Dark Ages America Quotes

“Ottoman Empire. “The West,” writes Huntington, “won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion…but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.”29”
― Morris Berman, Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire

“how reality feels. People addicted to busyness, people who don’t just use their cell phones in public but display in every nuance of cell-phone deportment their sense of throbbing connectedness to Something Important—these people would suffocate like fish on a dock if they were cut off from the Flow of Events they have conspired with their fellows to create. To these plugged-in players, the rest of us look like zombies, coasting on fumes. For”
― Morris Berman, Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire

“If you doubt for a moment that there is a “vast, right-wing conspiracy” in this country, you must be living on another planet.74”
― Morris Berman, Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire

“The result is that children now live in an “ethos of fantasy consumerism.” Modern American childhood, says Cross,”
― Morris Berman, Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire

“On 1 November 1983 Secretary of State George Shultz received intelligence reports showing that Iraq was using chemical weapons almost daily. The following February, Iraq used large amounts of mustard gas and also the lethal nerve agent tabun (this was later documented by the United Nations); Reagan responded (in November) by restoring diplomatic relations with Iraq. He and Bush Sr. also authorized the sale of poisonous chemicals, anthrax, and bubonic plague. Along with French supply houses, American Type Culture Collection of Manassas, Virginia, shipped seventeen types of biological agents to Iraq that were then used in weapons programs. In 1989, ABC-TV news correspondent Charles Glass discovered what the U.S. government had been denying, that Iraq had biological warfare facilities. This was corroborated by evidence from a defecting Iraqi general. The Pentagon immediately denied the facts.”
― Morris Berman, Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire

“The paradox of this arrangement was not lost on Lewis Mumford, who described suburbia as “a collective effort to live a private life.” In many ways, this goes to the heart of the matter, for it is a project based on self-contradiction—the tragedy of American domestic”
― Morris Berman, Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire

“In 1997, the government spent $37 billion on military research and development, nearly two-thirds of what the entire world spent on the same. In”
― Morris Berman, Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire

“The outlay for defense was 4.6 percent of the GDP in 1950; by 1953 it had risen to 13.8 percent. In 1940 the federal budget devoted 16 percent to defense; in 1959, more than 50 percent. By 1955, the American alliance system circled the globe, and we were pledged to the defense of practically everybody, including a host of despots and autocrats. The”
― Morris Berman, Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire

“The West developed the notion of the “corporate body,” the senate or representative assembly; Islam did not. The West, in a secularization of the Catholic corpus mysticum, eventually developed the idea of the corporation that lies at the heart of capitalism; Islam did not. Western science has the notions of the fact-value distinction, genuine critical analysis, and provisional truth; Islam keeps reason subordinate to faith.”
― Morris Berman, Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire

“For millions of Arabs and Muslims, this universe of abstract systems, this world of Western freedom and individualism, constitutes the soullessness of modernity. The attack on the World Trade Center, in this interpretation, was not so much an attack on the United States, but on modernity—secular, non-tribal modernity—itself.”
― Morris Berman, Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire

“The problem is that this fluidity is not a choice we are free to make. Despite the unifying patriotic rhetoric that permeates the United States, on some level Americans are not really fooled: at bottom, each person knows he or she must continually “reinvent themselves,” which is to say, go it alone. America is the ultimate anticommunity.3”
― Morris Berman, Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire

“Who can doubt that there is an American empire?—an “informal” empire, not colonial in polity, but still richly equipped with imperial paraphernalia: troops, ships, planes, bases, proconsuls, local collaborators, all spread around the luckless planet. —Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., The Cycles of American History (1984)”
― Morris Berman, Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire

“The less affluent must be able, at least in theory, to catch up with the more affluent. Hence politics remains without substance, a realm from which the crucial dimensions of life, the core values, are excluded.42 Who, then, can criticize this situation?”
― Morris Berman, Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire

“The unpleasant truth of middle-class American life, he concludes, is that “most of us don’t talk to our neighbors about anything except the weather.”
― Morris Berman, Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire

“a world remade in the image of Walt Disney, and driven by an increasingly sophisticated communications technology, is the total breakdown of civilization.20”
― Morris Berman, Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire

“The seduction of shopping is not about buying goods. It’s about dreaming of a perfect society and a perfect self.” We are looking, she says, “for truth with a capital T…. In a society where we no longer have contact with nature or beauty in our daily lives, shopping is one of the few ways we have left to create a sense of ultimate value.” We are, she concludes, “searching for our dreams,” and seek to fulfill them in stores.5”
― Morris Berman, Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire