Terrorism Prevention Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Terrorism Prevention. Here they are! All 100 of them:

In the days when hyenas of hate suckle the babes of men, and jackals of hypocrisy pimp their mothers’ broken hearts, may children not look to demons of ignorance for hope.
Aberjhani (The River of Winged Dreams)
Just above our terror, the stars painted this story in perfect silver calligraphy. And our souls, too often abused by ignorance, covered our eyes with mercy.
Aberjhani (I Made My Boy Out of Poetry)
As a citizen of the world, it’s my instinct to keep the fallen and the suffering in my thoughts. The human brain fascinates me; its limitless bounds of empathy. You see, in my mind there is logic to it: do no harm, prevent harm, help, support, care for the harmed, face the harmer. My stupid idealist conscience considers sympathy, not pity, at its worst, the most basic and the least negotiable civil duty. Of course as a citizen of the world, I should strive to do more. That said, I am only a man and so I often do the least.
Asaad Almohammad (An Ishmael of Syria)
In my head this cruel unspeakable truth: that we battled and we cursed and we spilled each other’s blood, we relished our taste of hell and strangled heaven’s love.
Aberjhani (Visions of a Skylark Dressed in Black)
The acknowledgement of a single possibility can change everything.
Aberjhani (Splendid Literarium: A Treasury of Stories, Aphorisms, Poems, and Essays)
The surest way to prevent seditions...is to take away the matter of them.
Francis Bacon (The Essays)
when traumatic events are of human design, those who bear witness are caught in the conflict between victim and perpetrator. All the perpetrator asks is that the bystander do nothing. He appeals to the universal desire to see, hear, and speak no evil. The victim, on the contrary, asks the bystander to share the burden of pain. The victim demands action, engagement and remembering.
Judith Lewis Herman (Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence - From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror)
We are living in an era in which billions of people are grappling to promote communication, tolerance, and understanding over the more destructive forces of war, terrorism, and political chaos that have characterized the beginning of the 21st Century.
Aberjhani (Journey through the Power of the Rainbow: Quotations from a Life Made Out of Poetry)
Peace is not so much a political mandate as it is a shared state of consciousness that remains elevated and intact only to the degree that those who value it volunteer their existence as living examples of the same... Peace ends with the unraveling of individual hope and the emergence of the will to worship violence as a healer of private and social dis-ease.
Aberjhani (The American Poet Who Went Home Again)
I shall possess this woman; I shall steal her from the husband who profanes her: I will even dare ravish her from the God whom she adores. What delight, to be in turns the object and the victor of her remorse! Far be it from me to destroy the prejudices which sway her mind! They will add to my happiness and my triumph. Let her believe in virtue, and sacrifice it to me; let the idea of falling terrify her, without preventing her fall; and may she, shaken by a thousand terrors, forget them, vanquish them only in my arms.
Pierre Choderlos de Laclos (Les Liaisons dangereuses)
We can gain a lot more striving for harmonious coexistence than we can by giving in to hate-filled rage and fear-driven ignorance.
Aberjhani (Splendid Literarium: A Treasury of Stories, Aphorisms, Poems, and Essays)
Fear is good, for it makes us cautious and aids survival. Not so with terror. It is like slow poison, paralyzing the limbs and blurring the mind. . . Never, when in danger, ask yourself, What will they do to me? Instead think, What can I do to prevent them?
David Gemmell (Morningstar)
Faith drives a wedge between ethics and suffering. Where certain actions cause no suffering at all, religious dogmatists still maintain that they are evil and worth of punishment (sodomy, marijuana use, homosexuality, the killing of blastocysts, etc). And yet, where suffering and death are found in abundance their causes are often deemed to be good (withholding funds for family planning in the third world, prosecuting nonviolent drug offenders, preventing stem cell research, etc). This inversion of priorities not only victimizes innocent people and squanders scarce resources; it completely falsifies our ethics. It is time we found a more reasonable approach to answering questions of right and wrong.
Sam Harris (The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason)
As Clover looked down the hillside her eyes filled with tears. If she could have spoken her thoughts, it would have been to say that this was not what they had aimed at when they had set themselves years ago to work for the overthrow of the human race. These scenes of terror and slaughter were not what they had looked forward to on that night when old Major first stirred them to rebellion. If she herself had had any picture of the future, it had been of a society of animals set free from hunger and the whip, all equal, each working according to his capacity, the strong protecting the weak, as she had protected the lost brood of ducklings with her foreleg on the night of Major's speech. Instead--she did not know why--they had come to a time when no one dared speak his mind, when fierce, growling dogs roamed everywhere, and when you had to watch your comrades torn to pieces after confessing to shocking crimes. There was no thought of rebellion or disobedience in her mind. She knew that, even as things were, they were far better off than they had been in the days of Jones, and that before all else it was needful to prevent the return of the human beings. Whatever happened she would remain faithful, work hard, carry out the orders that were given to her, and accept the leadership of Napoleon. But still, it was not for this that she and all the other animals had hoped and toiled.
George Orwell (Animal Farm)
Occupation, curfew, settlements, closed military zone, administrative detention, siege, preventive strike, terrorist infrastructure, transfer. Their WAR destroys language. Speaks genocide with the words of a quiet technician. Occupation means that you cannot trust the OPEN SKY, or any open street near to the gates of snipers tower. It means that you cannot trust the future or have faith that the past will always be there. Occupation means you live out your live under military rule, and the constant threat of death, a quick death from a snipers bullet or a rocket attack from an M16. A crushing, suffocating death, a slow bleeding death in an ambulance stopped for hours at a checkpoint. A dark death, at a torture table in an Israeli prison: just a random arbitrary death. A cold calculated death: from a curable disease. A thousand small deaths while you watch your family dying around you. Occupation means that every day you die, and the world watches in silence. As if your death was nothing, as if you were a stone falling in the earth, water falling over water. And if you face all of this death and indifference and keep your humanity, and your love and your dignity and YOU refuse to surrender to their terror, then you know something of the courage that is Palestine.
Suheir Hammad
Women particularly should concern themselves with peace because men by nature are more foolhardy and headstrong, and their overwhelming desire to avenge themselves prevents them from foreseeing the resulting dangers and terrors of war. But woman by nature is more gentle and circumspect. Therefore, if she has sufficient will and wisdom she can provide the best possible means to pacify man.
Christine de Pizan (The Treasure of the City of Ladies)
The central attitudes driving the Terrorist are: You have no right to defy me or leave me. Your life is in my hands. Women are evil and have to be kept terrorized to prevent that evil from coming forth. I would rather die than accept your right to independence. The children are one of the best tools I can use to make you fearful. Seeing you terrified is exciting and satisfying.
Lundy Bancroft (Why Does He Do That? Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men)
It is time to recognize the past and ongoing genocides to prevent new ones. Together we can build a better world!
Widad Akreyi
Sometimes a strikeout means that the slugger’s girlfriend just ran off with the UPS driver. Sometimes a muffed ground ball means that the shortstop’s baby daughter has a pain in her head that won’t go away. And handicapping is for amateur golfers, not ballplayers. Pitchers don’t ease off on the cleanup hitter because of the lumps just discovered in his wife’s breast. Baseball is not life. It is a fiction, a metaphor. And a ballplayer is a man who agrees to uphold that metaphor as though lives were at stake. Perhaps they are. I cherish a theory I once heard propounded by G.Q. Durham that professional baseball is inherently antiwar. The most overlooked cause of war, his theory runs, is that it’s so damned interesting. It takes hard effort, skill, love and a little luck to make times of peace consistently interesting. About all it takes to make war interesting is a life. The appeal of trying to kill others without being killed yourself, according to Gale, is that it brings suspense, terror, honor, disgrace, rage, tragedy, treachery and occasionally even heroism within range of guys who, in times of peace, might lead lives of unmitigated blandness. But baseball, he says, is one activity that is able to generate suspense and excitement on a national scale, just like war. And baseball can only be played in peace. Hence G.Q.’s thesis that pro ball-players—little as some of them may want to hear it—are basically just a bunch of unusually well-coordinated guys working hard and artfully to prevent wars, by making peace more interesting.
David James Duncan
Whether it is an accident, terrorism or irresponsible push of a nuke button, we all know, the result is devastating. How to prevent nuclear explosions on earth? This is the most crucial political, moral, social, technical and spiritual question of our time.
Amit Ray (Nuclear Weapons Free World - Peace on the Earth)
No,” I start, hesitantly. “Well, we have to end apartheid for one. And slow down the nuclear arms race, stop terrorism and world hunger. Ensure a strong national defense, prevent the spread of communism in Central America, work for a Middle East peace settlement, prevent U.S. military involvement overseas. We have to ensure that America is a respected world power. Now that’s not to belittle our domestic problems, which are equally important, if not more. Better and more affordable long-term care for the elderly, control and find a cure for the AIDS epidemic, clean up environmental damage from toxic waste and pollution, improve the quality of primary and secondary education, strengthen laws to crack down on crime and illegal drugs. We also have to ensure that college education is affordable for the middle class and protect Social Security for senior citizens plus conserve natural resources and wilderness areas and reduce the influence of political action committees.” The table stares at me uncomfortably, even Stash, but I’m on a roll.
Bret Easton Ellis (American Psycho (Vintage Contemporaries))
America is bad at discriminating between danger likely to strike again, and red herrings, the freaking helpings of disaster that no man or plan can prevent.
Bill Maher (When You Ride Alone You Ride With Bin Laden: What the Government Should Be Telling Us to Help Fight the War on Terrorism)
Underlying the attack on psychotherapy, I believe, is a recognition of the potential power of any relationship of witnessing. The consulting room is a privileged space dedicated to memory. Within that space, survivors gain the freedom to know and tell their stories. Even the most private and confidential disclosure of past abuses increases the likelihood of eventual public disclosure. And public disclosure is something that perpetrators are determined to prevent. As in the case of more overtly political crimes, perpetrators will fight tenaciously to ensure that their abuses remain unseen, unacknowledged, and consigned to oblivion. The dialectic of trauma is playing itself out once again. It is worth remembering that this is not the first time in history that those who have listened closely to trauma survivors have been subject to challenge. Nor will it be the last. In the past few years, many clinicians have had to learn to deal with the same tactics of harassment and intimidation that grassroots advocates for women, children and other oppressed groups have long endured. We, the bystanders, have had to look within ourselves to find some small portion of the courage that victims of violence must muster every day. Some attacks have been downright silly; many have been quite ugly. Though frightening, these attacks are an implicit tribute to the power of the healing relationship. They remind us that creating a protected space where survivors can speak their truth is an act of liberation. They remind us that bearing witness, even within the confines of that sanctuary, is an act of solidarity. They remind us also that moral neutrality in the conflict between victim and perpetrator is not an option. Like all other bystanders, therapists are sometimes forced to take sides. Those who stand with the victim will inevitably have to face the perpetrator's unmasked fury. For many of us, there can be no greater honor. p.246 - 247 Judith Lewis Herman, M.D. February, 1997
Judith Lewis Herman (Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence - From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror)
If falling in love is not love, then what is it other than a temporary and partial collapse of ego boundaries? I do not know. But the sexual specificity of the phenomenon leads me to suspect that it is a genetically determined instinctual component of mating behavior. In other words, the temporary collapse of ego boundaries that constitutes falling in love is a stereotypic response of human beings to a configuration of internal sexual drives and external sexual stimuli, which serves to increase the probability of sexual pairing and bonding so as to enhance the survival of the species. Or to put it in another, rather crass way, falling in love is a trick that our genes pull on our otherwise perceptive mind to hoodwink or trap us into marriage. Frequently the trick goes awry one way or another, as when the sexual drives and stimuli are homosexual or when other forces-parental interference, mental illness, conflicting responsibilities or mature self-disciplinesupervene to prevent the bonding. On the other hand, without this trick, this illusory and inevitably temporary (it would not be practical were it not temporary) regression to infantile merging and omnipotence, many of us who are happily or unhappily married today would have retreated in whole- hearted terror from the realism of the marriage vows.
M. Scott Peck (The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth)
The 'pre-emption' versus 'prevention' debate may be a distinction without much difference. The important thing is to have it understood that the United States is absolutely serious. The jihadists have in the past bragged that America is too feeble and corrupt to fight. A lot is involved in disproving that delusion on their part.
Christopher Hitchens (Christopher Hitchens and His Critics: Terror, Iraq, and the Left)
Don’t let the horrible nature of the waters prevent you from crossing the rivers of life. The more horrible the challenges we face, the sweeter the joy of conquering them.
Israelmore Ayivor (Leaders' Ladder)
This morning there s first a predictable story about Darfur; an expert on African affairs notes that seven thousand African Union troops patrolling a region the size of France have been ineffectual in preventing continued janjaweed terror. Funding for the troops is about to run out, and it seems that no one, including the United States, is ready to put forth more money or come up with new ideas to stop the killing and displacement. This is not surprising to those of us who lived through twenty years of oppression by the hands of Khartoum and its militias.
Dave Eggers (What Is the What)
You are a coward by nature, Sancho, said don Quixote, yet to prevent you from claiming I am obstinate and never do as you recommend, just this once I shall take your advice and keep my distance from the fury that so frightens you, but on one condition: never, in life or in death, will you tell anyone that I retreated from this peril out of fear, but rather acceded to your entreaties; and if you say anything else, you will be lying, and I give you the lie from now until then and from then until now, and I affirm that you lie and you will lie whenever you think or say it. and do not answer me back; for the mere thought that I am retreating from peril, especially this peril, which does appear to have some faint shadow of fear about it, is enough to make me take my stand here and await alone not only that Holy Brotherhood whose name you speak in such terror but the brothers of the twwelve tribes of Israel, and the seven Maccabees, and Castor and Pollux, and all the brothers and brotherhoods in the world.
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (Don Quixote)
with few apparent connections to Afghanistan as such, but there were no calls to bomb Riyadh (imagine if the hijackers had been Iraqi). Rather, Saudi Arabia is a favoured ally in the 'war against terrorism'. It is obvious that at stake here are US geopolitical interests (discussed further below), more than concerns to prevent future terrorism.
Mark Curtis
a community able to express itself openly, without fear, whether in the mosque or elsewhere, should be a key element in efforts to prevent terrorism.
Arun Kundnani (The Muslims Are Coming!: Islamophobia, Extremism, and the Domestic War on Terror)
I am convinced that military action will not prevent further acts of international terrorism against the United States.
Barbara Lee
using our terror of fairy tales to prevent us from engaging our most valuable organ—our mind—and our most valuable modern asset—our logic.
Lydia Kang (Opium and Absinthe)
You cannot win a war if you cannot talk honestly about the enemy Since the 9/11 attacks, political correctness and ideological prejudice—under both Republican and Democratic presidents—have distorted our analysis of the enemy, preventing us from drawing an effective plan to defeat the likes of Al Qaeda and the Islamic State. The Obama administration, blinded by its own preconceived ideas of why terrorism occurs, is influenced by malevolent actors who have an interest in censoring any talk of the religious aspects of the enemy’s ideology. At the highest level of the U.S. government, terrorism is deemed to be the result of poverty, unemployment, and lack of political enfranchisement. This fallacy must be jettisoned. We are not at war with Islam. The people most immanently in danger, in fact, are the nonviolent and non-extremist Muslims of the Middle East, such as our allies in Jordan and the modern Muslims of Egypt and the United Arab Emirates. They are on the most important front of this war, and they understand just how much religion truly matters. We do a great disservice to those brave Muslims when we try to convince the world that the threat will disappear if enough people have good jobs and sound educations.
Sebastian Gorka (Defeating Jihad: The Winnable War)
When will we realize that the concessions we have made to faith in our political discourse have prevented us from even speaking about, much less uprooting, the most prolific source of violence in our history?
Sam Harris (The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason)
If you’re still not convinced, watch what you say, because I’ve been in therapy since I was five. My mother started me at such a young age because I was really angry at my dad, and it was coming out in the form of night terrors. Therapy literally changed my life, and I’ve been in it pretty much ever since. Because of my years on the couch, I’ve gotten to know my dark side, and I’ve learned how to keep it in check. At this point my self-destructive behaviors are like old enemies that I’ve done battle with again and again—I know all the angles, all the moves I need to dodge them and prevent them from fucking up my life.
Jillian Michaels (Unlimited: A Three-Step Plan for Achieving Your Dreams)
At least ten times as many people died from preventable, poverty-related diseases on September 11, 2001, as died in the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on that black day. The terrorist attacks led to trillions of dollars being spent on the ‘war on terrorism’ and on security measures that have inconvenienced every air traveller since then. The deaths caused by poverty were ignored. So whereas very few people have died from terrorism since September 11, 2001, approximately 30,000 people died from poverty-related causes on September 12, 2001, and on every day between then and now, and will die tomorrow.
Singer Sewing Company (Practical Ethics)
Every cause is painful, and every loss leaves us wondering how we could have acted otherwise to prevent the death. But because different causes of death provoke sufficiently different responses—anger toward suicide victims; blame for homicide, terrorism, and war; helplessness and fear with natural disasters; and hopelessness with terminal disease—the specific way a mother dies or leaves influences how her daughter will respond. Long-term
Hope Edelman (Motherless Daughters: The Legacy of Loss)
Fragmentation in the inner representations of the self prevents the integration of identity. Fragmentation in the inner representations of others prevents the development of a reliable sense of independence within connection.
Judith Lewis Herman (Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence — From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror)
In 58 BCE Cicero’s enemies argued that, whatever authority he had claimed under the senate’s prevention of terrorism decree, his executions of Catiline’s followers had flouted the fundamental right of any Roman citizen to a proper trial.
Mary Beard (SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome)
Hitler’s cabinet enacted a new law, to take effect January 1, 1934, called the Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Diseases, which authorized the sterilization of individuals suffering various physical and mental handicaps.
Erik Larson (In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin)
Look, look at my country, look at my Kabul, my city, what is left of my city? The streets are as bare as mountains now, the buildings are as ragged as mountains and as bare and empty of life, there is no life here only fear, we do not live in the buildings now, we live in terror in the cellars in the caves in the mountains, only God can save us now, only order can save us now, only God's Law harsh and strictly administered can save us now, only The Department for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice can save us now, only terror can save us from ruin, only neverending war, save us from terror and neverending war, save my wife they are stoning my wife, they are chasing her with sticks, save my wife save my daughter from punishment by God, save us from God, from war, from exile, from oil exploration, from no oil exploration, from the West, from the children with rifles, carrying stones, only children with rifles, carrying stones, can save us now.
Tony Kushner
Did you ever feel a creeping, That awoke you from your sleeping, That made your pulses flutter and bristled all your hair; While a horrid stealthy crawling Prevented you from calling, And something seemed to tell you that a ghost was coming there?
Amelia B. Edwards
The battles are at night. The worst of times. The most awful of times, when he fights to prevent sleep while feeling so tired that all he wants is sleep. Sleep brings the nightmares. The ever-worsening terrors in his head. They become confusing and jumbled.
R.R. Haywood (Extracted (Extracted Trilogy, #1))
[THE DAILY BREATH] When Jesus walked the Earth, He said again and again: "Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand." For many years I misunderstood this message. The line: "Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is near" brought fear because to me it meant: "Repent or else you go to hell." But this is not what it means. Read the words again: "Repent" which means ask God for forgiveness, "because the kingdom of Heaven is at hand" which means peace is close to you. Ask for forgiveness because when you do so in all honesty, you bring Heaven in your life. When you open your heart and ask for forgiveness in all truth, you find Heaven: the healing you need, the love you deserve, the peace you want: all of these wait for you on the other side of you having a heart-to-heart, truthful relationship with Jesus. God's love for you is unconditional, but communication is possible only in truth. Turn your eyes from your pain, and look unto Jesus. Literally, focus your eyes on Him. Walk through the terror barrier that prevents you from opening your heart, and tell Him everything. Ask for forgiveness for everything you think you've done wrong, ask for help with your weaknesses - not from your mind or from your emotions, but from your spirit - and hide nothing because what you keep hidden will torment you until you bring it out to light. Carl Jung, the renowned psychiatrist said, "The most terrifying thing is to accept oneself completely." Do not be afraid. Tell God everything you fear to acknowledge, because He cannot heal what you conceal, and he will heal everything you reveal.
Dragos Bratasanu
Frightened of the peril she is courting, she would like to stop but cannot hold back. Care and skill can shorten the steps she takes: nothing can prevent them succeeding each other. Sometimes, unable to face the danger, she closes her eyes and lets herself go, putting her fate in my hands. More often some new fear rouses her to new efforts. In her mortal terror she tries once more to retreat, and exhausts her strength in regaining a little ground; but soon some magic power transplants her yet nearer the danger she has vainly attempted to fly.
Pierre Choderlos de Laclos (Les Liaisons dangerueses (French Edition))
certainly she nodded from time to time, and pursed her lips, and shook her head, and uttered little ejaculations; but it seemed to Mary that years of fear and anxiety had taken away her powers of concentration, and that some underlying terror prevented her from giving her whole interest to any conversation.
Daphne du Maurier (Jamaica Inn)
The untried recruits learned about fear. It wasn't some occasional leap of terror, a startled response; it was the unbearable tension of being forced to remain in a terrifying place, your mind the only thing preventing you from throwing down your rifle and running, anywhere, a flight of atavistic self-preservation.
Joanne van Os (Ronan's Echo)
Holy Sonnets: Thou hast made me, and shall thy work decay?" Thou hast made me, and shall thy work decay? Repair me now, for now mine end doth haste, I run to death, and death meets me as fast, And all my pleasures are like yesterday; I dare not move my dim eyes any way, Despair behind, and death before doth cast Such terror, and my feebled flesh doth waste By sin in it, which it towards hell doth weigh. Only thou art above, and when towards thee By thy leave I can look, I rise again; But our old subtle foe so tempteth me, That not one hour I can myself sustain; Thy grace may wing me to prevent his art, And thou like adamant draw mine iron heart.
John Donne
I have always had an interest in furniture. At the very least, it weighs us down and keeps us on the ground, and prevents us from clambering up trees and howling naked as the terror of our useless lives overcomes us. It keeps us from wandering aimlessly in pathless wildernesses, plotting cannibalism in forest clearings and dripping caves.
Abdulrazak Gurnah (By the Sea)
It’s the same with people. Purging dead wood inevitably creates another predicament. People soon find themselves working in a reign of terror, their creativity and conscientiousness smothered by fear. It prevents an organization from learning from its mistakes. Process is paramount to knowledge, and mistakes are powerful catalysts for the process.
Ricardo Semler (The Seven-Day Weekend: Changing the Way Work Works)
Under the influence of Christian notions of the sinfulness of sex outside of marriage, the U.S. government has required that one-third of its AIDS prevention funds allocated to Africa be squandered on teaching abstinence rather than condom use. It is no exaggeration to say that millions could die as a direct result of this single efflorescence of religious dogmatism.
Sam Harris (The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason)
In 1917 I went to Russia. I was sent to prevent the Bolshevik Revolution and to keep Russia in the war. The reader will know that my efforts did not meet with success. I went to Petrograd from Vladivostok, .One day, on the way through Siberia, the train stopped at some station and the passengers as usual got out, some to fetch water to make tea, some to buy food and others to stretch their legs. A blind soldier was sitting on a bench. Other soldiers sat beside him and more stood behind. There were from twenty to thirty.Their uniforms were torn and stained. The blind soldier, a big vigorous fellow, was quite young. On his cheeks was the soft, pale down of a beard that has never been shaved. I daresay he wasn't eighteen. He had a broad face, with flat, wide features, and on his forehead was a great scar of the wound that had lost him his sight. His closed eyes gave him a strangely vacant look. He began to sing. His voice was strong and sweet. He accompanied himself on an accordion. The train waited and he sang song after song. I could not understand his words, but through his singing, wild and melancholy, I seemed to hear the cry of the oppressed: I felt the lonely steppes and the interminable forests, the flow of the broad Russian rivers and all the toil of the countryside, the ploughing of the land and the reaping of the wild corn, the sighing of the wind in the birch trees, the long months of dark winter; and then the dancing of the women in the villages and the youths bathing in shallow streams on summer evenings; I felt the horror of war, the bitter nights in the trenches, the long marches on muddy roads, the battlefield with its terror and anguish and death. It was horrible and deeply moving. A cap lay at the singer's feet and the passengers filled it full of money; the same emotion had seized them all, of boundless compassion and of vague horror, for there was something in that blind, scarred face that was terrifying; you felt that this was a being apart, sundered from the joy of this enchanting world. He did not seem quite human. The soldiers stood silent and hostile. Their attitude seemed to claim as a right the alms of the travelling herd. There was a disdainful anger on their side and unmeasurable pity on ours; but no glimmering of a sense that there was but one way to compensate that helpless man for all his pain.
W. Somerset Maugham
Under the leadership of Henry Kissinger, first as Richard Nixon’s national security adviser and later as secretary of state, the United States sent an unequivocal signal to the most extreme rightist forces that democracy could be sacrificed in the cause of ideological warfare. Criminal operational tactics, including assassination, were not only acceptable but supported with weapons and money. A CIA internal memo laid it out in unsparing terms:        On September 16, 1970 [CIA] Director [Richard] Helms informed a group of senior agency officers that on September 15, President Nixon had decided that an Allende regime was not acceptable to the United States. The President asked the Agency to prevent Allende from coming to power or to unseat him and authorized up to $10 million for this purpose. . . . A special task force was established to carry out this mandate, and preliminary plans were discussed with Dr. Kissinger on 18 September 1970.
John Dinges (The Condor Years: How Pinochet and His Allies Brought Terrorism to Three Continents)
At least ten times as many people died from preventable, poverty-related diseases on September 11, 2011, as died in the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on that black day. The terrorist attacks led to trillions of dollars being spent on the ‘war on terrorism’ and on security measures that have inconvenienced every air traveller since then. The deaths caused by poverty were ignored. So whereas very few people have died from terrorism since September 11, 2001, approximately 30,000 people died from poverty-related causes on September 12, 2001, and on every day between then and now, and will die tomorrow. Even when we consider larger events like the Asian tsunami of 2004, which killed approximately 230,000 people, or the 2010 earthquake in Haiti that killed up to 200,000, we are still talking about numbers that represent just one week’s toll for preventable, poverty-related deaths — and that happens fifty-two weeks in every year.
Peter Singer (Practical Ethics)
While Paine was endeavoring to make the movement in France peaceful, Burke fomented the league of monarchs against France which maddened its people, and brought on the Reign of Terror. While Paine was endeavoring to preserve the French throne ("phantom” though he believed it), to prevent bloodshed, Burke was secretly writing to the Queen of France, entreating her not to compromise, and to “trust to the support of foreign armies” ("Histoire de France depuis 1789.” Henri Martin, i., 151).
Thomas Paine (Rights of Man)
In this miasma of forgotten wars, torture and the war on terror, there are no easy answers, especially in the face of a very real terrorism. But I can live my questions. As a humanitarian, I can act from a feeling of shared vulnerability with the victims of preventable suffering. I have a responsibility to bear witness publicly to the plight of those I seek to assist and to insist on independent humanitarian action and respect for international humanitarian law. As a citizen, I can assume my responsibility for the public world - the world of politics - not as a spectator, but as a participant who engages and shapes it. The larger force that can push back against the wrong use of power can be the force of a citizen's politics that openly debates the right use of power and the reasoned pursuit of justice. Catherine Lu, a political philosopher and my friend, has described justice as a boundary over which we must not go, a bond of common humanity between us, a balance among people of equal worth and dignity. I fight not for a utopian ideal, but each day I make a choice, against nihilism and towards justice.
James Orbinski (An Imperfect Offering: Humanitarian Action in the Twenty-first Century)
Faith drives a wedge between ethics and suffering. Where certain actions cause no suffering at all, religious dogmatists still maintain that they are evil and worthy of punishment (sodomy, marijuana use, homosexuality, the killing of blastocysts, etc.). And yet, where suffering and death are found in abundance their causes are often deemed to be good (withholding funds for family planning in the third world, prosecuting nonviolent drug offenders, preventing stem-cell research, etc). This inversion of priorities not only victimizes innocent people and squanders scarce resources; it completely falsifies our ethics.
Sam Harris (The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason)
it could only put Roosevelt “in an embarrassing position.” Moore explained: “If he declined to comply with the request, he would be subjected to considerable criticism. On the other hand, if he complied with it he would not only incur the resentment of the German Government, but might be involved in a very acrimonious discussion with that Government which conceivably might, for example, ask him to explain why the negroes of this country do not fully enjoy the right of suffrage; why the lynching of negroes in Senator Tydings’ State and other States is not prevented or severely punished; and how the anti-Semitic feeling in the United States, which unfortunately seems to be growing, is not checked.
Erik Larson (In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin)
Even years later traumatized people often have enormous difficulty telling other people what has happened to them. Their bodies reexperiences terror, rage, and helplessness, as well as the impulse to fight or flee, but these feelings are almost impossible to articulate. Trauma by nature drives us to the edge of comprehension, cutting us off from language based on common experience or an imaginable past... Sooner or later most survivors... come up with what many of them call their "cover story" that offers some explanation for their symptoms and behavior for public consumption. These stories, however, rarely capture the inner truth of the experience. It is enormously difficult to organize one's traumatic experiences into a coherent account - a narrative with a beginning, middle, and an end.
Bessel van der Kolk (The Body Keeps the Score: Mind, Brain and Body in Transformation of Trauma / Hidden Healing Powers Of Super & Whole Foods: Plant Based Diet Proven To Prevent & Reverse Disease)
Nevertheless, as Oppie predicted, the Truman Administration rejected the Soviet response out of hand. Negotiations continued in a desultory fashion for many months, but without result. An early opportunity for a good-faith effort to prevent an uncontrolled nuclear arms race between the two major powers had been lost. It would take the terrors of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, and the massive Soviet buildup that followed it, before an American administration would propose, in the 1970s, a serious and acceptable arms control agreement. But by then tens of thousands of nuclear warheads had been built. Oppenheimer and many of his colleagues always blamed Baruch for this missed opportunity. Acheson angrily observed later, “It was his [Baruch’s] ball and he balled it up. . . . He pretty well ruined the thing.” Rabi was equally blunt: “It’s simply real madness what has happened.
Kai Bird (American Prometheus)
When we blame those who brought about the brutal murder of Emmett Till, we have to count President Eisenhower, who did not consider the national honor at stake when white Southerners prevented African Americans from voting; who would not enforce the edicts of the highest court in the land, telling Chief Justice Earl Warren, 'All [opponents of desegregation] are concerned about is to see that their sweet little girls are not required to sit in schools alongside some big, overgrown Negroes.' We must count Attorney General Herbert Brownell Jr., who demurred that the federal government had no jurisdiction in the political assassinations of George Lee and Lamar Smith that summer, thus not only preventing African Americans from voting but also enabling Milam and Bryant to feel confident that they could murder a fourteen-year-old boy with impunity. Brownell, a creature of politics, likewise refused to intervene in the Till case. We must count the politicians who ran for office in Mississippi thumping the podium for segregation and whipping crowds into a frenzy about the terrifying prospects of school desegregation and black voting. This goes double for the Citizens' Councils, which deliberately created an environment in which they knew white terrorism was inevitable. We must count the jurors and the editors who provided cover for Milam, Bryant, and the rest. Above all, we have to count the millions of citizens of all colors and in all regions who knew about the rampant racial injustice in America and did nothing to end it. The black novelist Chester Himes wrote a letter to the New York Post the day he heard the news of Milam's and Bryant's acquittals: 'The real horror comes when your dead brain must face the fact that we as a nation don't want it to stop. If we wanted to, we would.
Timothy B. Tyson (The Blood of Emmett Till)
Across Western nations, shell-shocked citizens experienced all the well-worn tactics of rising totalitarianism—mass propaganda and censorship, the orchestrated promotion of terror, the manipulation of science, the suppression of debate, the vilification of dissent, and use of force to prevent protest. Conscientious objectors who resisted these unwanted, experimental, zero-liability medical interventions faced orchestrated gaslighting, marginalization, and scapegoating. American lives and livelihoods were shattered by a bewildering array of draconian diktats imposed without legislative approval or judicial review, risk assessment, or scientific citation. So-called Emergency Orders closed our businesses, schools and churches, made unprecedented intrusions into privacy, and disrupted our most treasured social and family relationships. Citizens the world over were ordered to stay in their homes.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health)
Emotional abuse can pose a threat to a person’s psychological survival, particularly if that person is a child and if the emotional abuse is chronic and severe. Threat of abandonment is experienced by some as a threat to physical and/or psychological survival. This is particularly so if the victim is dependent on the person threatening abandonment, as a child may be. Incest is a form of physical and emotional abuse that threatens a child’s psychological survival and sometimes even her or his physical survival. Extreme sexual or emotional abuse may produce fragmentation of identity, as in multiple personality, or psychic annihilation, as in psychosis. Threat to psychological survival can also occur, for example, when someone threatens to kill your children, when someone continues to sexually abuse your children and there is nothing you can do to stop it, or when someone prevents you from seeing your children.
Dee L.R. Graham (Loving to Survive: Sexual Terror, Men's Violence, and Women's Lives (Feminist Crosscurrents, 3))
A State Department memorandum on the resolution written by Dodd’s friend R. Walton Moore, assistant secretary of state, sheds light on the government’s reluctance. After studying the resolution, Judge Moore concluded that it could only put Roosevelt “in an embarrassing position.” Moore explained: “If he declined to comply with the request, he would be subjected to considerable criticism. On the other hand, if he complied with it he would not only incur the resentment of the German Government, but might be involved in a very acrimonious discussion with that Government which conceivably might, for example, ask him to explain why the negroes of this country do not fully enjoy the right of suffrage; why the lynching of negroes in Senator Tydings’ State and other States is not prevented or severely punished; and how the anti-Semitic feeling in the United States, which unfortunately seems to be growing, is not checked.
Erik Larson (In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin)
What are the heights, and depths, and lengths, of human science, with all the boasted acquisitions of the brightest genius of mankind! Learning and science can measure the globe, can sound the depths of the sea, can compass the heavens, can mete out the distances of the sun and moon, and mark out the path of every twinkling star for many ages past, or ages to come; but they cannot acquaint us with the way of salvation from this long, this endless distress. What are all the sublime reasonings of philosophers upon the abstruse and most difficult subjects? What is the whole circle of sciences which human wit and thought can trace out and comprehend? Can they deliver us from the guilt of one sin? Can they free us from one of the terrors of the Almighty? Can they assuage the torment of a wounded spirit, or guard us from the impressions of divine indignation? Alas, they are all but trifles in comparison of this blessed Gospel, which saves us from eternal anguish and death. It is the Gospel that teaches us the holy skill to prevent this worm of conscience from gnawing the soul, and instructs us how to kill it in the seed and first springs of it, to mortify the corruptions of the heart, to resist the temptations of Satan, and where to wash away the guilt of sin. It is this blessed Gospel that clearly discovers to us how we may guard against the fire of divine wrath, or rather how to secure our souls from becoming the fuel of it. It is this Book that teaches us to sprinkle the blood of Christ on a guilty conscience by faith, by receiving Him as sincere penitents, and thereby defends us from the angel of death and destruction. This is that experimental philosophy of the saints in Heaven whereby they have been released from the bonds of their sins, have been rescued from the curse of the law, and have been secured from the gnawing worm and devouring fire.
Isaac Watts (The World to Come)
One example of systematic oppression is structural violence. This concept was introduced in the 1970s by Johan Galtung, a pioneering Norwegian researcher in peace and conflict, and founder of the International Peace Research Institute. He describes structural violence as “a form of violence which corresponds with the systematic ways in which a given social structure or social institution kills people slowly by preventing them from meeting their basic needs. Institutionalized elitism, ethnocentricism, classism, racism, sexism, adultism, nationalism, heterosexism and ageism are just some examples of structural violence. Life spans are reduced when people are socially dominated, politically oppressed, or economically exploited. Structural violence and direct violence are highly interdependent. Structural violence inevitably produces conflict and often direct violence including family violence, racial violence, hate crimes, terrorism, genocide, and war.
Laura Van Dernoot Lipsky (Trauma Stewardship: An Everyday Guide to Caring for Self While Caring for Others)
On 28 June 1914 the heir to the throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, was assassinated in Sarajevo, capital of Bosnia, a heartland of the South Slavs. Philosophers refer to ‘the inevitable accident’, and this was a very accidental one. Some young Serb terrorists had planned to murder him as he paid a state visit. They had bungled the job, throwing a bomb that missed, and one of them had repaired to a café in a side street to sort himself out. The Archduke drove to the headquarters of the governor-general, Potiorek (where he was met by little girls performing folklore), and berated him (the two men were old enemies, as the Archduke had prevented the neurasthenic Potiorek from succeeding an elderly admirer as Chief of the General Staff). The Archduke went off in a rage, to visit in hospital an officer wounded by the earlier bomb. His automobile moved off again, a Count Harrach standing on the running board. Its driver turned left after crossing a bridge over Sarajevo’s river. It was the wrong street, and the driver was told to stop and reverse. In reverse gear such automobiles sometimes stalled, and this one did so - Count Harrach on the wrong side, away from the café where one of the assassination team was calming his nerves. Now, slowly, his target drove up and stopped. The murderer, Gavrilo Princip, fired. He was seventeen, a romantic schooled in nationalism and terrorism, and part of a team that stretches from the Russian Nihilists of the middle of the nineteenth century, exemplified especially in Dostoyevsky’s prophetic The Possessed and Joseph Conrad’s Under Western Eyes. Austria did not execute adolescents and Princip was young enough to survive. He was imprisoned and died in April 1918. Before he died, a prison psychiatrist asked him if he had any regrets that his deed had caused a world war and the death of millions. He answered: if I had not done it, the Germans would have found another excuse.
Norman Stone (World War One: A Short History)
Imagine the daughter of a narcissistic father as an example. She grows up chronically violated and abused at home, perhaps bullied by her peers as well. Her burgeoning low self-esteem, disruptions in identity and problems with emotional regulation causes her to live a life filled with terror. This is a terror that is stored in the body and literally shapes her brain. It is also what makes her brain extra vulnerable and susceptible to the effects of trauma in adulthood.                              Being verbally, emotionally and sometimes even physically beaten down, the child of a narcissistic parent learns that there is no safe place for her in the world. The symptoms of trauma emerge: disassociation to survive and escape her day-to-day existence, addictions that cause her to self-sabotage, maybe even self-harm to cope with the pain of being unloved, neglected and mistreated. Her pervasive sense of worthlessness and toxic shame, as well as subconscious programming, then cause her to become more easily attached to emotional predators in adulthood. In her repeated search for a rescuer, she instead finds those who chronically diminish her just like her earliest abusers. Of course, her resilience, adept skill set in adapting to chaotic environments and ability to “bounce back” was also birthed in early childhood. This is also seen as an “asset” to toxic partners because it means she will be more likely to stay within the abuse cycle in order to attempt to make things “work.” She then suffers not just from early childhood trauma, but from multiple re-victimizations in adulthood until, with the right support, she addresses her core wounds and begins to break the cycle step by step. Before she can break the cycle, she must first give herself the space and time to recover. A break from establishing new relationships is often essential during this time; No Contact (or Low Contact from her abusers in more complicated situations such as co-parenting) is also vital to the healing journey, to prevent compounding any existing traumas.
Shahida Arabi (Healing the Adult Children of Narcissists: Essays on The Invisible War Zone and Exercises for Recovery)
As we close out the second decade of the twenty-first century, we can draw some conclusions about the post–Cold War era. This has been a period in which new information and communication technologies have burst onto the world scene in forms that have made them widely available. There have also been great advances in development, including in medicine and life expectancy. Economic growth has been considerable and widespread. Wars between countries have become rare. But this has also been an era in which the advance of democracy has slowed or even reversed. Inequality has increased significantly. The number of civil wars has increased, as has the number of displaced persons and refugees. Terrorism has become a global threat. Climate change has advanced with dire implications for both the near and the distant futures. The world has stood by amid genocide and has shown itself unable to agree on rules for cyberspace and unable to prevent the reemergence of great-power rivalry. Those who maintain that things have never been better are biased by what they are focusing on and underestimate trends that could put existing progress at risk.
Richard N. Haass (The World: A Brief Introduction)
Why? Why do the authorities allow the criminal gangs that terrorize neighborhoods and entire cities to thrive as they do? Politicians, attorneys general, district attorneys, and the FBI have the power to destroy the gangs and prevent most of the crimes they commit, the murdering and raping and human trafficking and the endless flood of drugs across the border, the hateful murdering murdering murdering of faithful husbands and little girls in their Sunday dresses. Yet the people with the power to stop men like Hamal and Lupo and Parker often facilitate their activities. Maybe the majority of politicians and their appointees are corrupt, but not all. Are those uncorrupted individuals so often ineffective because they are cowards or lazy or stupid? Does loyalty to party, class, club, or ideology matter to them more than doing what is right? Why? Why can’t such people see that the crime and anarchy they permit to flourish in poor and middle-class neighborhoods will eventually metastasize into the enclaves of the elite where they live their privileged lives? Why do they have contempt for those not in their circle? Why can’t they see that being of the people rather than ruling over them is the only way that they themselves will survive?
Dean Koontz (The House at the End of the World)
I had decided to allow no room in the universe for something which shamed and frightened me. I succeeded very well -- by not looking at the universe, by not looking at myself, by remaining, in effect, in constant motion. Even constant motion, of course, does not prevent an occasional mysterious drag, a drop, like an airplane hitting an air pocket. And there were a number of those, all drunken, all sordid. one very frightening such drop while I was in the Army which involved a fairy who was later court-martialed out. The panic his punishment cause in me was as close as I ever came to facing in myself the terrors I sometimes saw clouding another man's eyes. What happened was that, all unconscious of what this ennui meant, I wearied of the motion, wearied of the joyless seas of alcohol, wearied of the blunt, bluff, hearty, and totally meaningless friendships, wearied of wandering through the forests of desperate women, wearied of the work which fed me only the brutally literally sense. Perhaps, as we say in America, I wanted to find myself. This is an interesting phrase, not current as far as I know in the language of any other people, which certainly does not mean what it says betrays a nagging suspicion that something has been misplaced. I think now that if I had had any intimidation that the self I was going to find would turn out to be only the same self from which I had spent so much time in flight, I would have stayed at home. But again, I think I knew, at the very bottom of my heart, exactly what I was doing when I took the boat for France.
James Baldwin (Giovanni’s Room)
Dr. Gilligan states: “I am suggesting that the only way to explain the causes of violence, so that we can learn how to prevent it, is to approach violence as a problem in public health and preventive medicine, and to think of violence as a symptom of life-threatening pathology, which, like all form of illness, has an etiology or cause, a pathogen.”160 In Dr. Gilligan's diagnosis he makes it very clear that the greatest cause of violent behavior is social inequality, highlighting the influence of shame and humiliation as an emotional characteristic of those who engage in violence.161 Thomas Scheff, a emeritus professor of sociology in California stated that “shame was the social emotion”.162 Shame and humiliation can be equated with the feelings of stupidity, inadequacy, embarrassment, foolishness, feeling exposed, insecurity and the like – all largely social or comparative in their origin. Needless to say, in a global society with not only growing income disparity but inevitably “self-worth” disparity - since status is touted as directly related to our “success” in our jobs, bank account levels and the like - it is no mystery that feelings of inferiority, shame and humiliation are staples of the culture today. The consequence of those feelings have very serious implications for public health, as noted before, including the epidemic of the behavioral violence we now see today in its various complex forms. Terrorism, local school and church shootings, along with other extreme acts that simply did not exist before in the abstractions they find context today, reveals a unique evolution of violence itself. Dr. Gilligan concludes: “If we wish to prevent violence, then, our agenda is political and economic reform.”163
TZM Lecture Team (The Zeitgeist Movement Defined: Realizing a New Train of Thought)
The Negro had never really been patient in the pure sense of the word. The posture of silent waiting was forced upon him psychologically because he was shackled physically. In the days of slavery, this suppression was openly, scientifically and consistently applied. Sheer physical force kept the Negro captive at every point. He was prevented from learning to read and write, prevented by laws actually inscribed in the statute books. He was forbidden to associate with other Negroes living on the same plantation, except when weddings or funerals took place. Punishment for any form of resistance or complaint about his condition could range from mutilation to death. Families were torn apart, friends separated, cooperation to improve their condition carefully thwarted. Fathers and mothers were sold from their children and children were bargained away from their parents. Young girls were, in many cases, sold to become the breeders of fresh generations of slaves. The slaveholders of America had devised with almost scientific precision their systems for keeping the Negro defenseless, emotionally and physically. With the ending of physical slavery after the Civil War, new devices were found to "keep the Negro in his place." It would take volumes to describe these methods, extending from birth in jim-crow hospitals through burial in jim-crow sections of cemeteries. They are too well known to require a catalogue here. Yet one of the revelations during the past few years is the fact that the straitjackets of race prejudice and discrimination do not wear only southern labels. The subtle, psychological technique of the North has approached in its ugliness and victimization of the Negro the outright terror and open brutality of the South. The result has been a demeanor that passed for patience in the eyes of the white man, but covered a powerful impatience in the heart of the Negro.
Martin Luther King Jr. (Why We Can't Wait)
Creating “Correct” Children in the Classroom One of the most popular discipline programs in American schools is called Assertive Discipline. It teaches teachers to inflict the old “obey or suffer” method of control on students. Here you disguise the threat of punishment by calling it a choice the child is making. As in, “You have a choice, you can either finish your homework or miss the outing this weekend.” Then when the child chooses to try to protect his dignity against this form of terrorism, by refusing to do his homework, you tell him he has chosen his logical, natural consequence of being excluded from the outing. Putting it this way helps the parent or teacher mitigate against the bad feelings and guilt that would otherwise arise to tell the adult that they are operating outside the principles of compassionate relating. This insidious method is even worse than outand-out punishing, where you can at least rebel against your punisher. The use of this mind game teaches the child the false, crazy-making belief that they wanted something bad or painful to happen to them. These programs also have the stated intention of getting the child to be angry with himself for making a poor choice. In this smoke and mirrors game, the children are “causing” everything to happen and the teachers are the puppets of the children’s choices. The only ones who are not taking responsibility for their actions are the adults. Another popular coercive strategy is to use “peer pressure” to create compliance. For instance, a teacher tells her class that if anyone misbehaves then they all won’t get their pizza party. What a great way to turn children against each other. All this is done to help (translation: compel) children to behave themselves. But of course they are not behaving themselves: they are being “behaved” by the adults. Well-meaning teachers and parents try to teach children to be motivated (translation: do boring or aversive stuff without questioning why), responsible (translation: thoughtless conformity to the house rules) people. When surveys are conducted in which fourth-graders are asked what being good means, over 90% answer “being quiet.” And when teachers are asked what happens in a successful classroom, the answer is, “the teacher is able to keep the students on task” (translation: in line, doing what they are told). Consulting firms measuring teacher competence consider this a major criterion of teacher effectiveness. In other words if the students are quietly doing what they were told the teacher is evaluated as good. However my understanding of ‘real learning’ with twenty to forty children is that it is quite naturally a bit noisy and messy. Otherwise children are just playing a nice game of school, based on indoctrination and little integrated retained education. Both punishments and rewards foster a preoccupation with a narrow egocentric self-interest that undermines good values. All little Johnny is thinking about is “How much will you give me if I do X? How can I avoid getting punished if I do Y? What do they want me to do and what happens to me if I don’t do it?” Instead we could teach him to ask, “What kind of person do I want to be and what kind of community do I want to help make?” And Mom is thinking “You didn’t do what I wanted, so now I’m going to make something unpleasant happen to you, for your own good to help you fit into our (dominance/submission based) society.” This contributes to a culture of coercion and prevents a community of compassion. And as we are learning on the global level with our war on terrorism, as you use your energy and resources to punish people you run out of energy and resources to protect people. And even if children look well-behaved, they are not behaving themselves They are being behaved by controlling parents and teachers.
Kelly Bryson (Don't Be Nice, Be Real: Balancing Passion for Self with Compassion for Others)
By collecting data from the vast network of doctors across the globe, they added dozens of new compounds to the arsenal—all proven effective against COVID-19. Dr. Kory told me that he was deeply troubled that the extremely successful efforts by scores of front-line doctors to develop repurposed medicines to treat COVID received no support from any government in the entire world—only hostility—much of it orchestrated by Dr. Fauci and the US health agencies. The large universities that rely on hundreds of millions in annual funding from NIH were also antagonistic. “We didn’t have a single academic institution come up with a single protocol,” said Dr. McCullough. “They didn’t even try. Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Duke, you name it. Not a single medical center set up even a tent to try to treat patients and prevent hospitalization and death. There wasn’t an ounce of original research coming out of America available to fight COVID—other than vaccines.” All of these universities are deeply dependent on billions of dollars that they receive from NIH. As we shall see, these institutions live in terror of offending Anthony Fauci, and that fear paralyzed them in the midst of the pandemic. “Dr. Fauci refused to promote any of these interventions,” says Kory. “It’s not just that he made no effort to find effective off-the-shelf cures—he aggressively suppressed them.” Instead of supporting McCullough’s work, NIH and the other federal regulators began actively censoring information on this range of effective remedies. Doctors who attempted merely to open discussion about the potential benefits of early treatments for COVID found themselves heavily and inexplicably censored. Dr. Fauci worked with Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and other social media sites to muzzle discussion of any remedies. FDA sent a letter of warning that N-acetyle-L-cysteine (NAC) cannot be lawfully marketed as a dietary supplement, after decades of free access on health food shelves, and suppressed IV vitamin C, which the Chinese were using with extreme effectiveness.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health)
Events in the African American town of Hamburg, in the Edgefield District of South Carolina, were typical of many others across the former Confederacy where white paramilitary groups mobilized to regain control of state governments. Their aim was simple: prevent African Americans from voting. In July 1876, a few months before the election that gave the presidency to Hayes, a violent rampage in Hamburg abolished the civil rights of freed slaves. Calling itself the Red Shirts, a collection of white supremacists killed six African American men and then murdered four others whom the gang had captured. Benjamin Tillman led the Red shirts; the massacre propelled him to a twenty-four-year career as the most vitriolic racist in the U.S. Senate. Following the massacre, the terror did not abate. In September, a 'rifle club' of more than 500 whites crossed the Savannah River from Georgia and camped outside Hamburg. A local judge begged the governor to protect the African American population, but to no avail. The rifle club then moved on to the nearby hamlet of Ellenton, killing as many as fifty African Americans. President Ulysses S. Grant then sent in federal troops, who temporarily calmed things down but did not eliminate the ongoing threats. Employers in the Edgefield District told African Americans they would be fired, and landowners threatened black sharecroppers with eviction if they voted to maintain a biracial state government. When the 1876 election took place, fraudulent white ballots were cast; the total vote in Edgefield substantially exceeded the entire voting age population. Results like these across the state gave segregationist Democrats the margin of victory they needed to seize control of South Carolina's government from the black-white coalition that had held office during Reconstruction. Senator Tillman later bragged that 'the leading white men of Edgefield' had decided to 'seize the first opportunity that the Negroes might offer them to provoke a riot and teach the Negroes a lesson.' Although a coroner's jury indicted Tillman and ninety-three other Red Shirts for the murders, they were never prosecuted and continued to menace African Americans. Federal troops never came to offer protection. The campaign in Edgefield was of a pattern followed not only in South Carolina but throughout the South. With African Americans disenfranchised and white supremacists in control, South Carolina instituted a system of segregation and exploitation that persisted for the next century. In 1940, the state legislature erected a statute honoring Tillman on the capitol grounds, and in 1946 Clemson, one of the state's public universities, renamed its main hall in Tillman's honor. It was in this environment that hundreds of thousands of African Americans fled the former Confederacy in the first half of the twentieth century.
Richard Rothstein (The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America)
You are claiming that the Soviet authorities began and influenced the existence of the Democratic Party [in Iran]. That is the basis of all your statements. The simplest way to discredit your absurd claim si to tell you about Iran, of which you are apparently ignorant. The people of Iran are oppressed, poverty-stricken, and miserable with hunger and disease. Their death rate is among the highest in the world, and their infant mortality rate threatens Iran with complete extinction. They are ruled without choice by feudalistic landowners, ruthless Khans, and venal industrialists. The peasants are slaves and the workers are paid a few pennies for a twelve hour day--not enough to keep their families in food. I can quote you all the figures you like to support these statements, quote them if necessary from British sources. I can also quote you the figures of wealth which is taken out of Iran yearly by the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, of which the British Governemtn is the largest shareholder. 200 million pounds sterling have been taken out of Iran by your Oil company: a hundred times the total amount of Iran's national income and ten thousand times the total national income of the working people of Iran. By such natural resources as oil, Iran is by nature one of the wealthiest countries on earth. That wealth goes to Britain, while Iran remains poverty-ridden and without economic stability at all. It has no wage policies, no real trade unions, few hospitals, no sanitation and drainage, no irrigation, no proper housing, and no adequate road system. Its people have no rights before the law; their franchise in non-existent, and their parliamentary rights are destroyed by the corrupt method of election and political choice. The Iranian people suffer the terrors of a police regime, and they are prey to the manipulations of the grain speculators and the money operators. The racial minorities suffer discrimination and intolerance, and religious minorities are persecuted for political ends. Banditry threatens the mountain districts, and British arms have been used to support one tribe against another. I could go on indefinitely, painting you a picture of misery and starvation and imprisonment and subjection which must shame any human being capable of hearing it. Yet you say that the existence of a Democratic Party in Iran has been created by the Soviet authorities. You underestimate the Iranian people, Lord Essex! The Democratic Party has arisen out of all this misery and subjection as a force against corruption and oppression. Until now the Iranian people have been unable to create a political party because the police system prevented by terror and assassination. Any attempt to organize the workers and peasants was quickly halted by the execution of party leaders and the vast imprisonment of its followers. The Iranian people, however, have a long record of struggle and persistence, and they do not have to be told by the Soviet Union where their interests lie. They are not stupid and they are not utterly destroyed. They still posses the will to organize a democratic body and follow it into paths of Government. The Soviet Union has simply made sure that the police assassins did not interfere.... To talk of our part in 'creating' the democratic movement is an insult to the people and a sign of ignorance. We do not underestimate the Iranian people, and as far as we are concerned the Democratic Party...belongs to the people. It is their creation and their right, and it cannot be broken by wild charges which accuse the Soviet Union of its birth. We did not create it, and we have not interfered in the affairs of Iran. On the contrary, it is the British Government which has interfered continuously and viciously in Iran's affairs.
James Aldridge (The Diplomat)
THE EXCITEMENT IN the boardroom was only overshadowed by the anticipation. They didn’t have long to wait. Sam yelled for everyone to get down. Jack pushed her from behind and shoved her to the floor, covering her with his body. Shots rang out. Someone cried out in pain. Jack cursed, snapping her out of her haze. She tried to look up, but Jack kept her head down. Two more shots rang out before everything went eerily quiet. “Jenna, are you okay?” Sam called to her from the doorway. “Fine,” she answered automatically, unsure about anything at the moment. “Everyone else okay?” Sam asked. All the men indicated they were fine, but she didn’t hear Jack among them. Jack eased his weight off her and slid aside. Cameron helped her to her feet and the two bodyguards flanking her made room for her to pass. Jack leaned against the wall, blood running down his left arm, a gun in his right. She flung herself against his chest and held on to him, unable to look through the doorway where the first shots originated. Sam was excellent at his job. In his background check on David, he’d discovered David’s gun permit. Using some of his less-than-reputable contacts from the FBI, they’d had someone break into David’s house and office to locate the weapon. David actually owned quite a few guns, only one registered, which he kept in his office, locked in his desk drawer. They assumed David would be in a rage before he left the boardroom, and his rage would make him pick up the gun and come after Jenna. Provoking him was risky, but it was also the only way to end David’s terrorism. Knowing David would be volatile, she and Sam had sat in the office at the ranch planning what they’d do to prevent the inevitable. They figured David would probably try to get to her before she got back on the plane. She never thought David would come after her before she’d even left the boardroom. “What the hell were you thinking? You weren’t supposed to have a gun. I’m going to kill Sam,” she said and grabbed his lapels and shook him. “Later, give me a kiss.” She pressed her lips to his. Warm, alive, she thanked God he was alive. She helped him off with his suit jacket, revealing the deep furrow on the outside of his arm. “Looks like this time you get the stitches. Maybe if you need a pokey shot, Lily will give you a lollipop.” She gave him her most sugary sweet smile, even though they both knew she wasn’t happy about the situation. A tear slid down her cheek. “I could have lost you.” “Now you know exactly how I felt when he took you.” The relief overcame her fear. She pressed her forehead to his and took a moment to savor the closeness and the fact that they were both alive. She took a calming breath before addressing Sam. “Is David dead?” “Yes, just outside the door. Jack got him.” “I told you I’d kill that bastard.” -Sam, Jenna, & Jack
Jennifer Ryan (Saved by the Rancher (The Hunted, #1))
Our world today is characterized with a process of globalization, multiculturalism, with clashes of civilizations, gradual isolation of the individual in spite of increased communication, inequality in prosperity, and fundamentalism, with the meaninglessness threat of terrorism, indiscriminate exploitation of natural resources and totalitarism. The prevalent trend is towards crisis intervention rather than crisis prevention, responding to crises caused by natural disasters, wars, economic grid and so on.
