EMPIRE OF CHAOS

COUNTRIES

PAGE 7

NICARAGUA

"Thanks mostly to an invasion by murderous 'Contra' squads, who were paid, armed and directed by the CIA, Nicaragua has been returned to its status under the Washington-sponsored Somoza dictatorship: that of the poorest, most indebted country in Latin America. Gone are the literacy programmes, the child mortality figures, the 'barefoot doctors', the improving community schools, the agricultural co-operatives."

John Pilger

"The most important effect of the Reagan policy was the tremendous destruction it wreaked on Nicaragua. Approximately 30,000 Nicaraguans were killed and tens of thousands others were wounded, a death total higher in per capita terms than that suffered by the United States in the Civil War, World War One, World War Two, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War combined."

Thomas Carothers

"In 1932, a coup in El Salvador - with United Fruit sponsorship - exterminated 300,000 peasants who had risen up in revolt against the conditions in which they were forced to live. For forty years, the United Fruit Company stood behind the regime of Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua."

DOPE, INC

"Washington continued to prop up the Nicaraguan Somoza dictatorship with loans. The Pentagon created, trained, and armed the National Guard, and nearly all Guard officers spent their last year of training in U.S. schools in the Panama Canal Zone.
The money, the training, and the arms Nicaragua received from the United States were used to repress the poor people in the slums and rural areas by imprisonment, torture, and death.
... During Somoza's presidency, the Somoza family alone owned 8,260 square miles, or more than 5 million acres, an area approximately the size of El Salvador. The Somozas controlled an equally disproportionate share of the country's industry; they owned Nicaragua's twenty-six biggest companies.
... According to conservative estimates, some thirty thousand Nicaraguans died in the four decades prior to the 1978-79 civil war for opposing the government of Anastasio Somoza and his sons Luis and Anastasio II."

Penny Lernoux in her book Cry of the People

"After five years of Sandinista rule, infant mortality dropped to the lowest level in Central America. Over 85 percent of the population had learned to read and write at least on a third-grade level as a result of a crash literacy program acclaimed by UNESCO. The number of schools had doubled since the overthrow of Anastazio Somoza. The Sandinistas also initiated sweeping agrarian reform, emphasizing basic grains and crops for local needs rather than export-a development strategy that brought Nicaragua close to food self-sufficiency.
... In addition, the Nicaraguan government banned DDT and other harmful sprays, while neighboring states still serve as dumping grounds for U.S.-made chemical toxins. Strides in Nicaraguan health care won praise from the United Nations and other international groups. The World Health Organization lauded Nicaragua's success in nearly eliminating polio, measles and diphtheria, and reducing infant mortality. But many of these achievements were subsequently eroded-along with the Sandinistas' popularity-as the Nicaraguan government diverted its resources in an effort to defend itself from attacks by U.S.-financed mercenary forces. "Unfortunately," said former contra leader Edgar Chamorro, "the contras bum down schools, homes and health centers as fast as the Sandinistas can build them."

Martin A. Lee and Norman Solomon, Unreliable Sources

"The main tactical issue mulled over in the U.S. press with respect to Nicaragua's 1990 elections was how to channel millions of dollars to the political opposition - covertly via the CIA or openly through the National Endowment for Democracy. That such meddling - whether overt or covert - might compromise the integrity of the Nicaraguan electoral process was never mentioned by most mainstream journalists, who seemingly took for granted that it's perfectly fine if the U.S. government interferes in the affairs of other countries."

Martin A. Lee and Norman Solomon, Unreliable Sources

"The US is the only nation on record to have been condemned by the World Court for international terrorism - in Nicaragua."

John Pilger

"Democracy has been our goal in Nicaragua, and to reach it we have sponsored the killing of thousands of Nicaraguans."

Jack Beatty, Atlantic Monthly editor

"The people of Nicaragua did not become anti-Semitic by the influence of a new kind of bananas they have begun to grow. The Sandinista movement does not need such questionable justifications in order to achieve popularity-the fact that Somoza's regime is so corrupt and dirty is sufficient grounds for any reasonable man to support, either openly or covertly, those fighting Somoza. If more and more Nicaraguans are hating Israel more and more, it is not because they have become anti-Semitic suddenly. The reason is different: Because more and more of their children are being killed or wounded by weapons "made in Israel."

Israeli Daily Davar (on the eve of Somoza's overthrow in the 1980s)

"It is common knowledge in the United States and throughout the world that the power ruling the "banana republics" of Central America is and has been the United Fruit Company - United Brands. It is no exaggeration to say that every coup that has taken place in the region was backed by the fruit company, which ran the nations of Central America mercilessly as slave-labor plantations. In 1932, a coup in El Salvador-with United Fruit sponsorship-exterminated 300,000 peasants who had risen up in revolt against the conditions in which they were forced to live. For forty years, the United Fruit Company stood behind the regime of Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua."

from the book 'DOPE, INC'

"Israel has active relations with many Third World countries, mainly because of its vigorous sales of military equipment and its close ties to the United States, which small countries seek to exploit. Israel at times also acts as a surrogate for the United States in activities in which Washington wishes to conceal its involvement. A dramatic example is the Iran-Contra affair in which Israel shipped weapons to Iran and the profits were used to finance the Nicaraguan Contras in contravention of congressional restrictions.
... Israel has courted and befriended such brutal despots as General Augusto Pinochet Ugarte of Chile, Roberto D'Aubuisson of El Salvador, General Romeo Lucas Garcia of Guatemala, Jean-Claude Duvalier of Haiti, Anastasio Somoza Debayle of Nicaragua, and General Aifredo Stroessner of Paraguay."

Paul Findley

"The U.S.-backed Contra war in Nicaragua killed some 30,000 Nicaraguans, a percentage of their population equivalent to 2 million dead Americans."

Stephen M. Walt

"Once the state of Israel was established, the flow of weapons through Nicaragua into Palestine was reversed: A sizable part of the Israeli armaments industry (an estimated 60%) was pumped back into the Central American "banana dictatorships." Israeli weapons and military hardware sustained the Somoza regime when it came under attack and permitted Somoza to carry out his scorched earth policy against his own population.
... Israeli weapons to Somoza were funneled under the cover of the Israeli Maritime Fruit Company, through the services of Max Fisher's associates... And when the United Brands mafia determined to dump the traditional dictators of the previous half-century, the same flow of Israeli and East Bloc originating arms began to flow into the Sandinistas and Moscow-backed narcoterrorist groups in Guatemala and El Salvador."

from the book 'DOPE, INC'

*****

the quotes below are from David Model's book 'Lying For Empire'

"After the Sandinista Government in Nicaragua overthrew the corrupt and brutal dictator Somoza, the United States organized, trained, and supplied a guerrilla force known as the Contras in order to restore a friendly government in Nicaragua."

"The United States breached the OAS charter when it mined the harbours of Nicaragua and when it organized a guerrilla force to undermine the government of Nicaragua."

"When the Sandinistas took power, the educational system in Nicaragua was one of the poorest in Latin America. Limited spending on education and severe poverty forced many children into the labour market before their education was complete. By the time Somoza went into exile only 65 percent of primary school-age children were enrolled in school and only 22 percent of those who attended primary school completed the full six years. In rural areas, most secondary schools had only one or two grades and there was a 75 percent illiteracy rate. To improve the educational system, the Sandinistas doubled the proportion of GNP spent on primary and secondary schools, increased the number of teachers, and built more schools. Using volunteer teachers, the Sandinista government succeeded in reducing the illiteracy rate from 50 percent of the population to 23 percent. Enrollment in colleges skyrocketed from 11,142 students in 1978 to 38,570 in 1985.
Health care was a disaster under the Somoza regime with many Nicaraguans having limited or no access to modern health care. The Sandinistas completely restructured the entire health care system by spending substantially more on health care, increasing the number of students entering medical school from 100 to 500, building five new hospitals, and building 363 primary health care clinics.
The Sandinistas, who had themselves been victims of the brutal dictatorship of Somoza, were determined to construct new political institutions and to introduce a new constitution which guaranteed human rights.
All these progressive measures were interpreted by the new American President, Ronald Reagan, as symptoms of communism requiring immediate action by the United States."

"The purpose of the Contras was not to defeat the Sandinista army in battle but to use terrorist tactics to destroy infrastructure, health, and educational services. Their intention was not to confront Sandinistas but to blow up bridges, power plants, oil pipelines, ports, schools, health clinics, grain silos, irrigation projects, and farmhouses. The underlying purpose of these acts of terrorism was to destroy the morale of the Nicaraguan people and to force the Nicaraguan government to divert a high proportion of its budget to defence as discussed in detail below. Diverting government resources to the war, forcing the Sandinistas to cut back on their reform programs, had a considerable negative impact on the people of Nicaragua.
Noam Chomsky, in Understanding Power
Why do we have to get rid of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua? In reality it's not because anybody really thinks that they're a communist power about to conquer the Hemisphere - it's because they were carrying out social programs that were beginning to succeed, and which would have appealed to other people in Latin America who want the same things."

"Nicaragua was a victim of the Cold War and also of the American obsession with creating client states in Latin America. According to U.S. policy-makers, whenever Latin American countries experimented with progressive reforms they were communist and a threat to American corporate interests. Then the mighty American military and intelligence machine jumped into action. Human rights and respect for the sovereignty and political independence of other states dropped off the radar screen. All that remained was American self-interest."

PALESTINE

"Following the War [World War I] Britain and France carved up the Middle East. Britain obtaining protectorate status over Palestine (Israel) and the important oil-producing areas, especially Iraq. Their protectorate over Palestine set the stage for their planned later creation in that area of a Jewish homeland, which intent was proclaimed to British Zionists in a letter from Britain's Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour to Walter Lord Rothschild, representing the English Federation of Zionists. The letter became known as the Balfour Declaration, which was not implemented until after World War 2. The British intent was to project their control into the oil laden Middle East by creating a Jewish-dominated Palestine, beholden to Britain for survival, and surrounded by a pack of squabbling, balkanized Arab states."

William Engdahl in his book "A Century of War"

"The Balfour Declaration justified the seizure of Palestinian lands for the post-WWII establishment of Israel. Israel would serve, not as some high-minded "Jewish homeland", but as linchpin in Rothschild/Eight Families control over the world's oil supply. Baron Edmond de Rothschild built the first oil pipeline from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean to bring BP Iranian oil to Israel. He founded Israeli General Bank and Paz Oil. He is considered by many the father of modern Israel."

Dean Henderson in his book "Big Oil & Their Bankers In The Persian Gulf"

"Following the War [World War I] Britain and France carved up the Middle East... Britain obtaining protectorate status over Palestine (Israel) and the important oil-producing areas, especially Iraq. Their protectorate over Palestine set the stage for their planned later creation in that area of a Jewish homeland, which intent was proclaimed to British Zionists in a letter from Britain's Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour to Walter Lord Rothschild, representing the English Federation of Zionists. The letter became known as the Balfour Declaration, which was not implemented until after World War 2. The British intent was to project their control into the oil laden Middle East by creating a Jewish-dominated Palestine, beholden to Britain for survival, and surrounded by a pack of squabbling, balkanized Arab states."

"Israel's policy -- in the last 60 years -- stems from a racist hegemonic ideology called Zionism, shielded by endless layers of righteous fury. Despite the predictable accusation of anti-Semitism ... it is time to associate in the public mind the Zionist ideology with the by now familiar historical landmarks of the land: the ethnic cleansing of 1948, the oppression of the Palestinians in Israel during the days of the military rule, the brutal occupation of the West Bank and now the massacre of Gaza."

Ilan Pappe, 2009

"I favor partition of the country because when we become a strong power after the establishment of the state, we will abolish partition and spread throughout all of Palestine."

Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, 1938

"A partial Jewish state is not the end, bur only the beginning. The establishment of such a Jewish state will serve as a means in our historical effort to redeem the country in its entirety.... We shall organize a modern defense force... and then I am certain that we will not be prevented from settling in other parts of the country, either by mutual agreement with our Arab neighbors or by some other means.... We will expel the Arabs and take their place... with the force at our disposal."

Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, in a 1937 letter to his son

"The Arabs will have to go, but one needs an opportune moment for making it happen, such as a war."

Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, in a 1937 letter to his son

"We should prepare to go on the offensive. Our aim is to smash Lebanon, Trans-Jordan, and Syria. The weak point is Lebanon, for the Moslem regime is artificial and easy for us to undermine. We shall establish a Christian state there, and then we will smash the Arab Legion, eliminate Trans-Jordan; Syria will fall to us. We then bomb and move on and take Port Said, Alexandria and Sinai."

Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, 1948

"I am for compulsory transfer [of Palestinians]; I do not see anything immoral in it."

Israeli Prime MInister David Ben-Gurion, June 1938

"If we will receive in time the arms we have already purchased, and maybe even receive some of that promised to us by the UN, we will be able not only to defend [ourselves] but also to inflict death blows on the Syrians in their own country - and take over Palestine as a whole."

Israeli Prime MInister David Ben-Gurion, 1948, in a letter to Moshe Sharett the Jewish state's foreign minister designate

"Why should the Arabs make peace? If I were an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural. We have taken their country. Sure, God promised it to me, but what does it matter to them? Our God is not theirs. We come from Israel, it is true, but two thousand years ago, and what is it to them? There have been anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, and Auschwitz but was that their fault? They only see one thing: we have come here and stolen their country."

Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion to Nahum Goldman, President of the World Zionist Organization, 1956

"We must do everything to ensure they [the Palestinian refugees] never do return."

Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, in his diary, 18 July 1948

"The Cold war will be a thing of the past. Internal pressure of the constantly growing intelligentsia in Russia for more freedom and the pressure of the masses for raising their living standards may lead to a gradual democratization of the Soviet Union.
On the other hand, increasing influence of the workers and the farmers, and the rising political importance of men of science, may transform the United States into a welfare state with a planned economy. Western and Eastern Europe will become a federation of autonomous states, having a Socialist and democratic regime. With the exception of the USSR, as a federated Eurasian state, all other countries will become united in a world alliance, at whose disposal will be an international police force. All armies will be abolished, and there will be no more wars. In Jerusalem, the United Nations will build a shrine to the Prophets to serve the federated union on all continents, as prophesied by Isaiah. Higher education will be the right of every person in the world. A pill to prevent pregnancy would slow down the explosive natural increase in China and India."

Israeli Prime Minister David Ben Gurion, 1962

"In 1917 British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour penned a letter to Lord Lionel Walter Rothschild in which he expressed support for a Jewish homeland on Palestinian-controlled lands in the Middle East.
The Balfour Declaration justified Lord Rothschild's purchase of the land for the post-WWII establishment of Israel. Israel was to serve as a Jewish homeland and a lynchpin in Rothschild control over the world's oil supply. Baron Edmond de Rothschild built the first oil pipeline from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean to bring British Petroleum Iranian oil to Israel. He founded Israeli General Bank and Paz Oil. He is considered by many the father of modern Israel."

Dean Henderson in his book "Big Oil and Their Bankers in the Persian Gulf"

"Zionism was willing to sacrifice the whole of European Jewry for a Zionist State. Everything was done to create a state of Israel and that was only possible through a world war. Wall Street and Jewish large bankers aided the war effort on both sides."

Joseph Burg, The Toronto Star,1988

"On April 5, 1917 the British government announced that it was sending Rt. Hon. Arthur James Balfour, the Foreign Secretary, to the United States, to notify the American bankers that the British government was prepared to officially endorse their plans for political Zionism provided they would bring America into the war (WWI) on the side of the Allies. America came into the war."

William Guy Carr in his book "Pawns in the Game", 1958

"I just received from Herbert Samuel a memorandum headed The Future of Palestine. He thinks we might plant in this territory about three or four million European Jews."

Herbert Asquith, Prime Minister of England, wrote in his diary - January 28th, 1915

"Major Lionel de Rothschild, of the League for British Jews, informs me that his organization is in agreement with the American Jewish Committee ... The Balfour Declaration, with its acceptance by the Powers, is an act of the highest diplomacy. Zionism is but an incident of a far-reaching plan : It is merely a convenient peg on which to hang a powerful weapon."

Louis Marshall, legal representative of Kuhn-Loeb & Co. wrote to Max Senior, September 26th, 1917

"I do believe that it might be feasible to secure the good-will of America, Great Britain and France towards the promotion of a large influx, and settlement of our people in Palestine ... further it might be possible to obtain from the Powers the formal assurance to our people that they shall obtain autonomy in Palestine as soon as their numbers become large enough to justify this."

Jacob Schiff of Kuhn-Loeb & Co. wrote a letter dealing with the Zionist question, September (1917)

PANAMA

"On December 20, 1989, the United States attacked Panama with what was reported to be the largest airborne assault on a city since World War II. It was an unprovoked attack on a civilian population. Panama and her people posed absolutely no threat to the United States or to any other country. Politicians, governments, and press around the world denounced the unilateral U.S. action as a clear violation of international law.
Had this military operation been directed against a country that had committed mass murder or other human rights crimes - Pinochet's Chile, Stroessner's Paraguay, Somosa's Nicaragua, D'Aubuisson's El Salvador, or Saddam's Iraq, for example - the world might have understood. But Panama had done nothing of the sort; it had merely dared to defy the wishes of a handful of powerful politicians and corporate executives."

John Perkins in his book Confessions of Economic Hit Man

"Jaime Roldós, president of Ecuador, and Omar Torrijos, president of Panama. Both died in fiery crashes. Their deaths were not accidental. They were assassinated because they opposed that fraternity of corporate, government, and banking heads whose goal is global empire. We EHMs failed to bring Roldós and Torrijos around, and the other type of hit men, the CIA-sanctioned jackals who were always right behind us, stepped in."

