Masha Gessen Quotes

Without communism ... our state lacks a Wizard of Oz to terrify all the people all the time. So the state looks inward, at the true enemy, who turns out to be - who else? the people of the United States.

Politicians are propaganda, the people with guns are the enforcers and the media is the enthusiastic lapdog who enables the entire behavior and acts as the verbal abuser against those who deviate from nodding their heads at the vast statues of evil that we inherited.

If you've lived in a dictatorship for thirty years, you're used to people lying to you.

The continual manufacture of enemies is essential to the growth of the fascist state.

The United Nations cannot do anything, and never could; it is not an animate entity or agent. It is a place, a stage, a forum and a shrine... a place to which powerful people can repair when they are fearful about the course on which their own rhetoric seems to be propelling them.

Very big business is in bed with very big government in Washington, and has more to do with what the average person sees, hears and reads than most people know.

This is how you control your domestic population - by making people afraid and by identifying an enemy.

I don't think that Saddam Hussein is deliberately starving his own people. I would think that a man who gets 99 percent of the people to vote for him in an election and the people love him so much, how would they love a man that is starving them?

Homosexuals are not interested in making other people homosexuals. Homophobes are interested in making other people homophobes.

Never underestimate a populist. We have come to a moment where language is very important. Saying the media is the number one enemy of society is a way to create confusion and set people against each other. It's like a virus. Democracy dies and is born every day. If you don't take an active role in what is going on, somebody can easily steal it from you.

You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all the people some of the time, which is just long enough to be president of the United States.

We like to think we're superior to the people who, centuries ago, burned 'witches' for no better reason than a neighbor's belief that his crop failure or impotence was caused by that woman's action. But reporters are still prone to the same mental errors that caused these killings: seeing patterns where there are none, finding causes where there is only coincidence, ignoring our sources' political agendas and turning scanty evidence into panic.

Remember, when you hear them beginning to say "freedom" look carefully-. see who it is they want you to butcher.

Everything you see in North Korea, it's all propaganda, but it's all connected to the volcano.

People who live under fascism are not only miserable but they're full of shame. You just don't go in and inject democracy into them. They're half crazy with their own.

My face on every coin engraved, the anarchists are all enslaved. My flag is forever waved, by the grateful people I have saved.

These false Jews promote the filth of Hollywood that is seeding the American people and the people of the world and bringing you down in moral strength. … It's the wicked Jews, the false Jews, that are promoting lesbianism, homosexuality. It's the wicked Jews, false Jews, that make it a crime for you to preach the word of God, then they call you homophobic!

If you help manufacture an enemy that's really evil, you can point to the fact that it's really evil, and say, "Hey, it's really evil."

We have made the Reich by propaganda

The word communist, of course, has become a rallying cry for certain people here just as the word Jew was in Hitler's Germany, a way of arousing emotion without engendering thought.

That's why they (the Bush administration) had to make up that story about weapons of mass destruction. Because that was the only thing that would sell to the American people, and that wasn't true.

Some people will say that words like scum and rotten are wrong for Objective Journalism -- which is true, but they miss the point. It was the built-in blind spots of the Objective rules and dogma that allowed Nixon to slither into the White House in the first place.

The truth is the President of the United States used the same device that Slobodan Milosevic used in Serbia. When you appeal to homophobia, when you appeal to sexism, when you appeal to racism, that is extraordinarily damaging to the country.

Christianity is the enemy of liberty and civilization. It has kept mankind in slavery and oppression. The Church and the State have always fraternally united to exploit the people.