Maria Marshall (Logotherapy Revisited: Review of the Tenets of Viktor E. Frankl's Logotherapy)
It is the custom in my household, during the hard frosts of winter, to put out food for the birds, and it is a noticeable fact that these creatures, when they are really starving, live together most amicably, huddling together to keep each other warm, and refraining from all strife; and if a small quantity of food be given them they will eat it with comparative freedom from contention; but let a quantity of food which is more than sufficient for all be thrown to them, and fighting over the coveted supply at once ensues. Occasionally we would put out a whole loaf of bread, and then the contention of the birds became fierce and prolonged, although there was more than they could possibly eat during several days. Some, having gorged themselves until they could eat no more, would stand upon the loaf and hover round it, pecking fiercely at all newcomers, and endeavouring to prevent them from obtaining any of the food. And along with this fierce contention there was noticeably a great fear. With each mouthful of food taken, the birds would look around in nervous terror, apprehensive of losing their food or their lives.
James Allen (21 Books: Complete Premium Collection)
Another reason that this question hasn’t demanded an answer is that most people understandably consider it to be far less relevant than “How can nuclear terrorism be prevented?” Speculating on responses to a nuclear attack is a bit like contemplating the day after any number of disasters that involve an unprecedented scale of devastation. Does the national security community focus on the US government’s potential response to an asteroid striking the planet or the aftermath of a war between China and the United States? It does not, because these types of scenarios fall into the realm of the surreal or at a minimum envision a situation in which there is such massive social disruption and such a severe
Benjamin Schwartz (Right of Boom: The Aftermath of Nuclear Terrorism)
Three billion of the people on the planet – approximately half – are destitute. They live in shocking poverty. There are 10 million children dying of easily preventable causes every year - things like starvation, thirst, cholera. Billions of people lack any form of health care. Billions of people lack access to basics like clean water, adequate food and safe housing. Environmentally, we are raping the planet in hundreds of ways. A mass extinction event is looming on the horizon, yet we appear unmotivated to do anything at all to prevent it. Humans are constantly at war, constantly killing one another somewhere in the world. Crime seems rampant. In the United states, over two million citizens are incarcerated. We have thousands of nuclear warheads, enough to kill all of humanity many times over, all loaded into rockets that we can launch at a moment's notice simply by pushing a few buttons. We have spent trillions of dollars building and stockpiling conventional weapons designed to kill fellow humans in a thousand different ways. We can shoot them, bomb them, grenade them, poison them, burn them, etc. Humans often seem intent on bringing misery to other humans: terrorism, dictatorships, warlords, slavery, torture, unjust imprisonment, sweatshops, corruption, murder, mayhem, crime, etc. can be found all over the planet. The concentration of wealth is extreme and seems unstoppable, so a very small percentage of the planet's population owns half of the planet's wealth, while billions of others have nothing. In many cases and at many different levels we seem unable to control ourselves or to stop ourselves even when we know we are wrong.
Marshall Brain (The Second Intelligent Species: How Humans Will Become as Irrelevant as Cockroaches)
Corruption is worse than terrorism. Terrorists blow up existing infrastructure such as roads, airports and power plants. Corruption prevents such infrastructure from being created in the first place. Terrorists take innocent lives. Corrupt politicians prevent hospitals from being built, which means that innocent lives that could be saved are not.
Chetan Bhagat (What Young India Wants)
Corruption is worse than terrorism. Terrorists blow up existing infrastructure such as roads, airports and power plants. Corruption prevents such infrastructure from being created in the first place. Terrorists take innocent lives. Corrupt politicians prevent hospitals from being built, which means that innocent lives
Chetan Bhagat (What Young India Wants)
Today, Islam effectively resists secularization primarily because of its use of shame. Within the community, each person's sexuality is tied to his or her family and to the community. To violate the sexual rules of Allah violates both the family and the community. This powerful distortion allows Islam to remain isolated from secular sexual influences. The terror of social sanction or violence keeps young people from following their heart. It prevents healthy sexual exploration and development in men and women.
Darrel Ray (Sex & God: How Religion Distorts Sexuality)
It was a psychoanalyst colleague, Dr. Stanley Coen, who suggested in the course of our working on a medical paper together that the role of the pain syndrome was not to express the hidden emotions but to prevent them from becoming conscious. This, he explained, is what is referred to as a defense. In other words, the pain of TMS (or the discomfort of a peptic ulcer, of colitis, of tension headache, or the terror of an asthmatic attack) is created in order to distract the attention of the sufferer from what is going on in the emotional sphere.
John E. Sarno (Healing Back Pain: The Mind-Body Connection)
The attack on 9/11 was a localized event, affecting only a relatively small number of Americans. As indicated earlier, the general threat of terrorism, even factoring in the large death toll on that tragic day, produces a statistically insignificant threat to the average person’s life. People across the country, however, were gripped with fear. And because we are an object-oriented people, most felt the need to project that fear onto something. Some people stopped flying in airplanes, worried about a repeat attack—and for years afterward, air travel always dipped on the anniversary of 9/11.4 Of course, this was and is an irrational fear; it is safer to travel by plane than by car. According to the National Safety Council, in 2010 there were over 22,000 passenger deaths involving automobiles, while no one died in scheduled airline travel that year.5 Nevertheless, Congress responded by rushing through the USA PATRIOT Act six weeks after 9/11—a 240-plus page bill that was previously written, not available to the public prior to the vote, and barely available to the elected officials in Congress, none of whom read it through before casting their votes.6 Two weeks previous to the bill’s passage, President Bush had announced the establishment of the Office of Homeland Security to “develop and coordinate the implementation of a comprehensive national strategy to secure the United States from terrorist threats or attacks.” He explained that “[t]he Office will coordinate the executive branch’s efforts to detect, prepare for, prevent, protect against, respond to, and recover from terrorist attacks within the United States.”7 The office’s efforts culminated in the creation of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) one year later as a result of the Homeland Security Act of 2002. This law consolidated executive branch organizations related to “homeland security” into a single Cabinet department; twenty-two total agencies became part of this new apparatus. The government, responding to the outcry from a fearful citizenry, was eager to “do something.” All of this (and much, much more), affecting all Americans, because of a localized event materially affecting only a few. But while the event directly impacted only a small percentage of the population, its impact was felt throughout the entire country.
Connor Boyack (Feardom: How Politicians Exploit Your Emotions and What You Can Do to Stop Them)
In 2015, in a BBC interview, President Barack Obama said that he felt “frustrated” and “stymied” in failing to get the gun control laws he wanted. In fact, he said, “The United States of America is the one advanced nation on earth in which we do not have sufficient common-sense, gun-safety laws. Even in the face of repeated mass killings. And you know, if you look at the number of Americans killed since 9/11 by terrorism, it’s less than 100. If you look at the number that have been killed by gun violence, it’s in the tens of thousands.” You read that right: Barack Obama said that American gun owners are a bigger threat to our safety than are Muslim terrorists; and he said that Americans who believe in the Second Amendment lack “common sense.” My first response is that this just exposes how liberals like Obama have no grasp of the reality of the terrorist threat. They downplay the dangers of Islamist terrorism. Second, they have no respect for the Constitution. They treat that noble document with contempt. Third, they fail to consider how many crimes are prevented, deterred, or foiled by gun owners. Scholar John Lott has shown repeatedly that in American cities, in his famous phrase, more guns equals less crime. That’s a fact.
Sarah Palin (Sweet Freedom: A Devotional)
president, Kerry, Moniz, Sherman, and many others, we obtained more than the necessary support. The congressional review period expired without a vote of disapproval. The deal was done! The Iran agreement is proof of the value of tough sanctions, when combined with skillful, relentless diplomacy, to accomplish the seemingly unachievable in international affairs. The JCPOA was a finely detailed agreement that effectively closed all pathways to Iran developing a nuclear weapon and ensured Iran would face the most rigorous, intrusive international inspections regime ever established. It was never able, nor was it intended, to halt all of Iran’s nefarious behavior—its support for terrorism, its destabilization of neighboring states, its hostility toward Israel, or its ballistic missile program. Still, it effectively addressed our biggest concern and that of the international community—preventing Iran from posing a far more dangerous threat to the region and the world through its acquisition of nuclear weapons. Understandably, Israel always said it viewed Iran’s nuclear program as an existential threat. So, surely, the removal of that threat would be welcome news to Israel, our Gulf partners, and their backers. In reality, we discovered that removing the nuclear threat was not in fact their principal motivation. Rather, Israel and the Gulf Arab countries aimed to put permanent and crippling economic and military pressure on Iran such that either the regime collapsed, or it was too weak to wield meaningful influence in the region. The nuclear deal, which allowed Iran to access much of its own frozen assets held abroad under sanctions, in exchange for full and verifiable compliance with the terms of the agreement, was deemed worse than no deal at all by those who prioritized keeping the international community’s boot on Iran’s neck above halting its
Susan Rice (Tough Love: My Story of the Things Worth Fighting For)
Opposition to global hegemony cannot be the same as opposition to traditional oppression. It can only be something unpredictable, irreducible to the preventive terror of programming, forced circulation, irreducible to the White terror of the world order. Something antagonistic, in the literal sense, that opens a hole in this Western agony. Something that leaves a trace in the monotony of the global order of terror. Something that reintroduces a form of impossible exchange in this generalized exchange. Hegemony is only broken by this type of event, by anything that irrupts as an unexchangeable singularity. A revolt, therefore, that targets systematic deregulation under the cover of forced conviviality, that targets the total organization of reality.
