Who What Where
The Talented Mr. Takeyh:
Why Doesn't the Council on Foreign Relations Fellow Like Flynt & Hillary Mann Leverett?
Ray Takeyh
If there's one thing mainstream "Iran experts" hate, it's well-credentialed, experienced analysts who dare challenge Beltway orthodoxies, buck conventional wisdom and demythologize the banal, bromidic and Manichean foreign policy narrative of the United States government and its obedient media. Such perspectives are shunned by "serious" scholars who play by the rules they and their former bosses themselves wrote; those propounding such subversive ideas are likewise excoriated and banished, labeled apostates and attacked personally for failing to fall in line.
Enter Flynt and Hillary Mann Leverett, two former National Security Council officials, who have long questioned the wisdom and efficacy of the past thirty years of U.S. policy towards Iran. Their new expertly researched and meticulously-sourced book, Going to Tehran: Why the United States Must Come to Terms with the Islamic Republic of Iran, details and debunks numerous propagandized myths and delusional misunderstandings that many Americans have been led to believe about the country that is consistently referred to by our politicians and pundits as "the world's most dangerous state." The Leveretts argue that, by at least taking into account the Iranian side of things and reviewing the misguided, myopic and unsustainable American policies toward Iran, the groundwork may be laid for a constructive and beneficial change of course for both nations; by engaging openly and acknowledging past grievances – rather than ignoring, justifying or ridiculing them – a new future is possible, one without threats or war, without sabotage and cyberattacks, without demonization and demagoguery.
The problem is, without such things, the revolving door of Beltway think-tankery and government appointments might not spin so lucratively for our "Iran expert" industry. As a result, the Leveretts and their ideas are pilloried by political and policy elites who confuse heterodoxy for apologia.
In a supremely smug and self-satisfied pseudo-review of Going to Tehran, just published in Survival, the journal of the International Institute of Strategic Studies, Washington's "go-to" Iran analyst Ray Takeyh launches what is surely a paradigmatic opening salvo on the Leveretts' work. Needless to say, he didn't like the book; his review is the intellectual equivalent of a drive-by shooting. While lambasting the Leveretts, Takeyh fails to actually address any of their contentions or claims, preferring to make grandiose statements condemning their analyses of Iranian politics and foreign policy and their policy recommendations without bothering to back up these statements with evidence or explanation.
Takeyh is a mainstay of the Washington establishment – a Council on Foreign Relations Senior Fellow before and after a stint in the Obama State Department and a founding member of the neoconservative-created Iran Strategy Task Force who has become a tireless advocate for the collective punishment of the Iranian population in a futile attempt to inspire homegrown regime change (if not, at times, all-out war against a third Middle Eastern nation in just over a decade). Unsurprisingly, he dismisses out of hand the notion that "the principal cause of disorder in the Middle East today is a hegemonic America seeking to impose its imperial template on the region."
This is exactly the worldview that has produced the disastrous U.S. foreign policy of the last few decades, policies advocated time and time again by the same people – not only people like Takeyh, but including literally Takeyh himself – never learning from their mistakes or conceiving there might be a different way to engage the world (say, by not bullying, threatening, demanding, dictating, punishing, bombing, invading, destroying, dismantling, overthrowing, occupying, and propping up dictators). Takeyh's contemptuous rejection of history means that those who disagree with him – like the Leveretts, even though their experience in government and direct contact with on-the-ground reality in today's Iran dwarfs Takeyh's – must inevitably be minions of the ayatollahs.
Takeyh's dismissal of the Leveretts' work is especially ironic, given that his own analytic nonsense is legion. He routinely makes statements that aren't based in fact and that dispute even the most hysterical estimates of the United States government. He has no problem co-writing tomes of warmongering lunacy with psychotics like Matthew Kroenig, convicted criminals and racist demagogues like Elliott Abrams, and garbled inanity with his wife's insane colleague at the Saban Center and perennial war champion Kenneth Pollack. Everything he writes is easily destroyed with a basic perusal of facts.
Never bothering to cite any evidence, Takeyh has long assumed Iran - oh sorry, I mean, "the mullahs" (how spooky!) - are building a nuclear bomb and only the fierce determination of the United States, its benevolent buddy Israel and vital Arab dictator friends can stop it, if not by beating the Islamic Republic into submission through economic and covert warfare, then perhaps by military might. In April 2003, he wrote, "Tehran often claims that instability in the region forces it to pursue nuclear weapons, when in fact it is Iran's possession of such weapons that would increase instability." Actually, Iranian officials have never claimed anything remotely like that, instead declaring their commitment never to build nuclear weapons consistently for over 20 years. In 2011, Takeyh assured Washington Post readers, "Exact estimates vary, but in the next few years Iran will be in [a] position to detonate a nuclear device."
In October 2011, when the US government tried to pretend that a bumbling, bipolar Iranian used-car salesman in Texas had been tasked by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps to hire a Mexican drug cartel to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in a DC restaurant (it is literally impossible to read that without chuckling), Takeyh took to the airwaves to comment on the alleged plot. Speaking on NPR, Takeyh wholly endorsed the U.S. government's version of events, never for a second doubting their authenticity. Though he claimed it was "unusual," Takeyh made sure to add, "I don't know what the evidence about this is, but I'm not in a position to doubt it."
There you have it, folks, Takeyh's entire method of scholarship in a nutshell.
Takeyh's disdain for empirical reality allows him to take multiple, often contradictory positions on many issues—whatever it takes to align himself with "centrist" foreign policy hawks in the Democratic Party's national security establishment. In 2006, after the occupation of Iraq had turned irrevocably catastrophic and Democrats were looking for ways to distance themselves from Bush's Middle East follies, Takeyh argued "for the United States to become more directly engaged in negotiations with Iranians and also make an offer of some corresponding concessions." While assuming an Iranian desire for latent nuclear weapons capability, he held, "I don't think they've made up their mind yet to cross the threshold and actually weaponize [nuclear power]." He added, "For those who suggest that it is absolutely conclusively determined that Iran wants to have nuclear weapons, I think it behooves them to provide some kind of evidence for that claim." Just months later, though, Takeyh told the Senate that Iranian leaders were determined to achieve hegemony in the Persian Gulf and that, from their vantage, "it is only through the attainment of the bomb that Iran can negate the nefarious American plots to undermine its stature and power.
As the possibility of Democratic victory in the 2008 presidential election drew closer, Takeyh's views grew more hawkish. His transformation into an Iran hawk accelerated with his brief stint in the State Department during the Obama administration's first year. In 2010, he co-wrote a journal essay and accompanying op-ed that sought to characterize war with Iran as a natural outcome, a normalized and inevitable progression of history. Over the next couple of years, he fully realized his penchant for conflating Iran's monitored and safeguarded nuclear energy program with a nefarious, clandestine weapons program.
This conflation is present in Takeyh's attempted takedown of Going to Tehran, where he references Iran's "nuclear infractions," but provides no evidence for them other than collective Beltway wisdom, displaying a complete ignorance of what IAEA reports actually say and where such accusations actually come from (unverified American and Israeli allegations). His determination to blame only Iranian "intransigence" for the current nuclear dispute epitomizes the intellectual dishonesty for which most Washington think-tanks are unfortunately revered.
Takeyh's analytic malfeasance extends to Iran's domestic politics as well. His conversion from unimpressive establishment scholar to full-blown neocon fellow traveler is underscored by his remarkable insistence that Iran's clerics are to blame for the 1953 CIA coup that overthrew Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh (sic). Takeyh also refuses to understand the reality of the Green Movement in Iran, elevating them to surreal heights of organization, unity and potential.
In his review of Going to Tehran, Takeyh notes what he calls "transparent electoral fraud in the presidential election" of 2009, but again fails to advance any actual documentation to support this contention. Since 2010, he has been warning us all of Ahmadinejad's impending consolidation of power over the Iranian government. This didn't happen. Good call, Ray, how astute.
The self-serving vacuity of Takeyh's review is especially glaring in his treatment of the Leveretts' critique of U.S. policy toward Iran. As the Leveretts themselves have already noted, Takeyh is adamant that the U.S. has often and openly reached out diplomatically to Tehran but can't seem to square this with reality – including statements made by his former boss, Dennis Ross, who sees the perception of failed diplomacy as necessary to sell the American public on a new illegal war against another enemy that poses absolutely no threat to the United States.
Takeyh complements his rewriting of diplomatic history with a selective – indeed exploitative – focus on human rights issues in Iran. Along with the vast majority of the Leveretts' detractors (and anyone else who rejects a reality-based approach to the three-decades-long U.S.-Iranian impasse), Takeyh seems unaware that basing American foreign policy on human rights is not only disingenuous, but also contrary to how the U.S. actually operates all over the world.
Going to Tehran is a policy prescription addressed primarily to the government of the United States, not to human rights organizations. Iran has as abhorrent a human rights record as many other countries - far worse than many, better than others. But the United States government has never cared one iota about human rights when it comes to strategic partnership with its closest and most trusted political allies (let alone its own actions).
Whether looking at our torture regime, our indefinite detention, our illegal drone program, our invasions, our assassinations, our surveillance state, our contempt for due process, our racist justice system and bloated prisons, and - perhaps, most relevant - our continued support and encouragement of ongoing Israeli war crimes, ethnic cleansing, colonization and occupation of Palestine alongside weapons sales and willful blindness to the atrocities of true dictatorships like Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, the concept that American diplomacy or interests rest upon virtuousness and humane practices is not only hypocritical; it's downright laughable. As Glenn Greenwald recently wrote about Iran, Syria and Libya, "That the US and its Nato allies - eager benefactors of the world's worst tyrants - are opposed to those regimes out of concern for democracy and human rights is a pretense, a conceit, so glaring and obvious that it really defies belief that people are willing to advocate it in public with a straight face."
If our government cared about human rights it wouldn't be subjecting the Iranian people (who wholeheartedly oppose American sanctions and constant bullying) to collective punishment, just like it did the people of Iraq - the half million Iraqi children sacrificed to similar sanctions know full well the American consideration for human rights. Takeyh reflects this duplicity in his review, noting the appalling history of "show trials, mass repression and persistent international transgressions" in Iran and condemning the Leveretts for not making this the focus of their book. Yet if Takeyh actually cared about fundamental human rights and the importance of international law, he would not only call for Congress to sanction Israel and Saudi Arabia, he would be outraged by the closeness of these governments to his own here in the United States. But he doesn't. Only Iran is the target of his anger and concern.
Because for the U.S. government, human rights abuses are used merely as a bludgeon against its adversaries while the myriad transgressions of its strategic partners are routinely ignored (if not, in the case of Israel, even funded and justified), Takeyh's argument is disingenuous at minimum. As always, he and his fellow mavens of the established foreign policy community are silent about America's role as the guarantor of Middle Eastern tyranny, as long as its puppet dictators do our bidding, namely with regard to acquiescing to Israeli regional hegemony and following the U.S. lead on isolating and threatening Iran.
In the most recent Human Rights Watch report, we learn that a large Middle Eastern country, ruled by an unelected religious fundamentalist misogynistic elite, has "arrested hundreds of peaceful protesters during 2012, and sentenced activists from across the country to prison for expressing critical political and religious views." Not only this, but "thousands of people are in arbitrary detention, and human rights activists were put on trial on politicized charges. The Ministry of Interior forbids public protests. Since 2011, security forces have killed at least 14 protesters in the Eastern province who were seeking political reforms."
It finds that the "government has gone to considerable lengths to punish, intimidate, and harass those who express opinions that deviate from the official line," while "lawyers are not generally allowed to assist suspects during interrogation, and face obstacles to examining witnesses or presenting evidence at trial." Furthermore, "Authorities have used specialized criminal courts, set up to try terrorism cases, to prosecute a growing number of peaceful dissidents on politicized charges."
What country is this? Saudi Arabia, the leading U.S. trading partner in the Middle East, which receiving billions upon billions of high-tech weaponry from our noble nation year after year. The United States uses a secret Saudi base as a launchpad for lethal drone strikes in neighboring Yemen and is even working closely with the Kingdom on its nascent nuclear program. One wonders if this recent case (one of the worst things I have ever heard about) will cause the U.S. to reconsider its relationship with Saudi Arabia. Don't hold your breath. But just imagine if that had happened in Iran.
Our best friend in the world, Israel, meanwhile is a militarized colonial state in routine contravention of existing international and humanitarian law. Ample evidence reveals the illegality of Israel's Apartheid Annexation Wall, Israel's use of administrative detention to hold Palestinians indefinitely without charge or trial and the rampant Israeli arrest of Palestinian children and toddlers, who suffer abuse - mental, physical and sexual - and who are tortured during and traumatized by their imprisonment. Palestinian communities are constantly victimized by housing demolitions and eviction, a particularly vindictive form of collective punishment favored by the Israeli government.
None of this seems to bother our government one bit and any attempt to hold Israel accountable for its crimes is met with derision in the circles in which Mr. Takeyh travels, all expenses paid, of course.
The issue isn't about whitewashing or justifying abuse and repression; it's about U.S. government policy, which clearly has no problem overlooking such horrors depending on who commits them. If the U.S. were consistent in its concern for human rights (rather than selectively using them only to condemn its enemies), Takeyh might have a point. But it isn't, so he doesn't.
The Leveretts explicitly address this issue in Going to Tehran. They write, "Washington has never demonstrated that it cares about human rights in the Middle East for their own sake. It cares about them when and where caring appears to serve other policy goals." In their explicitly stated effort "to outline a potentially far more efficacious diplomatic approach" (p.388), the Leveretts point out that "the only way human rights conditions in the Islamic Republic, as defined by Western liberals, are likely to improve is in a context of U.S.-Iranian rapprochement, whereby the United States had credibly given up regime change as a policy goal." (p.326)
While conventional Washington wisdom (and actual acts of Congress and executive orders by the President) hold that the U.S. government should be critical of Iran's human rights record as a matter of policy, doing so is pure propaganda. The United States is in no position to affect the violations of the Iranian government because it has no diplomatic presence, credibility or connection to the Islamic Republic. As George W. Bush admitted in December 2004, in a rare moment of candor and honesty, "We're relying upon others, because we've sanctioned ourselves out of influence with Iran…We don't have much leverage with the Iranians right now."
Takeyh, by employing ad hominem attacks on the Leveretts in an effort to label them apologists for theocratic authoritarianism and thereby discredit their views, is trying to poison the well, so to speak, with anti-war progressives who might find a new approach to Iran novel and welcome. He calls Going to Tehran "tedious," "stale," and "trite." That's coming from a guy who works at the Council on Foreign Relations and writes about implementing even more "crippling" sanctions on Iranians in order to compel their government's capitulation to American and Israeli diktat. How original, fresh, and innovative!
Regardless of whether one finds their arguments compelling or their history sufficiently comprehensive, the Leveretts deliver a blow to the establishment narrative of "what to do about Iran." It is no surprise that Ray Takeyh is offended by the Leveretts – they directly address the danger he and others like him in the official foreign policy community pose to those who oppose another war.
They write that the claims put forward by Takeyh "that Iran's leadership is too ideologically constrained, fractious, or politically dependent on anti-Americanism to pursue a strategic opening to the United States are not just at odds with the historical record. Such claims push the United States ever further in its support of coercive regime change and, ultimately, down the disastrous path toward war." (p.108)
The main thesis of Going to Tehran, as evident in the book's title, holds that, as American power declines worldwide, recognition of faulty and detrimental foreign policy is required for the U.S. to better adapt to an ever-changing and more independent Middle East; a region in which Iranian influence is ascendant whether we like it or not. They see the precedent set by Richard Nixon's historic visit to China as the best way forward with regard to Iran.
Such a suggestion, while increasingly relevant, is not actually new. A noted foreign policy expert proffered an identical view in 2006, explaining, "First of all, this is not a unique historical moment for the United States. We've been in this position before. If you look back in the late 1960s, early '70s, we were in a position in East Asia where our power was declining because of the Vietnam War, and the Chinese power was increasing because of China's own capability and declining American power. And then there was certainly antagonism between the two countries.
Lamenting the "conceptual divergence" of Iranian and American negotiating positions, the analyst continued,
"I think you have to accept certain basic realities. Iran is an important power with influence in the region, and the purpose of the negotiation would be how to establish a framework for regulation of its influence. Therefore, in a perverse sense, negotiations [are] a form of containment. We're negotiating as a means of containing Iran's influence, surely as we negotiated with the Chinese in the early 1970s as means of coming to some arrangements to rationalize U.S.-Sino American relations as a means of regulating Chinese power."
He further insisted that the United States must take a bold step to enter into "comprehensive negotiations on all of Iranian concerns and all of our concerns. Our concerns are human rights, terrorism; they have their own grievances and so forth. And these negotiations will take place ultimately without precondition," just as negotiations with China in 1970 were not preconditioned.
Again making the explicit analogy to Nixon's overture to Beijing, he stated, "The purpose of these negotiations would be to foster an arrangement where Tehran's relationship with Washington is more meaningful to it than various gradation of uranium or potentially its ties with Hezbollah." This way, he concluded, an "end point" would be reached "by creating a new framework and a new basis for U.S.- Iran relations," which would, in order to be at all successful, have to recognize Iran's position in its own neighborhood. "[I]n all these discussions and negotiations," he affirmed, "we have to appreciate that in a sense we are legitimizing Iran's at least Persian Gulf if not larger regional aspirations."
That analyst was Ray Takeyh. He was addressing the Senate Foreign Relations Committee of the 109th Congress. Sitting on the Committee at the time of his statement were John Kerry and Chuck Hagel. Its ranking member was Joe Biden. Also on the committee? The junior Senator from Illinois, Barack Obama.
Just six months later, Takeyh wrote in Foreign Affairs that no U.S. policy regarding Iran in the past thirty years has worked. Noting the impossibility of regime change, military action, isolation and obstinacy, Takeyh wrote the U.S. government must abandon these "incoherent policies" and "must rethink its strategy from the ground up."
He continued,
"The Islamic Republic is not going away anytime soon, and its growing regional influence cannot be limited. Washington must eschew superficially appealing military options, the prospect of conditional talks, and its policy of containing Iran in favor of a new policy of détente. In particular, it should offer pragmatists in Tehran a chance to resume diplomatic and economic relations."
He added, "The sooner Washington recognizes these truths and finally normalizes relations with its most enduring Middle Eastern foe, the better."
This is literally what Going to Tehran is about. Literally.
By attacking the Leveretts' new book, Takeyh is attacking the very ideas he himself has espoused so confidently, both in a leading policy journal and to a senate Committee that included the current administration's President, Vice President, Secretary of State and Secretary of Defense themselves.
But he doesn't want you to know that.
***** ***** *****
Originally posted at Antiwar.com
February 15, 2013 - In a new opinion piece for the Los Angeles Times, Ray Takeyh stops warmongering for a second and takes a deep breath. While he still assumes that Iran is actively attempting to acquire nuclear weapons capability (incidentally, this is inevitable regardless of intent considering the technological and technical specifics of a fully functioning nuclear energy program and enrichment facilities), Takeyh now suggests the United States abandon its stubborn all-or-nothing approach to negotiating with Iran.
He notes that Iran's "multilayered, multifaceted program can be dealt with only on a piecemeal basis, as the technical details and rules for inspections are too complex to be addressed in a single agreement," and adds that, even if offered a proposal, "Tehran still has a right to contest and negotiate its provisions and offer counterproposals," especially since "[t]he international community is unlikely to concede to either more sanctions or the use of force until Iran's objections are taken into full consideration."
Takeyh's softer side is on full display throughout the article, even when he writes of the "diplomatic challenge...to derail this path to a nuclear weapon." He posits this be achieved "through a process that proceeds incrementally and sequentially." He rightly continues:
U.S. officials would be wise to get out of the crisis mode and put some time back on the clock. The Iran issue always seems urgent, and yet somehow there is always time to deal with it. Washington should acknowledge the obvious, namely, that given Iran's gradualist approach, it is still years from completing an efficient enrichment infrastructure, constructing a nuclear arsenal and developing a reliable means of delivery. By agreeing to a compressed timeline, the U.S. only narrows its options and makes a solution even more elusive.
This is welcome advice from the Senior CFR Fellow. Hopefully those who pay attention to his analysis will heed this particular advice before he publishes something else in the future that totally contradicts these current conclusions.
Posted by Nima Shirazi
Freelance Journalism said...
Dear Nima,
if people who are working for Hidden organization which have covered extra cash, material, security and so many other incentives, why should they write and speak base on the truth and honesty whether their name is Takeh or any Arabic or Persian,they will follow the master
not the truth.
As repressive as the Saudi regime is, the Islamic Republic (IRI) is orders of magnitude higher in sheer bloodthirstiness. Indeed, when it comes to executing its own citizens, the IRI is the world's leader in per capita terms (second only in the actual number of executions to China, a state with a population nearly 1.3 billion greater than that of Iran).
Great post Nima! It was about time Ray Takyeh got a serious intellectual smacking across the face!
Takyeh comes off as a Dennis Ross wannabe. As you've documented thoroughly, he's a true lapdog for necons and their nefarious criminal, all Israel all the time agenda. O
Ray might be Persian but he is an Israel firster through and through. Pardon me to say this but I'd strongly advise Mr Takyeh to go fuck himself for the rest of his life.
Iranian said...
Amir,
The "per-capita execution of own citizens" is a pretty arbitrary metric to measure human rights abuses. The vast majority of those executed are convicted drug smugglers, rapists and murderers tried according to Iranian law. Those executed for other reasons have been people linked by Iran to terrorist organizations like PJAK (although opposition claims they are mere political opponents of the regime) and possibly spies (like the merchant who allegedly acted on behalf of Mossad to sell booby-trapped equipment to Iranian nuclear industries). The latter group are less than ten people per year. This is not to whitewash the executions, but a context should be provided when citing these kinds of statistics.
If killing of foreign citizens is also included in the execution stats, the U.S. stands higher than Iran in terms of per-capita executions, if we only consider the drone attacks in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia.
More garbage from Nima.
The Leveretts are such IRI apologists, it's not even funny. In fact, I believe they're almost the level of Nima Shirazi.
Don't forget, Flynt's buddy-buddy with Prof. Mirandi...serving as the tour guide.
This couple is a joke. The IRI must be wiped out by Iran's own people, and the Leveretts try their hardest to make that as delayed as possible.
Screw them.
The vast majority of people executed anywhere are executed "according to the laws" of the state carrying out the executions. By that measure, all executions everywhere should be seen within their own "context". Presumably, the "vast majority" of the many thousands executed by the Islamic Republic from the very first day it came to power got what they deserved, especially the ones killed for being guilty of "moharebeh" or "mofsed fel arz", a common category of "crime" around the world!
Just to remind, "moharebeh" is merely the Iranian legal term for "terrorism".
And of course, everything (not just executions) should be seen in their context. This leads one to more informed and balanced judgement, whether one eventually agrees or disagrees with the act in question.
