Home > Work > Full Spectrum Disorder: The Military in the New American Century
1 " Even scientists and academics are frequent prey to the delusion that reality is reducible. Fear, deep and wide, is the secret motive force of much human behavior, and I think reduction is often rooted in fear. Passing over fear, I think, is the beginning of every liberatory project. "
― , Full Spectrum Disorder: The Military in the New American Century
2 " American culture is a sheep culture—long on talk about individualism, but even longer on absolute conformity. Most still believe that individuality is based on which model car you like best—commodity identity, a selection of personalities on a shelf full of products approved by the Federal Identity Administration. I’m a Taurus aspiring to be a Lexus. "
3 " The author also participated in Operation Uphold Democracy (in Haiti, a year after the catastrophic denouement of Operation Restore Hope in Somalia). ... Hope was not restored in Somalia. Democracy was not upheld in Haiti. "
4 " I would add entertainment media cheerleader Wolf Blitzer, CNN’s Pentagon sycophant in Kuwait City, a representative of the neon press, neon being that colorless, inert gas that lights up on command. "
5 " It's always easier to pretend you know something than it is to learn about it. It's always easier to be cute than it is to be rigorous. It is easier to talk trash than it is to practice the humility of the serious student. "
6 " But paranoids might have real enemies and obsessives might obsess about really important stuff. "
7 " It's the same hope we have to hold for humanity—that we can transform our roles, roles constructed like so many doors for us to go through by history, and by and by transform the whole edifice of human relations. "
8 " Remember that Caligula was not a cause, he was an effect. "
9 " That sounds stupid, but people have to remember that being raised a white male in the U.S.in the fifties and sixties, for most of us, meant being raised stupid. "
10 " I think we are all about to become rootless. It may be time. The soil has become poisonous. "
11 " The dialectical movement of economics, politics, and military power is folding and swirling like weather. Politics is being reshaped by military failure. Military failure is being shaped by economics. "
12 " People who claim, for example, that capitalism can overcome its dependence on fossil fuel have either not researched the question or they are on mescaline. "
13 " Politics is economics by other means, and war is politics by other means. "
14 " George W. Bush committed impeachable offenses in waging war in Iraq. "
15 " The starkest reality of war is that the enemy is never really a monster, never inhuman ... Every soldier is the same fallible breed of human that we are. The making of war, even the most necessary and 'just' war, hardens human hearts. "
16 " People who are under the same hegemonic-for-the-time-being power become furtive. They drop comments to test one another. They feel out levels of resentment. They sniff for willingness to take eventual action. "
17 " The point is that when one is dealing with a too-powerful-for-the-present force, pragmatism demands one bite one's lip, play the game, and become very alert. "