Jean Baudrillard (The Agony of Power)
A prime example of these rogue-events, which are both farcical and terrifying, is the recent bird flu scare (where the terrorists were wild ducks!). There is no greater masquerade than this global panic, than the sacred union in panic. The international community becomes hectic and epileptic from the virus of terror and the terror of viruses. Terror is multiplied by the grotesque profusion of security measures that end up causing perverse autoimmune effects: the antibodies turn against the body and cause more damage than the virus. Without real solidarity between nations, the specter of Absolute Evil must be raised up as an ersatz Universal, an emergency solution to symbolic misery. When traditional contracts and symbolic pacts, the universal and the particular no longer function, a form like a conspiracy takes brutal shape, a plot in which everyone is involuntarily involved. Partaking in the conspiracy is not based on anything, on any value, other than delirious self-defense, in response to the total loss of the imaginary's immunity... In fact, the virus is a "cosa mentale" and contamination happens so quickly because the mental immunity, the symbolic defenses are long lost. A panic space can take hold in this liquidation, one to which the entire global information system also belongs for another reason, the system of networks and instant diffusion - a non-Euclidean space where all rational, preventive, prophylactic countermeasures are almost automatically turned against themselves through their own excesses. Security is the best medium for terror.
Jean Baudrillard (The Agony of Power)
The depths of terror are inseparable from the extension of farce. The terror of the Good much more than of Evil, which only follows like a shadow. The parody of the sacred union is taking hold everywhere, under the sign of a full preventive war against the slightest infectious molecule - but also against the least anomaly, the least exception, the least singularity. The biting irony of this counter-terror, of white terror, is that it establishes a vast autoimmune syndrome, self-destruction through excess protection, which leads to crimes against humanity under the sign of the expulsion of Evil, crimes committed by humanity to get rid of itself completely, to cast itself out of an unlivable setting.
Jean Baudrillard (The Agony of Power)
It was a psychoanalyst colleague, Dr. Stanley Coen, who suggested in the course of our working on a medical paper together that the role of the pain syndrome was not to express the hidden emotions but to prevent them from becoming conscious. This, he explained, is what is referred to as a defense. In other words, the pain of TMS (or the discomfort of a peptic ulcer, of colitis, of tension headache, or the terror of an asthmatic attack) is created in order to distract the attention of the sufferer from what is going on in the emotional sphere. It is intended to focus one's attention on the body instead of the mind. It is a response to the need to keep those terrible, antisocial, unkind, childish, angry, selfish feelings (the prisoners) from becoming conscious. It follows from this that far from being a physical disorder in the usual sense, TMS is really part of a psychological process. (page 56)
John E Sarno, M.D (Healing Back Pain)
Violence is a self-perpetuating rabbit hole that exaggerates problems and rarely solves them. It is a reaction to a situation and not a thought process. You and your supposed enemy may wash in each other's blood, but once the bloodlust passes, all that remains is a determination to prevent the next generation from inheriting the sins of their fathers. Then the search for peace finally begins.
Stewart Stafford
Properly used, regret is a tool that can help you take actions to prevent its further accumulation.
Irvin D. Yalom (Staring at the Sun: Overcoming the Terror of Death)
Plantation owners redefined their former slaves as sharecroppers to maintain harsh and exploitative conditions. Events in the African American town of Hamburg, in the Edgefield District of South Carolina, were typical of many others across the former Confederacy where white paramilitary groups mobilized to regain control of state governments. Their aim was simple: prevent African Americans from voting. In July 1876, a few months before the election that gave the presidency to Hayes, a violent rampage in Hamburg abolished the civil rights of freed slaves. Calling itself the Red Shirts, a collection of white supremacists killed six African American men and then murdered four others whom the gang had captured. Benjamin Tillman led the Red Shirts; the massacre propelled him to a twenty-four-year career as the most vitriolic racist in the U.S. Senate. Following the massacre, the terror did not abate. In September, a “rifle club” of more than 500 whites crossed the Savannah River from Georgia and camped outside Hamburg. A local judge begged the governor to protect the African American population, but to no avail. The rifle club then moved on to the nearby hamlet of Ellenton, killing as many as fifty African Americans. President Ulysses S. Grant then sent in federal troops, who temporarily calmed things down but did not eliminate the ongoing threats. Employers in the Edgefield District told African Americans they would be fired, and landowners threatened black sharecroppers with eviction if they voted to maintain a biracial state government. When the 1876 election took place, fraudulent white ballots were cast; the total vote in Edgefield substantially exceeded the entire voting age population. Results like these across the state gave segregationist Democrats the margin of victory they needed to seize control of South Carolina’s government from the black-white coalition that had held office during Reconstruction. Senator Tillman later bragged that “the leading white men of Edgefield” had decided “to seize the first opportunity that the Negroes might offer them to provoke a riot and teach the Negroes a lesson.” Although a coroner’s jury indicted Tillman and ninety-three other Red Shirts for the murders, they were never prosecuted and continued to menace African Americans. Federal troops never again came to offer protection. The campaign in Edgefield was of a pattern followed not only in South Carolina but throughout the South. With African Americans disenfranchised and white supremacists in control, South Carolina instituted a system of segregation and exploitation that persisted for the next century. In 1940, the state legislature erected a statue honoring Tillman on the capitol grounds, and in 1946 Clemson, one of the state’s public universities, renamed its main hall in Tillman’s honor. It was in this environment that hundreds of thousands of African Americans fled the former Confederacy in the first half of the twentieth century.*
Richard Rothstein (The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America)
Page 147: As nation and state are two radically distinct notions, it is clearly not redundant to treat the growth processes of the modern state and of modern nationalism separately in discussing the causes of revolution. That the development of the state sometimes parallels the growth of nationalism is beyond doubt, but that the term “nation-state” in most cases grossly simplifies the actual complexity of the population of most states is just as certain. The most blatant consequence of this latter confusion is that what many modern social scientists call “nation building” is rather “state building,” which often turns out to be “nation destroying” instead. The strengthening of the state under the guise of “nation building” occurs at the expense of groups whose claim to nationhood is quite valid. The attempt to merge already existing nations or near-nations into a novel state-sponsored supernation is patently artificial. Terror is the usual means used to prevent such weak structures from tottering to the ground. The growth of true nationalism then is the growth of that sentiment of belonging together and differentiation from others which is such a salient feature of the modern world. Not surprisingly, whether or not the potentially explosive elements of nationalism will reach revolutionary dimensions is determined by the historical context. However, one general conclusion is warranted: nationalism in some manifestation is always involved in modern revolutions.
Mark N. Hagopian (The Phenomenon of Revolution)
Law does not tell me what my duty is, it merely tells me that I should accomplish my duty, and so leaves the space open for empty voluntarism (whatever I decide to be my duty is my duty). However, far from being a limitation, this very feature brings us to the core of Kantian ethical autonomy: it is not possible to derive the concrete norms I have to follow in my specific situation from the moral Law itself - which means that the subject herself has to assume responsibility of translating the abstract injunction of the moral Law into a series of concrete obligations. The full acceptance of this paradox compels us to reject any reference to duty as an excuse: 'I know this is heavy and can be painful, but what can I do, this is my duty...' Kant's ethics of unconditional duty is often taken as justifying such an attitude - no wonder Adolf Eichmann himself referred to Kantian ethics when he tried to justify his role in planning and executing the Holocaust: he was just doing his duty and obeying the Fuhrer's orders. However, the aim of Kant's emphasis on the subject's full moral autonomy and responsibility is precisely to prevent any such manoeuvre of displacing the blame onto some figure of the big Other.
Slavoj Žižek (Robespierre. Virtud y terror)
Those who study the process of radicalization say the only thing certain thing about it is that’s it’s highly complex. Over and over, literature on the prevention of violent extremism suggests that holding radical beliefs doesn’t necessarily lead to terrorism: there’s no conveyor belt that begins with sympathy for a cause and ends with acts of violence: and some people commit terrorist offenses with no knowledge of extremist ideology.
Carla Power (Home, Land, Security: Deradicalization and the Journey Back From Extremism)
It was a psychoanalyst colleague, Dr. Stanley Coen, who suggested in the course of our working on a medical paper together that the role of the pain syndrome was not to express the hidden emotions but to prevent them from becoming conscious. This, he explained, is what is referred to as a defense. In other words, the pain of TMS (or the discomfort of a peptic ulcer, of colitis, of tension headache, or the terror of an asthmatic attack) is created in order to distract the attention of the sufferer from what is going on in the emotional sphere. It is intended to focus one's attention on the body instead of the mind. It is a response to the need to keep those terrible, antisocial, unkind, childish, angry, selfish feelings (the prisoners) from becoming conscious. It follows from this that far from being a physical disorder in the usual sense, TMS is really part of a psychological process.
John E Sarno, M.D (Healing Back Pain)