists for his principled ways, Cicero was often an unprincipled opportunist and dissembler. In 50 BC, for example, with Caesar's fame and power ascendant, he persuaded the senate to decree a thanksgiving service in Caesar's honor, and himself delivered a hypocritical panegyric - which he privately recanted shortly thereafter in a letter to Atticus: “I was not exactly proud of my palinode. But goodnight to principle, sincerity and honor!”
  • Ch. 4
• Throughout history, in the name of “liberty,” owning classes have opposed political leaders who have sought a more equitable distribution and use of wealth. And in the name of “stability” and “public safety,” they have repeatedly surrendered some of their own power to autocratic leaders dedicated to preserving the privileged socioeconomic order.
  • Ch. 10

Contrary Notions (2007)

• The struggle against plutocracy and the striving for peace and democracy are forever reborn.
  • Introduction
• Some critics complain that the press is sensationalistic and intrusive. In fact, the media’s basic modus operandi is evasive rather than invasive. More common than the sensationalistic hype is the artful avoidance.
  • Ch. 1, Section 3: Methods of Media Manipulation
• The efficacy of a label is that it propagates an evocative but undefined image lacking a specific content that can be held up to the test of evidence.
  • Ch. 1, Section 3: Methods of Media Manipulation
• Our readiness to accept something as true, or reject it as false, rests less on its argument and evidence and more on how it aligns with the preconceived notions embedded in the dominant culture, assumptions we have internalized due to repeated exposure.
  • Ch. 1, Section 4: Objectivity and the Dominant Paradigm
• People who never complain of the orthodoxy of their mainstream political education are the first to complain about the dogmatic “political correctness” of any challenge to it. Far from seeking a diversity of views, they defend themselves from exposure to such diversity, preferring to leave their unexamined background assumptions and conventional political opinions unruffled.
  • Ch. 1, Section 4: Objectivity and the Dominant Paradigm
• Devoid of the supportive background assumptions of the dominant belief system, the deviant view sounds too improbable and too controversial to be treated as reliable information.
  • Ch. 1, Section 4: Objectivity and the Dominant Paradigm
• Facing a campus that is not nearly as reactionary as they would wish, ultra-conservatives rail about how academia is permeated with doctrinaire, “politically correct” leftists. This is not surprising, since they describe as “leftist” anyone to the left of themselves, including mainstream centrists. Their diatribes usually are little more than attacks upon socio-political views they find intolerable and want eradicated from college curricula. Through all this, one seldom actually hears from the “politically correct” people who supposedly dominate the universe of discourse.
  • Ch. 1, Section 5: Repression in Academia
• Something has got to be done about the internal combustion engine before it does something irreversible to us—assuming it already has not. It is not a rational and survivable form of technology. Its social, ecological, and human costs are far greater than any benefit it brings.
  • Ch. 2, Section 10: Autos and Atoms
• In short, it is possible to demonstrate that (a) many people support positions or political forces that violate their own professed interests, and (b) many people profess interests that violate their actual well-being.
  • Ch. 5, Section 20: False Consciousness
• The conceptual distinction between state and government allows us to understand why taking office in government seldom guarantees full access to the instruments of state power.
  • Ch. 5, Section 22: State vs. Government
• It is somewhat ironic to credit capitalism with the genius of gradual reform when most reforms through history have been vehemently and sometimes violently resisted by the capitalist class and were won only after prolonged and bitter contest.
  • Ch. 5, Section 23: Democracy vs. Capitalism
• Democracy is something more than a set of political procedures. To be worthy of its name, democracy should produce outcomes that advance the well-being of the people.
  • Ch. 5, Section 23: Democracy vs. Capitalism
• The secret to wealth usually is not to work hard, but to have others work hard for you.
  • Ch. 6, Section 25: Capital and Labor, an Old Story
• Superior firepower, not superior culture, has brought the Europeans and Euro-North Americans to positions of global supremacy.
  • Ch. 7, Section 29: Imperialism for Beginners
• Imperialism has created what I call “maldevelopment”: modern office buildings and luxury hotels in the capital city instead of housing for the poor, cosmetic surgery clinics for the affluent instead of hospitals for workers, highways that go from the mines and latifundios to the refineries and ports instead of roads in the back country for those who might hope to see a doctor or a teacher.
  • Ch. 7, Section 29: Imperialism for Beginners
• History has many enemies, including some who profess to serve its cause. The struggle to define the past is part of the struggle to control society itself.
  • Ch. 8, Section 35: Dominant History
• They who struggled against formidable odds with the fear and courage of ordinary humans, whose names we shall never know, whose blood and tears we shall never see, whose cries of pain and hope we shall never hear, to them we are linked by a past that is never dead nor ever really past. And so, when the best pages of history are finally written, it will be not by princes, presidents, prime ministers, or pundits, nor even by professors, but by the people themselves. For all their faults and shortcomings, the people are all we have. Indeed, we ourselves are the people.
  • Ch. 8, Section 38: The People as “Rabble” and “Mob”

God and His Demons (2010)

• It is never explained why God could not have freely granted us redemption and salvation, assuming we were deemed worthy of it, without contriving to have some of us brutalize and murder his son.
  • Ch. 1, Section 4: The Other Face of Our Sweet Savior