Washington Bullets Quotes

“There is that old joke. Why is there never a coup in the United States? Because there is no US embassy there.”
― Vijay Prashad, Washington Bullets

“The theory of rogue states and terrorism provided the US with the ability to appropriate the entire discourse of liberalism and human rights to its side – the West is ipso facto the arbiter of human rights and of liberalism, and those that it finds to be violators of these broad principles are rogue states and terrorists. If the US sanctions regime against Iraq could be shown (as FAO did show) to have been responsible for the death of half a million children, that was not to be seen as either the operations of a rogue state or of a terrorist – that was simply unfortunate. If a rogue state or a terrorist killed a few hundred people or even ten people, it was a human rights catastrophe.”
― Vijay Prashad, Washington Bullets

“The war against the English was premised against a desire by the European settlers to break out of the Thirteen Colonies and conquer the entire continent; this was a war for colonization, not a war against colonialism.”
― Vijay Prashad, Washington Bullets: A History of the CIA, Coups, and Assassinations

“It was class against class in the immediate years after the Second World War, with the CIA helping the ruling elites to maintain their property and privilege against democracy.”
― Vijay Prashad, Washington Bullets: A History of the CIA, Coups, and Assassinations

“When the United States continues its embargoes against more than 50 countries - but mostly against Cuba, Iran and Venezuela - when there is a global pandemic afoot, what does this say about the nature of power and authority in our world?”
― Vijay Prashad, Washington Bullets

“In 1996, US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright went on 60 Minutes . The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) had released a report on the impact of US-driven UN sanctions on Iraq. It showed that 567,000 Iraqi children under the age of five had died because of these sanctions. Lesley Stahl of 60 Minutes asked Albright, ‘We have heard that a half million children have died. I mean, that’s more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?’ Neither 60 Minutes nor Albright contested the UN report, or the damage done to Iraq. Albright did not wait for a second. She replied, ‘I think this is a very hard choice, but the price – we think the price is worth it.’ That was that, then. The total destruction of Iraq was worth it. But what was being purchased at that price? It was US supremacy.”
― Vijay Prashad, Washington Bullets: A History of the CIA, Coups, and Assassinations

“That term was key to Truman –The Free World. The term emerged during the Second World War to refer to the countries that fought against fascism, although many of those countries – such as Britain and France -held colonies where they maintained authoritarian regimes. The United States government of Truman weaponized the term through a massive campaign of psychological warfare, which included Truman’s Campaign of Truth of 1950 and the celebrated publication of Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), which made the case for the identity of fascism and communism. These were totalitarian and unfree ideologies, while Western liberalism was identical to freedom. The ‘Free World’ was the world led by the United States. What the US champions is freedom; its adversaries are the forces of unfreedom.”
― Vijay Prashad, Washington Bullets: A History of the CIA, Coups, and Assassinations