Michael Parenti

"Assassinations of men like Saddam [Hussein] usually have to involve collusion by bodyguards. In the cases I knew personally - Ecuador's Jaime Roldós and Panama's Omar Torrijos - I was certain that bodyguards trained at the United States' School of the Americas were bribed to sabotage the airplanes"

John Perkins, Confessions of Economic Hit Man

"Under the Carter Administration when Panama fell in arrears on the payment of its loans, a consortium of banks including Chase Manhattan, First National of Chicago and Citibank brought pressure to bear on Washington to give the Canal to the Panamanian government so it could use the revenue to pay interest on its loans. Although there was massive opposition to this move among the American people, the Senate yielded to insider pressure and passed the give-away treaty. The Panamanian government inherited $120 million in annual revenue, and the interest payments to the banks were restored."

G. Edward Griffin

"The United States had to invade Panama in 1989 to topple its narco-dictator, Manuel A. Noriega, who, for almost 20 years, was a valued informant for American intelligence. And the struggle to mount an unarmed opposition against Nicaragua's leftists in the 1980s by any means necessary, including selling arms to Iran for cold cash, led to indictments against senior Reagan administration officials."

John Perkins in his book Confessions of Economic Hit Man

"Panamanian President Manuel Antonio Noriega, who having completed the mission that the White House had set out for him was arrested in 1989 after a devastating U.S. invasion of Panama and was condemned to 40 years in prison for his connection with the Medellin cartel. When Noriega ceased to be useful to the interests of the imperialists, he quickly went from being president to a prisoner in a maximum security cell in the United States."

Professor Atilio Borón

"President Omar Torrijos of Panama died in July 1981 when his flight went down. Torrijos had been a nationalist, struggling to regain sovereignty over his country's greatest national resource: the Panama Canal. Torrijos also objected to the School of the Americas, the notorious U.S. academy located on his country's soil that trained so many dictators and death squads. Later, testimonies to U.S. senate inquiries would reveal that the Reagan administration was behind what turned out to be a CIA assassination."

Ted Snider

"Jaime Roldós, president of Ecuador, and Omar Torrijos, president of Panama. Both had just died in fiery crashes. Their deaths were not accidental. They were assassinated because they opposed that fraternity of corporate, government, and banking heads whose goal is global empire. We EHMs failed to bring Roldós and Torrijos around, and the other type of hit men, the CIA-sanctioned jackals who were always right behind us, stepped in."

John Perkins, Confessions of Economic Hit Man

PHILIPPINES

"Upon taking the Philippines from Spain in 1898, the US then fought a bloody three-year war against Filipino rebels. In Luzon alone over 600,000 people were killed by American troops or died from war-related diseases and privations- as the war against the guerrillas became a war against the people who supported the guerrillas. US General Arthur MacArthur issued a proclamation renouncing "precise observance of the laws of war." Among other things, MacArthur's troops tortured and executed prisoners (civilians included), destroyed crops, food stores, domestic animals, boats, and whole villages, and forced tens of thousands of Filipinos into "relocation camps."

Michael Parenti

"In early 2003 then-Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz called the Philippines the "second front in the War on Terror." Since then tens of thousands of Muslim villagers have been forcibly displaced and hundreds have been tortured, killed, or disappeared. As a result Muslim guerrilla activity has increased.
In October 2003, during a visit Bush cited the Philippines as a model for the rebuilding of Iraq. Forgetting to mention the U.S. invasion of the Philippines in 1898 and 13-year pacification campaign when upwards of one million Filipinos died, Bush described the Philippines as a "model of democracy"-albeit a bonafide death squad democracy. "

James Petras and Robin Eastman-Abaya, 2006

"You never hear of any disturbances in Northern Luzon, Philippines, because there isn't anybody there to rebel. That country was marched over and cleared out. The good lord in Heaven only knows the number of Filipinos that were put under the ground; our soldiers took no prisoners; they kept no records; they simply swept the country and wherever or however they could get hold of a Filipino they killed him."

a Republican member of Congress in 1899, gave an eyewitness report on the US invasion of the Philippines

"In the United States, the first militarist tendencies appeared at the end of the nineteenth century. Before and during the Spanish-American War of 1898, the press was manipulated to whip up a popular war fever, while atrocities and war crimes committed by American forces in the Philippines were hidden from public view."

Chalmers Johnson, Sorrows of Empire

"After the fall of Ferdinand Marcos in 1986, Philippine conservative ruling elites aided by the United States moved quickly to reinstate the pre-dictatorship political system that had since Spanish colonial rule allowed them to entrench their economic dominance over society.
Smarting from the lessons of Marcos' dictatorship, and seeing that authoritarianism was not necessarily the most effective way to maintain their collective grip on power, the elite leaders restored civil liberties, but restricted democracy to mere electoral contests that remained structurally skewed in their favor.
Dubbed variably as "low-intensity democracy," "limited democracy," or "polyarchy" by academics, the post-1986 consensus became both the linchpin of stability and the source of legitimacy for Philippine ruling elites."

Herbert Docena, 2006

"As our armies were committing massacres in the Philippines - at least 600,000 Filipinos died in a few years of conflict - Elihu Root, our Secretary of War, was saying: 'The American soldier is different from all other soldiers of all other countries since the war began. He is the advance guard of liberty and justice, of law and order, and of peace and happiness'."

Howard Zinn

"Of all post Marcos regimes, Gloria Macapagal Arroyo's is the most discredited and detested,
Under Arroyo, the Philippines has been rated near or at the top of the most dangerous countries for journalists and activists. The country has likewise been rated as the most corrupt in Asia and one of the most corrupt in the world."

Marya Salamat, 2010

"Our men have killed to exterminate men, women, children, prisoners and captives, active insurgents and suspected people from lads of 10 up .... Our soldiers have pumped salt water into men to "make them talk," and have taken prisoners people who held up their hands and peacefully surrendered, and an hour later... stood them on a bridge and shot them down one by one, to drop into the water below and float down, as examples to those who found their bullet-loaded corpses."

a dispatch from the Philadelphia Ledger's Manila correspondent in 1901

"Filipino rebels. In Luzon alone over 600,000 people were killed by American troops or died from war-related diseases and privations-as the war against the guerrillas became a war against the people who supported the guerrillas. US General Arthur MacArthur issued a proclamation renouncing "precise observance of the laws of war." Among other things, MacArthur's troops tortured and executed prisoners (civilians included), destroyed crops, food stores, domestic animals, boats, and whole villages, and forced tens of thousands of Filipinos into "relocation camps."

Michael Parenti, Sword and Dollar

"A de-facto civilian-military alliance has been ruling the Philippines since the declaration of Martial Law by Marcos in 1972. In the 1960s most economists considered the Philippines to be the most economically progressive nation in Southest Asia. With the advent of the liberalization of the economy, it has become and remains one of the poorest and most socially polarized country in Asia, with a per capita GDP of $950 per year, about half of Thailand's. With over 50 percent of total private assets controlled by 15 extended super-rich families, it is one of the most unequal societies in the world. In stark contrast to the rest of Asia, there has been no economic progress in the past two decades. "

James Petras and Robin Eastman-Abaya, 2006

"I have seen that we do not intend to free, but to subjugate the people of the Philippines. We have gone there to conquer, not to redeem... And so I am an anti-imperialist. I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land... We have pacified some thousands of the islanders and buried them; destroyed their fields, burned their villages, turned their widows and orphans out-of-doors, (and) subjugated the remaining ten million by Benevolent Assimilation, which is the pious new name of the musket."

Mark Twain, October 15, 1900, about the U.S. invasion and occupation of the Philippines

"A U.S. military counterinsurgency document. It gave instructions on how to create terror; this was the way they put it. And they described methods used in the Philippines in the campaign against the Huks in 1900.
In the case of the Philippines they were talking about leaving the bodies by the rivers. So you mutilate the bodies, you cut them, you amputate, and then you display the bodies on the riversides to stir terror in the population. "

Allan Nairn, 2016

"The 1899-1902 conquest of the Philippines killed some 200,000 to 400,000 Filipinos, most of them civilians."

Stephen M. Walt

"An American weekly magazine, the San Francisco Argonaut defended the atrocities of American troops in the Philippines in 1902 by exulting over the enormous riches and fertility of the islands, then noted: "But unfortunately they are infested by Filipinos. There are many millions of them there, and it is to be feared that their extinction will be slow .... Let us all be frank. We do not want the Filipinos. We want the Philippines."

Michael Parenti, Sword and Dollar

"Since President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo joined the U.S. global "war on terrorism," the Philippines has become the site of an ongoing undeclared war against peasant and union activists, progressive political dissidents and lawmakers, human rights lawyers and activists, women leaders, and a wide range of print and broadcast journalists. Because of the links between the Army, the regime, and the death squads, political assassinations take place in an atmosphere of absolute impunity. The vast majority of the attacks occur in the countryside and provincial towns. The reign of terror in the Philippines is of similar scope and depth as in Colombia. Unlike Colombia, the state terrorism has not drawn sufficient attention from international public opinion.
Between 2001 and 2006 hundreds of killings, disappearances, death threats, and cases of torture have been documented by the independent human rights center, KARAPATAN, and the church-linked Ecumenical Institute for Labor Education and Research. Since Arroyo came to power in 2001, there have been 400 documented extrajudicial killings."

James Petras and Robin Eastman-Abaya, 2006

"Far from being a model for nation building and democracy ... the Philippines epitomizes an American foreign policy based on dubious premises and false promises.
American troops committed atrocities, attacked civilians, and destroyed their crops and villages.
By the time the war ended in 1902 (although intermittent fighting lasted for decades), more than four thousand Americans, twenty thousand rebels and perhaps two hundred thousand civilians lay dead. And the relationship of the United States to the rest of the world had permanently changed.
It was only in 1946 that the Philippines were granted independence, though the State Department's own briefing papers, distributed just this week [October 2003] to the Bush entourage, still state that "U.S. administration of the Philippines was always declared to be temporary.
In the intervening years, the U.S. government has continued to support a succession of antidemocratic, repressive regimes in the Philippines."

historian Clifford Kuhn

"Kill everything over 10. Criminals because they were born ten years before we took the Philippines."

Teddy Roosevelt, 1901, supported the Spanish-American War

"The newly "installed" Gloria Macapagal Arroyo quickly instituted a neo-liberal program of privatizations, drastic cuts for public education and public hospitals, and onerous value-added taxes that impacted the poor and lower middle-class. By 2005 the Philippine total external and internal debt ballooned to over $100 billion dollars and yearly debt servicing exceeded 30 percent of the budget. Even 8 million overseas Filipino workers (including a significant section of the educated professionals) sending home $12.5 billion of remittances in 2005 could not begin to cover debt servicing. The Philippines bears the dubious distinction of being the only country in Asia to have seen a drop in per capita GDP during and since the heady years of the "Asian Tiger" boom.
Macapagal Arroyo's family and friends have been implicated in the same levels of corruption as those attributed to the deposed President Estrada."

James Petras and Robin Eastman-Abaya, 2006

RUSSIA

"A network of CIA-linked Western bankers, corrupt KGB generals, and their protégé, Boris Yeltsin, set the stage for the wholesale theft of Russian Federation state assets. It was called shock therapy, and it was brought to Russia by George Soros.
The human cost of the US-imposed Russian shock was beyond belief. Between 1991 and 1997, the Russian GDP - the value of all goods and services that Russia produces - collapsed by 83 percent. Farm production declined by a staggering 63 percent. Investment into the economy decreased by 92 percent. More than 70,000 factories were closed down. Those who still had work had their wages cut in half. The average life span for men had been shortened by six years. Alcoholism became epidemic as depression spread among the population. It was a shock therapy indeed, the kind of shock a country experiences only in a major war."

F. William Engdahl

"Rather than being regarded as a U.S. "partner," Russia was on the list of potential "regime change" targets. These included aggressive U.S. encirclement of Russia with new military bases on Russia's borders, encouragement of "regime change" in Georgia and the Ukraine, and the expansion of NATO into the Baltic states and Eastern Europe, in violation of a pledge to Gorbachev to refrain from any such threatening actions at the time the Soviet Union agreed to allow East Germany to join the West."

Edward S. Herman, 2008

"President Reagan reached agreements with Gorbachov, and they were good agreements, and the Russians banked on them, and they've been betrayed by every subsequent American administration. We did everything we said we wouldn't do - we brought NATO to their borders, we're putting missile systems in former parts of the Soviet Union, we're interfering in elections in former republics of the Soviet Union, including Georgia, where we managed to install a puppet government."

Paul Craig Roberts, 2008

"We can only theorize on the manner in which Moscow is controlled from New York, London and Paris. Undoubtedly much of the control is economic, but certainly the international bankers have an enforcer arm within Russia to keep the Soviet leaders in line."

Gary Allen in his book "None Dare Call It Conspiracy"

"The NATO encirclement of Russia, the Color Revolutions across Eurasia, and the war in Iraq, were all aspects of one and the same American geopolitical strategy: a grand strategy to de-construct Russia once and for all as a potential rival to a sole US Superpower hegemony."

F. William Engdahl in his book "Full Spectrum Dominance"

"At the end of World War II, we were militarily dominant, economically dominant, and we enjoyed a remarkable international credibility. With a modicum of restraint and self-confidence we could have laid the foundations of lasting world peace. Instead, we exaggerated the challenge of a Soviet Union which had just lost 70,000 villages, 1,710 towns, 4.7 million houses, and 20 million people in the war."

former CIA agent John Stockwell

'There are no political parties in the US that are funded by foreign interests. No such thing would be permitted. It would be regarded as high treason. What is surprising is that the Russian government permitted for 20 years its political opposition to be funded by Washington and still permits that today as long as the opposition registers as an American agent. The ability of Washington to fund the Russian government's political opposition and also protest groups, allows Washington free access to destabilize Russia."

