Overthrow Quotes

“Americans had to choose between permitting them to become democracies or maintaining power over them. It was an easy choice.”
― Stephen Kinzer, Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq

“Expansion presented the United States with a dilemma that has confronted many colonial powers. If it allowed democracy to flower in the countries it controlled, those nations would begin acting in accordance with their own interests rather than the interests of the United States, and American influence over them would diminish.”
― Stephen Kinzer, Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq

“American leaders clamored for this policy because, they said, the country desperately needed a way to resolve its “glut” of overproduction. This glut, however, was largely illusory. While wealthy Americans were lamenting it, huge numbers of ordinary people were living in conditions of severe deprivation. The surplus production from farms and factories could have been used to lift millions out of poverty, but this would have required a form of wealth redistribution that was repugnant to powerful Americans. Instead they looked abroad.”
― Stephen Kinzer, Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq

“The emergence of markets abroad put Americans to work, but it distorted the economies of poor countries in ways that greatly increased their poverty. As American companies accumulated vast sugar and fruit plantations in the Pacific, Central America, and the Caribbean, they forced countless small farmers off their land. Many became contract laborers who worked only when Americans needed them, and naturally came to resent the United States. At the same time, American companies flooded these countries with manufactured goods, preventing the development of local industry.”
― Stephen Kinzer, Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq

“Nationalists reflexively rebel against governments they perceive as lackeys of foreign power. In the twentieth century, many of these rebels were men and women inspired by American history, American principles, and the rhetoric of American democracy. They were critical of the United States, however, and wished to reduce or eliminate the power it wielded over their countries. Their defiance made them anathema to American leaders, who crushed them time after time.”
― Stephen Kinzer, Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq

“Countries that have the power to interfere in foreign lands almost always do so.”
― Stephen Kinzer, Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq

“According to historian Ellen Hammer, he (Pres. Kennedy) was, 'shaken and depressed.' to realize that, 'the first Catholic ever to become a Vietnamese chief of state was dead, assassinated as a direct result of a policy authorized by the first American Catholic president.' At one point an aide tried to console him by reminding him that Diem and Nhu had been tyrants.
'No," he replied. "They were in a difficult position.' They did the best they could for their country.”
― Stephen Kinzer, Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq

“On December 4, 1972, President Salvador Allende of Chile told the United Nations General Assembly that his country would “no longer tolerate the subordination implied by having more than eighty percent of its exports in the hands of a small group of large foreign companies.”
― Stephen Kinzer, Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq

“To kill weeds, you must pull them up at the roots,”
― Stephen Kinzer, Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq

“Until this episode, many Americans had believed that their soldiers were different from others, operating on a higher moral plane because their cause was good.”
― Stephen Kinzer, Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq

“The revolution of 1893 and the annexation that followed undermined a culture and ended the life of a nation. Compared to what such operations have brought to other countries, though, this one ended well.”
― Stephen Kinzer, Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq

“The main concern in Chile is that [Allende] can consolidate himself, and the picture projected to the world will be his success. . . . If we let the potential leaders in South America think they can move like Chile and have it both ways, we will be in trouble.”
― Stephen Kinzer, Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq

“Weyler, the brute, the devastator of haciendas, and the outrager of women . . . is pitiless, cold, an exterminator of men,” ran one such account. “There is nothing to prevent his carnal, animal brain from running riot with itself in inventing tortures and infamies of bloody debauchery.”
― Stephen Kinzer, Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq

“the United States has assumed the right to intervene anywhere in the world, not simply by influencing or coercing foreign governments but also by overthrowing them.”
― Stephen Kinzer, Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq

“In a nation too new to define itself by real or imagined historical triumphs, and too diverse to be bound together by a shared religion or ethnicity, this belief became the essence of national identity, the conviction that bound Americans to each other and defined their approach to the world. They are hardly the first people to believe themselves favored by Providence, but they are the only ones in modern history who are convinced that by bringing their political and economic system to others, they are doing God’s work.”
― Stephen Kinzer, Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq

“Le Temps said the United States, formerly “as democratic as any society can be,” had become “a state already closer to the other states of the old world, that arms itself like them and aggrandizes itself like them.” The Frankfurter Zeitung warned Americans against “the disastrous consequences of their exuberance” but realized that they would not listen.”
― Stephen Kinzer, Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq

“I will not resign. I will not do it. I am ready to resist by all means, even at the cost of my own life. . . . Foreign capital—imperialism united with reaction—created the climate for the army to break with their tradition. . . . Long live Chile! Long live the people! These are my last words. I am sure that my sacrifice will not be in vain. I am sure it will be at least a moral lesson, and a rebuke to crime, cowardice and treason.”
― Stephen Kinzer, Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq

“If it were possible to control the course of world events by deposing foreign governments, the United States would be unchallenged. It has deposed far more of them than any other modern nation. The stories of what has happened in the aftermath of these operations, however, make clear that Americans do not know what to do with countries after removing their leaders. They easily succumb to the temptation to stage coups or invasions but turn quickly away when the countries where they intervene fall into misery and repression.”
― Stephen Kinzer, Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq

“One of the most immutable patterns of history is the rise and fall of empires and great nations. Some Americans, however, believe their country to be so far beyond comparison with any other country or empire that has ever existed that it has passed beyond the reach of history.”
― Stephen Kinzer, Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq

“Most American-sponsored “regime change” operations have, in the end, weakened rather than strengthened American security.”
― Stephen Kinzer, Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq

“Had we to do it over again,” he said in an interview sixteen months after the invasion, “we would look at the consequences of catastrophic success.”
― Stephen Kinzer, Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq

“The central reason that Bush rejected the ambitious option of long-term engagement in Afghanistan, however, was that his attention was focused elsewhere. He understood the importance of stabilizing Afghanistan and would certainly have been happy to capture bin Laden and his henchmen, but his zeal for these projects paled beside his obsession with Iraq and Saddam Hussein.”
― Stephen Kinzer, Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq

“modern Afghan history shows that “an ounce of nation-building prevention will be worth a pound of military-operation cure.”
― Stephen Kinzer, Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq

“the idea of invading Iraq was first urged on him after the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, he could not fail to recognize it as a way to have his revenge, complete the job his father had begun, and redeem his family’s honor.”
― Stephen Kinzer, Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq

“For God’s sake,” one secular Afghan warned the Americans during this period, “you’re financing your own assassins!”
― Stephen Kinzer, Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq

“The Saudis were already deeply involved in Pakistan. They had sent Zia large sums of money to open religious schools catering to both impoverished Pakistanis and Afghan refugees. To ensure that these schools taught only the puritanical Wahhabi form of Islam and that students were not exposed to such corrupting subjects as history or science, they also sent hundreds of mullahs, Koran readers, and religious teachers.”
― Stephen Kinzer, Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq

“To all of this the CIA agreed. It subcontracted to Pakistan the job of directing the Afghan rebellion.”
― Stephen Kinzer, Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq

“Whatever doubts the Americans had about the wisdom of embracing Zia were overwhelmed by their determination to intensify the rebellion in Afghanistan.”
― Stephen Kinzer, Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq

“This upheaval came while the region was still recovering from the shock of the Islamic revolution in Iran, which radically reshaped the strategic map of the Middle East and Central Asia.”
― Stephen Kinzer, Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq

“Yet Haq was also an outspoken nationalist. His dream was that once the Taliban was overthrown, it would be replaced by a regime free of all outside influence.”
― Stephen Kinzer, Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq