Michael Parenti Quotes

The Government of the United States has always maintained that it would not intervene forcibly in the domestic affairs of the Central and South American Republics, and particularly of the island republics in the Caribbean Sea. Nevertheless, both the preceding national Administration and the present have felt no difficulty in using the army and navy of the United States for armed intervention in the affairs of some of those republics; and neither of the two great political parties in the United States has thus far shown any disposition to make an issue with either Administration on this subject.

Most governments in the United States in a hundred years have not respected the peoples of Latin America. They have sponsored coup d'etats, assassinations.

Any country whose people conduct themselves well can count our hearty friendship. If a nation shows that it knows how to act with reasonable efficiency and decency in social and political matters, if it keeps order and pays its obligations it need fear no interference from the United States.

In the 1920's U. S. Marines were periodically sent to Nicaragua to prevent the fiscal protectorate from revolution. The administration was accused of making war on Nicaragua:] We are not making war on Nicaragua any more than a policeman on the street is making war on passers-by.

Of twenty Latin American republics only six are free from American interference in one form or another. In eleven countries this interference takes the form of official direction of financial policy, and in six this direction is backed by United States troops.

In our fervor to halt the potential spread of totalitarianism, what incredible precedent are we setting in Vietnam? By marching our legions through the countryside of foreign continents, burning homes, laying waste to the land, and indiscriminately killing friend and foe alike?

After installing friendly leaders in Iran and Guatemala, the United States lost interest in promoting democracy in either country.

The greatest crime since World War II has been U.S. foreign policy.

People make mistakes. And one of the mistakes that the United States consistently made was that it could intervene and somehow adjust people's governments, especially in the Middle East.

Americans overthrew governments only when economic interests coincided with ideological ones.

It does not accord with the policy of the United States to acknowledge any monarchial Government erected on the ruins of any republican Government in America ...

Practically all we know is that thousands of native Haitians have been killed by American Marines, and that many of our own gallant men have sacrificed their lives at the behest of an Executive department in order to establish laws drafted by the Assistant Secretary of the Navy...I will not empower an Assistant Secretary of the Navy to draft a constitution for helpless neighbors in the West Indies and jam it down their throats at the point of bayonets borne by US Marines

I helped make Mexico...safe for American oil interests. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank …. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street.

There is no community of interests or of principles between North and South America.

We don't have the temperament to be an occupying power.

The glorious spectacle of eighteen millions of people, struggling to burst their chains and be free.

We have no concern with South America. We can have no well-founded political sympathy with them. We are sprung from different stock.

It is impossible not to look forward to distant times when our rapid multiplication will expand … and cover the whole northern if not the southern continent.

We should not act as if we were an imperialist power, willy-nilly moving into capitals in that part of the world, taking down governments.

The scorn of our formidable neighbor who does not know us is our America’s greatest danger …. Through ignorance it might even come to lay hands on us. Once it does know us, it will remove it’s hands out of respect.

We seem bent on saving the Vietnamese from Ho Chi Minh, even if we have to kill them and demolish their country to do it.

Such recognition is not necessary in order to enable the United States to intervene and pacify the Island.

The American continents ... are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European powers.... We should consider any attempt [by European countries] to extend their system to any portion of this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and safety. With the existing colonies or dependencies of any European Power we have not interfered, and shall not interfere. But with the governments who have declared their independence, and maintained it ... we could not view any interposition for the purpose of oppressing them, or controlling, in any other manner, their destiny, by any European Power, in any other light than as the manifestations of an unfriendly disposition towards the United States. [The "Monroe Doctrine."]

The best American internationalists reject the idea that their nation holds a global copyright that gives it a mandate to churn out replicas dotting the world.

When Marxist dictators shoot their way into power in Central America, the San Francisco Democrats don't blame the guerillas and their Soviet allies, they blame United States policies of 100 years ago, but then they always blame America first.