Paul Craig Roberts

"[By 1927 Stalin emerged as the new strongman in Russia. Stalin's plan required that the country be industrialized at breakneck speed, whatever the waste and hardships, and must emphasize heavy industry and armaments rather than rising standards of living. This meant that the goods produced by the peasants must be taken from them, by political duress, without any economic return, and that the ultimate in authoritarian terror must be used to prevent the peasants from reducing their level of production to their own consumptive needs, as they had done in the period 1921-1923. This meant that the first step towards the industrialization of Russia required that the peasantry be broken by terror and be reorganized from a capitalistic basis of private farms to a socialistic system of collective farms." It was deemed necessary to "crush all kinds of ... resistance to the Bolshevik State, independent thought, and public discontent. These must be crushed by terror so that the whole of Russia could be formed into a monolithic structure of disciplined proletariat who would obey their leaders with such unquestioning obedience.
[Under the communists, Russia became a "despotic police state] resting on espionage and terror, in which there was a profound gulf in ideology and manner of living between the rulers and the ruled.
[Because of its peculiar and unique structure, the communist apparatus would be] based on intrigue and violence and would inevitably bring to the top the most decisive, most merciless, most unprincipled and most violent of its members."

Carroll Quigley, historian and Georgetown University professor, in his book "Tragedy and Hope"

"By 1998, more than 80 percent of Russian farms had gone bankrupt, and roughly seventy thousand state factories had closed, creating an epidemic of unemployment. In 1989, before shock therapy, 2 million people in the Russian Federation were living in poverty, on less than $4 a day. By the time the shock therapists had administered their "bitter medicine" in the mid-nineties, 74 million Russians were living below the poverty line, according to the World Bank. That means that Russia's "economic reforms" can claim credit for the impoverishment of 72 million people in only eight years. By 1996, 25 percent of Russians - almost 37 million people-lived in poverty described as "desperate.""

Naomi Klein in her book "The Shock Doctrine"

"The goal of Washington in Eurasia was not only the strategic encirclement of Russia through a series of NATO bases, but the overarching goal of enabling NATO to control energy routes and networks between Russia and the EU.
... The NATO encirclement of Russia, the Color Revolutions across Eurasia, and the war in Iraq, were all aspects of one and the same American geopolitical strategy: a grand strategy to de-construct Russia once and for all as a potential rival to a sole US Superpower hegemony."

F. William Engdahl

"Rothschild financed Lenin in 1913 to over throw the Monarch of Russia in order to centralize the banking system to his London base?
When Putin was elected president of Russia in 2000, Russia was bankrupt. The nation owed $16.6 billion to the Rothschild-run International Monetary Fund while its foreign debt to the Rothschild-controlled Paris & London Club Of Creditors was over 36 billion dollars.
But Putin took advantage of the current boom in world oil prices by redirecting a portion of the profits of Russia's largest oil producer Gazprom so as to pay off the country's debt. The continual surge in oil prices greatly accelerated Russia's capacity to restore financial sovereignty.
By 2006 Putin had paid off Russia's debt to the Rothschilds. Russia's financial dependence on the Jewish financiers was now over."

Ron Paul

"While securing corporate control over extensive oil reserves and pipeline routes along the Eurasian corridor on behalf of the AngloAmerican oil giants, Washington's ultimate objective is to eventually destabilize and then colonize both China and Russia. This means the takeover of their national financial systems and the control over monetary policy, leading eventually to the imposition of the US dollar as the national currency."

Michel Chossudovsky in his book " America's War on Terrorism"

"International bankers arranged the Bolshevik coup in Russia in 1917, and then supported the regime thereafter, both for the profit involved and, presumably, to build up a 'credible enemy'."

G. Edward Griffin in his book "The Creature from Jekyll Island"

"One barrier to mature understanding of recent history is the notion that all capitalists are the bitter and unswerving enemies of all Marxists and Socialists. This erroneous idea originated with Karl Marx and was undoubtedly useful to his purposes. In fact, the idea is nonsense. There has been a continuing, albeit concealed, alliance between international political capitalists and international revolutionary socialists - to their mutual benefit."

Antony Sutton in his book "Wall Street And The Bolshevik Revolution"

COUNTRIES - MAIN PAGE