Hegemony Or Survival Quotes

Another problem with the official definitions of terror is that it follows from them that the US is a leading terrorist state.

It is useful to remember that no matter where we turn, there is rarely any shortage of elevated ideals to accompany the resort to violence.

Terrorism, he said is 'a reaction to the injustice in the region's domestic politics, inflicted in large part by the US.

Destroying hope is a critically important project. And when it is achieved, formal democracy is allowed—even preferred, if only for public relation purposes. In more honest circles, much of this is conceded. Of course, it is understood much more profoundly by beasts in men's shapes who endure the consequences of challenging the imperatives of stability and order.

On almost all issues, citizens could not identify the stands of the candidates--as intended.

An enemy combatant can be anyone that the US chooses to attack, with no credible evidence, as Washington concedes.

An Egyptian writer added that 'living in a country with an atrocious human rights record that also happens to be strategically vital to US interests is an illuminating lesson in moral hypocrisy and political double standards.

In September 2002 the Bush administration announced its National Security Strategy, which declared the right to resort to force to eliminate any perceived challenge to US global hegemony, which is to be permanent. The new grand strategy aroused deep concern worldwide, even within the foreign policy elite at home. Also in September, a propaganda campaign was launched to depict Saddam Hussein as an imminent threat to the United States and to insinuate that he was responsible for the 9 – 11 atrocities and was planning others.

In a dystopic global landscape that makes space for none of us, offers no sanctuary, the sheer at of living - surviving - in the face of a gendered and racialized hegemony becomes uniquely political. We choose to stay alive, against all odds, because our lives matter.

As far as Black people in the postwar South were concerned, a state of emergency prevailed. Frederick Douglass’ argument for Black suffrage was based on his insistence that the ballot was an emergency measure. However naïve he may have been about the potential power of the vote within the confines of the Republican party, he did not treat the issue of Black suffrage as a political game. For Douglass, the ballot was not a means of ensuring Republican party hegemony in the South. It was basically a survival measure—a means of guaranteeing the survival of the masses of his people.

And that’s when it got ugly. Many of the colder countries were what you used to call “First World.” One of the delegates from a prewar “developing” country suggested, rather hotly, that maybe this was their punishment for raping and pillaging the “victim nations of the south.” Maybe, he said, by keeping the “white hegemony” distracted with their own problems, the undead invasion might allow the rest of the world to develop “without imperialist intervention.” Maybe the living dead had brought more than just devastation to the world. Maybe in the end, they had brought justice for the future. Now, my people have little love for the northern gringos, and my family suffered enough under Pinochet to make that animosity personal, but there comes a point where private emotions must give way to objective facts. How could there be a “white hegemony” when the most dynamic prewar economies were China and India, and the largest wartime economy was unquestionably Cuba? How could you call the colder countries a northern issue when so many people were just barely surviving in the Himalayas, or the Andes of my own Chile? No, this man, and those who agreed with him, weren’t talking about justice for the future. They just wanted revenge for the past. [Sighs.] After all we’d been through, we still couldn’t take our heads from out of our asses or our hands from around each other’s throats.

We face a deep moral crisis, which we might also describe as a 'crisis of community.' Alongside increasing economic stratification and the continuation of an adaptive racism, a 'morality' of individualism has grown more and more severe. With this deadly combination, we have been losing the spirit that's needed to hold any community or any nation together: a sense of responsibility for each other. In the long term no community can survive when greed and irresponsibility are incentivized instead of reined in. This crisis point to a decision we have to make as a society: Do we want to live in a nation that is defined by inclusionary, solidaristic community values, or one that is defined by the moralistically bankrupt values of Wall Street and the bigoted, exclusionary "solidarity" of reactionaries?

The missile crisis "was the most dangerous moment in human history," Arthur Schlesinger commented in October 2002 at a conference in Havana on the fortieth anniversary of the crisis, attended by a number of those who witnessed it from within as it unfolded. Desision-makers at the time undoubtedly understood that the fate of the world was in their hands. Nevertheless, attendees at the conference may have been shocked by some of the revelations. They were informed that in October 1962 the world was "one word away" from nuclear war. "A guy named Arkhipov saved the world," said Thomas Blanton of the National Security Archive in Washington, which helped organize the event. He was referring to Vasil Arkhipov, a Soviet submarine officer blocked an order to fire nuclear-armed toredoes in October 27, at the tensest moment of the crisis, when te submarines were under attack bu US destroyers, A devastating response would have been a near certainty, leading a major war.

For Russia to adapt to a liberal regime, she would have to weaken considerably—her vigor would have to decline; better still: she would have to lose her specific character and denationalize in depth. How would she manage this, with her unbroached internal resources and her thousand years of autocracy? Even if she were to achieve such a thing in one bound, she would instantly disintegrate. Even more than a nation, an empire, if it is to survive and to flourish, requires a certain dose of terror. France herself could invest in democracy only when her springs were beginning to loosen, only when, no longer seeking hegemony, she was preparing to become prudent and respectable. Her First Empire was her final folly. Thereupon, accessible to liberty, she would become painfully accustomed to it, through a number of convulsions, unlike England, which—a bewildering example—had free relations of long standing, without shocks or dangers, thanks to the conformism and the enlightened stupidity of her citizens (the country has not produced, to my knowledge, a single anarchist).

