David M. Shoup Quotes

We are not about to send American boys 9 or 10 thousand miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves.

A Government protected by foreigners will never be accepted by a free people.

The culture of death is imposed by economic and political interests, the arrogance of power, corruption. I blame the first world for having taken our riches for so many years. I am speaking of the superpowers that dominate the life of the world. More concretely, the World Bank, the IMF. Those that have caused and tolerated the death of our people, those responsible for the plundering of the third world. Silence is also part of repression.

How easy it would be to govern this country and make it rich, but how uphill work it is to influence a native ruler pulled by all interested consuls and traders. This ought to be a British protectorate …

I now understand that foreigners who interfere in our internal affairs will bring us nothing but harm

Egyptian political elites are middlemen carrying out the instructions of Washington.

Every time there has been an effort by the Haitian people to overcome the misery and poverty that comes from 200 years of bitter attacks, really bitter, the U.S. steps in and blocks it.

I do not accept the right of big powers to change governments as and when it affects their interests.

I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.

In the past, foreign intervention was obviously a major problem. Foreign domination, or if not domination, interference. But that has ended. There is no foreign domination; there is minimal foreign interference. The Cold War has ended. The Soviet Union no longer exists. The United States is showing minimal and diminishing interest in the Muslim world. They now have to confront their own problems. The old excuses are gone. The old justifications are gone and therefore the anger of people is turning increasingly against their own rulers.

There is nothing perhaps more adverse to nature and reason than to hold in obedience remote countries and foreign nations, in opposition to their inclination and interest.

Going to places like Honduras, Nicaragua, and various African countries you get to see very clearly what the cause and effect is. We finance the obnoxious elites in those countries and they exploit their people so we don't have to say that we're doing the exploiting but nevertheless we are benefiting from it.

If you love Black people, why are you destroying Haiti? If you love Black people, why did you, [Hillary] Clinton, stop them from the rice that they were producing in Haiti to feed themselves and other Caribbean nations? You put the rice industry out of business; and now rice is coming from Arkansas, chicken coming from Arkansas, when it once was growing right there in Haiti.

As long as imperialism exists it will, by definition, exert its domination over other countries. Today that domination is called neocolonialism.

I believe it is both unwise and even wrong to interfere in the affairs of other nations. Indeed, if we are honest, we will see that this is one of the reasons for 9-11.

We denounce the mercenary system of foreign policy under recent administrations in the interest of financial imperialists, oil monopolists, and international bankers, which has at times degraded our State Department from its high service as a strong and kindly intermediary of defenseless governments to a trading outpost of those interest and concession seekers engaged in the exploitation of weaker nations, as contrary to the will of the American people, destructive of domestic development and provocative of war.

I hate them [the Americans]. Them and their false democracy, their false liberty, their imperialism conducted in the name of Christian Civilization, their coups, like the coup which they started against me...

Live and let live has never been a Balkan rule…. Following five centuries of subjugation the Balkan peoples have had only half a century of freedom for experiment in nationhood,--a half-century, too, which has been distracted by the plots and counter-plots of foreign statesmen.

The effects of U.S. intervention in Latin America have been overwhelming negative. They have had the effect of reinforcing brutal and unjust social systems and crushing people who are fighting for what we would actually call “American values.” In many cases, … we actually overthrew governments that had principles similar to ours and replaced those … leaders with people who detest everything the United States stands for.

The United States never stopped conspiring against the Arab world, which holds the largest oil reserves on the planet.

Forcing some countries to accept democracy is something that should not be done.

By the end of the 1960s, the United States owned more than half of the Indian rupee money supply, and that had been acquired through food aid. So I think it's very interesting to see the very long history of how sovereignty and food go together. When some countries remove another country's ability to feed itself, it is a very powerful tool. Imperialist countries, like the United Kingdom, like the United States, have used it for centuries.

The U.S. will ignore the opinion of the Iraqi people and it will compose the new government according to its own desires.

It is totally unacceptable for a government to interfere in the internal affairs of another government and send aid, money, and weapons, to the people who are against a certain regime in another country.

Some people try deliberately to exploit the colonial hangover for their own purpose, to serve an external force. To us, Communism is as bad as imperialism.