Sou obrigada a aceitar que o mundo não é só ele. Nem é tão bonito como ele...
Ainda em choque após a leitura absorvente de THE SHOCK DOCTRINE, de Naomi Klein.
Les Rêveries du Promeneur Solitaire, 1926
“The theories of Milton Friedman gave him the Nobel Prize; they gave Chile General Pinochet.”
Eduardo Galeano, Days and Nights of Love and War, 1983
“People were in prison so that prices could be free.”
Eduardo Galeano, 1990
“An armed conflict between nations horrifies us. But the economic war is no better that an armed conflict. This is like a surgical operation. An economic war is prolonged torture. And its ravages are no less terrible than those depicted in the literature on war properly so called. We think nothing of the other because we are used to its deadly effects... The movement against war is sound. I pray for its success. But I cannot help the gnawing fear that the movement will fail if is does not touch the root of all evil – human greed.”
M.K. Gandhi, “Non-Violence – The Greatest Force, 1926
“Bolivia’s situation could well be compared with the case of a person who has cancer. He knows he faces that most dangerous and painful operation which monetary stabilization and a number of other measures will undoubtedly be. Yet he has no alternative.”
Cornelius Zondag, U.S. economic adviser to Bolivia, 1956
“The use of cancer in political discourse encourages fatalism and justifies “severe” measures – as well as strongly reinforcing the widespread notion that the disease is necessarily fatal. The concept of disease is never innocent. But it could be argued that the cancer metaphors are in themselves implicitly genocidal.”
Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor, 1977
“Sovereign is he who decides the state of emergency.”
Carl Schmidt, Nazi lawyer
“Well, what is the sense of ruining my head and erasing my memory, which is my capital, and putting me out of business? It was a brilliant cure but we lost the patient.”
Ernest Hemingway on his electroshock therapy, shortly before committing suicide, 1961
La Marche Triomphale, 1947-48
“These worst of times give rise to the best of opportunities for those who understand the need for fundamental economic reform.”
Stephan Haggard and John Williamson, The Political Economy of Policy Reform, 1994
“We certainly must not stop eating from fear of choking.”
People’s Daily, the official state newspaper, on the need to continue free-market reforms after the Tiananmen Square massacre
“Good times make bad policy.”
Mohammad Sadti, economic adviser to Indonesia’s General Suharto
“He’s a ruthless little bastard. You can be sure of that.”
Richard Nixon, U.S. president, referring to Donald Rumsfeld, 1971
“There’s something that civil servants have that the private sector doesn’t. And that is the duty of loyalty to the greater good – the duty of loyalty to the collective best interest of all rather than the interest of a few. Companies have duties of loyalty to their shareholders, not to the country.”
David M. Walker, comptroller general of the United States, February 2007
The Scars of Memory, 1927
“In a post-Sept. 11 world, I thought the prudent use of violence could be therapeutic.”
Richard Cohen, a Washington Post columnist, on his support for the invasion of Iraq
“Would it not be easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?”
Bertold Brecht, The Solution, 1953
“Because you are able to star new, you can start fundamentally at the leading edge, which is a very good thing. It is a privilege for you to have that opportunity, because there are other places that haven’t had such systems or are burdened with systems that are a hundred or two years old. In a way, this is an advantage for Afghanistan to star anew with the bets ideas and the best technical knowledge.”
Paul O’Neill, U.S. Treasury secretary, November 2002, in postinvasion Kabul