It was Thucydides who described the dealings between states as a world in which the strong do as they like and the weak put up with what they must. Power and dominion form the basis of that system, even when a balance has been achieved within it. But neither the hegemony of a given superpower nor the attempt to prevent war by means of a balance of power have ever led to a lasting peace. The big question remains: can power be replaced as a ruling principle in international relations by justice? And how can justice, if it is not to deteriorate into mere words receive access to power? Can we, to that end, develop other forms of power, in order to establish justice between states? Now that modern weaponry has made the danger of war even greater, this question has become even more urgent. A European fort, a sort of Switzerland on a large scale, is an illusion in today's world. The power to destroy, once the monopoly held by the state, is now in the hands of anyone who can obtain the necessary information through the internet. The power of mass destruction, in other words, has become increasingly privatised in this world. In such a situation, can the international institutions with their joint responsibility provide justice that is accompanied by the power it needs? For our civilisation, the ability to develop a robust international rule of law is a matter of survival. Is that a utopia? No: for half a century, Europe has been proving that it is possible. [Max Kohnstamm]

From his early essays in the liberal intellectual journal the New York Review of Books to his most recent books Hegemony or Survival, Failed States, and Interventions, Noam Chomsky has produced a singular body of political criticism.1 American Power and the New Mandarins (1969), his first published collection of political writing (dedicated “To the brave young men who refuse to serve in a criminal war”), contains essays that still stand out for their insight and biting wit nearly four decades later.

one is tempted to believe that some people in the White House worship Aztec gods—with the offering of Central American blood.

Nonetheless, beyond selling military services or entering into opportunistic alliances, the principalities were basically passive participants in European events, subject to constant impositions and abuses by the invading Powers. This period of history up to the beginning of the 19th century left a deep impression on the memory of the German peoples and explains some of the core fears that survived later in their collective consciousness, particularly the fear of being fenced in and territorially suffocated, or the threat of coalitions among their neighbours.

This strikingly ambivalent attitude of Churchill towards Europe was consistently echoed by successive British governments to this day. It was not that Churchill did not sincerely wish European unity to succeed, but that he preferred to see Great Britain as a benevolent observer. No great perceptiveness is required to imagine that behind the ambivalence was something more than mere caprice. A first line of interpretation that seeks to exonerate Churchill from the accusation of inconsistency is that his second Government’s foreign policy was managed by Anthony Eden, who clearly never communed with the cause of European unity nor indeed with Britain’s participation in it. The political survival of Churchill in the Government depended in good measure on support from Eden, the party-anointed successor, with whom Churchill tried to avoid conflict. However, Churchill was not one to shy away from a fight for ideas that he considered important. Europe was simply not a high enough priority for him in his second Government.

Thirty thousand years ago there lived 'another human species' - the Neanderthals. Tremendous. If it is true, it is symbolically more important than the fact that man is descended from the apes. The shadow of this vanished human species weighs heavy on all our anthropology, since our entire concept of evolution privileges the exclusive universality of a single humanity, ours, the one that survived. And what if it were not the only one? Then that's the end of our privilege. If we had to eliminate this twin, this prehistoric double, to ensure our hegemony, if this other species had to disappear, then the rules of the game of being human are no longer the same. And where does this passion for universality come from, this lust to eliminate every other race? (It is a good bet that if any other race emerged from space, our first aim would be to subjugate or destroy it.) Why is it that in twin forms there always has to be one that dies? Why do we always have to wipe out duality everywhere to establish the monopoly of a species, a race, a subject? Having said this, it is not certain that we really did win out. What if we were carrying that double within us like a dead twin? And perhaps many others, in a kind of Unconscious, the stubborn heir to all the previous murders. Having achieved the unity of the species, for the greater glory of Homo sapiens, are we not now duplicating ourselves for the worse - in that artificial twinness of the clone, in which the species, denying its origins once and for all, prolongs itself as spectre in an infinite repetition? Over the screen of our consciousness and our Unconscious hovers the shadow of this original crime, the traces of which we shall doubtless never recover.

A well-known Egyptian academic traces hostility towards the US to its support for 'every possible anti-democratic government in the Arab-Islamic world..... ... When we hear American officials speaking of freedom, democracy and such values, they make terms like these sound obscene.

...though of course the weak would have to be insane to implement their rights

which it is a piece in its mechanism of hegemony. Born from a desperate will to survive, and strengthened by exploiting contradictions between the great powers, Israel has finally settled into a relationship of alliance with and submission to the United States, where its cause can find ardent defenders, both in the state apparatus and the wider society. Conditions have changed, but this expansionist, powerful and warlike state still remains dependent on an external support. Its sovereignty, in the last analysis, remains limited.