The point is, you might totally disagree with the death penalty anywhere, but you can't portray execution of violent criminals as being the same as the execution of political prisoners.
"Moharebeh" is an Islamic term meaning "at war (with God)". The Islamic Republic brands all sorts of individuals as being guilty of "moharebeh" or "mofsed fel arz" (corrupters of the earth) and includes a long list of non-capital offenses as being subject to execution. And by the way, the Islamic Republic has executed many thousands of political prisoners too. But I guess we shouldn't go too hard on the poor Islamic Republic for being such a prolific executioner of Iranians. After all, they have their reasons for doing what they gotta do, and we should try to be a little more understanding of what Khomeini and his followers have been doing for the past 34 years.
LOL The Islamic Republic is a terrorist country and should be treated as such.
Shame on Nima for promoting the "Leveretts".
Tayekh is miles ahead of you Nima.
Based on the attack-by-distraction-and-diversion comments, Nima, you must have struck a nerve: opposition to your article does NOT argue against any single claim that you made.
Maybe the critics are just stupid. Maybe they're not stupid, just incapable of finding a hole in your air-tight arguments.
You do good work, Nima, and reflect a rational as well as honorable perspective on Iran. We Americans who are NOT Iranians are hungry for the kind of information you provide: We Americans are not ALL bad people, but we have been very badly misinformed -- not least by those such as Takeyh who present themselves as knowledgeable informants on Iranian culture. That's why the lies Takeyh tells are so devastating, and why your work at unraveling that misinformation is so important.
I wish you strength and courage for the long haul.
Such a good words, work and great facts you presented here and always.
Never mind those that attack your personality without presenting just a single fact to back it up.
They are goons like Takey himself!
Every second these hypocrites are going down and would never last.
Just let us wait and see!
Nima Shirazi is an editor at Muftah, a digital foreign affairs magazine, and co-host of the media criticism podcast,
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His political analysis and commentary has appeared in Salon, Truthout, Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting, Al Jazeera English, and elsewhere.
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"If I sit silently, I have sinned."
- Mohammad Mossadegh
"One must always try to be as radical as reality itself."
- Vladimir Lenin
"They must find it difficult, those who have taken authority as truth, rather than truth as authority."
- Gerald Massey
"Social equality is the only basis of human happiness."
"I don't want them to believe me, I just want them to think."
- Marshall McLuhan
"Perhaps it is a universal truth that the loss of liberty at home is to be charged against provisions against danger, real or pretended from abroad."
- James Madison
"If you can't eliminate injustice, at least tell everyone about it."
- Ali Shariati
"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rock fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed."
"Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty."
"The problem is not changing people's consciousness but the political, economic, institutional regime of the production of truth."
- Michel Foucault
"There can be no peace until the forces of oppression are overthrown."
- Albert Luthuli
"Intelligent discontent is the mainspring of civilization."
- Eugene V. Debs
"The civility of no race can be perfect whilst another race is degraded. It is a doctrine of the oldest and of the newest philosophy, that man is one, and that you cannot injure any member, without a sympathetic injury to all members."
"In times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act."
- George Orwell
"There's no hope, but I may be wrong."
- Pete Seeger
"I'm witnessing this chronic, insidious genocide and I'm really scared, and questioning my fundamental belief in the goodness of human nature. This has to stop. I think it is a good idea for us all to drop everything and devote our lives to making this stop."
- Rachel Corrie
"Fear can only prevail when victims are ignorant of the facts."
"To protest in the name of morality against 'excesses' or 'abuses' is an error which hints at active complicity. There are no 'abuses' or 'excesses' here, simply an all-pervasive system."
- Simone de Beauvoir
"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident."
"Freedom means the supremacy of human rights everywhere. Our support goes to those who struggle to gain those rights and keep them. Our strength is our unity of purpose. To that high concept there can be no end save victory."
- Franklin Delano Roosevelt
"Truth is so obscure in these times, and falsehood so established, that, unless we love the truth, we cannot know it."
- Blaise Pascal
"No cause is left but the most ancient of all, the one, in fact, that from the beginning of our history has determined the very existence of politics, the cause of freedom versus tyranny."
- Hannah Arendt
"A state too expensive in itself, or by virtue of its dependencies, ultimately falls into decay; its free government is transformed into a tyranny; it disregards the principles which it should preserve, and finally degenerates into despotism."
- Simón Bolívar
"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."
"People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster."
- James Baldwin
"You have to understand that people have to pay the price for peace. If you dare to struggle, you dare to win. If you dare not to struggle then god damn it, you don't deserve to win. Let me say peace to you, if you're willing to fight for it."
- Fred Hampton
"The struggle of people against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting."
- Milan Kundera
"All those who seek to destroy the liberties of a democratic nation ought to know that war is the surest and shortest means to accomplish it."
- Alexis de Tocqueville
"Truth uncompromisingly told will always have its ragged edges; hence the conclusion of such a narration is apt to be less finished than an architectural finial."
- Herman Melville
"Believing in progress does not mean believing that any progress has yet been made."
- Franz Kafka
"Few of us can easily surrender our belief that society must somehow make sense. The thought that the state has lost its mind and is punishing so many innocent people is intolerable. And so the evidence has to be internally denied."
- Arthur Miller
"Everyone gives the title of barbarism to everything that is not in use in his own country."
- Michel de Montaigne
"Fascism itself can only be turned away if all those who are outraged by it show a commitment to social justice that equals the intensity of their indignation."
- Arundhati Roy
"Those who do not move, do not notice their chains."
- Rosa Luxemburg
"The basic principle, rarely violated, is that what conflicts with the requirements of power and privilege does not exist."
"Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule - and both commonly succeed, and are right."
- H.L. Mencken
"The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human."
"Many people would sooner die than think. In fact they do."
- Bertrand Russell
"If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor."
- Desmond Tutu
"Every empire...tells itself and the world that it is unlike all other empires, that its mission is not to plunder and control but to educate and liberate."
- Edward Said
"The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis."
- Dante Alighieri
"When fascism comes to this country, it will be wrapped in the flag, carrying a cross."
- Sinclair Lewis
"War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious."
- Smedley Butler
"The real difficulty is with the vast wealth and power in the hands of the few and the unscrupulous who represent or control capital... This is a government of the people, by the people, and for the people no longer. It is a government of corporations, by corporations, and for corporations.
- Rutherford B. Hayes
"Hard are the ways of truth, and rough to walk."
- John Milton
"A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."
- Max Planck
"Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety."
"With the establishment of a relationship of oppression, violence has already begun. Never in history has violence been initiated by the oppressed. How could they be the initiators, if they themselves are the result of violence? How could they be the sponsors of something objective whose objective inauguration called forth their existence as oppressed? There would be no oppressed had there been no prior of violence to establish their subjugation."
"The death of democracy is not likely to be an assassination from ambush. It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference, and undernourishment."
- Robert M. Hutchins
"I see how peoples are set against one another, and in silence, unknowingly, foolishly, obediently, innocently slay one another. I see that the keenest brains of the world invent weapons and words to make it yet more refined and enduring."
- Erich Maria Remarque
"The evil that is in the world almost always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence if they lack understanding."
- Albert Camus
"He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself."
"We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. We must remember always that accusation is not proof and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process of law. We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men."
- Edward R. Murrow
"If voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal."
- Emma Goldman
"Dissent is what rescues democracy from a quiet death behind closed doors."
- Lewis H. Lapham
"We are healthy only to the extent that our ideas are humane."
- Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
"The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off."
- Gloria Steinem
"Activism is my rent for living on this planet."
- Alice Walker
"More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly."
"My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music."
- Vladimir Nabokov
the road to Hell
is paved with
unbought stuffed dogs
The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.
- Italo Calvino (Invisible Cities)
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