Helen Caldicott Quotes

We must save America from the missionary idea that you must get the whole world on to the American way of life. This is really a big world danger.

We are being swallowed up by the popular culture of the United States, but then the Americans are being swallowed up by it too. It's just as much a threat to American culture as it is to ours.

The opponents of this process have always tried to vilify westernization as a poor imitation.

Often, these downplay the power of cultural imperialism - in that sense, playing the game of US interests - by reassuring us that the global success of American mass culture is not as bad as all that.

The French view globalization as synonymous with Americanization, the cultural imperialism that has filled France with bad food, bad films, and English words.

What will remain of our cultural identity if audiovisual Europe consists of ... sitting in front of Japanese TV sets showing American programs.

Identity politics includes the assertion of difference from ‘the West’, and the defenses against cultural invasions and ‘pollution’ by Western styles. The insistent emphasis on this theme is accompanied by its flagrant but largely unacknowledged subversion in everyday activity and styles, from dress, to food to music and entertainment, to media consumptions, to public spaces and general consumption patterns. While McDonald’s is boycotted because it is American, native fast food chains emerge which are direct imitations; the boycott of Coca Cola spawns Mecca Cola.

We should be obliged to admit that Europe is Americanizing herself with disconcerting rapidity.

Modernization means Westernization.

All cultures forged by nations—the noble indigenous past of America, the brilliant civilization of Europe, the wise history of Asian nations, and the ancestral wealth of Africa and Oceania—are corroded by the American way of life. In this way, neoliberalism imposes the destruction of nations and groups of nations in order to reconstruct them according to a single model. This is a planetary war, of the worst and cruelest kind, waged against humanity.

The loss of national identity is the greatest defeat a nation can know, and it is inevitable under the contemporary form of colonization.

I know that we're being inexorably taken over by the Americans. Without a doubt. I don't mean invaded or anything like that, just taken over. By degrees.

Things are so much global and Americanised.

In Canada you grow up - we're next to the United States. We're watching whatever you're watching. We're following your news. It's obvious that we are inundated with American cultural information and political information. Whereas the opposite is not true.

Everything has been homogenized. Over time, with television and jet travel, everybody has blended together. Some of our wonderful charm has been lost.

The standardization of world culture, with local popular or traditional forms driven out or dumbed down to make way for American television, American music, food, clothes and films, has been seen by many as the very heart of globalization.

A monoculture is not only Hollywood, but Americans trying to export democracy.

The present aristocracy of western culture, at the moment when it most clearly dominates the world, is being imitated rapidly and successfully in every eastern country.

Look, the whole world wants to modernize, and when you look to what they mean by modernizing, they mean Americanize. Would a modern Greek prefer to live in Orange County than Piraeus? Yes. Absolutely.

The problem in Hollywood is that they try to become the only kind of cinema in the world, okay? The imposition everywhere of a unique culture, which is Hollywood culture, and a unique way of life, which is the American way of life.

Countries have lost their culture because what they wanted was money. Money became the running theme in every country and culture was sacrificed.

I believed that English-speaking people had a divine mission to civilize the world by making it western, democratic and Christian.

It is through the European that civilization arrives ... precisely because of their superiority, the civilized people our responsible for an evolving world.

When you start exporting ideas, philosophy, behavior, products, ways of living, it becomes an assault on the culture. Americans have to understand that.

The United States considers itself a model for the world, imposing its way of living and thinking on other nations.