Masha Gessen Quotes

Most of us, if we're not careful, tend to dehumanize the enemy.

When the news wants to tell you something is important, they put dramatic theme music behind it. They scare you into watching the story.

It is wrong to make anyone into an enemy; it is wrong to scare the people of one's own country with that enemy and try to rally some allies on that basis.

When politicians use fear, they are playing into the enemy's hand.

War always begins with the dehumanizing of the enemy through rhetoric

In North Korea, we learnt all Americans are the enemy; they are not human.

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."

Whenever a liberal begins a statement with 'I don't know which is more frightening', you know the answer is going to be pretty clear.

It's hard to listen to the news every day and have everyone saying you're the Antichrist.

Because Bin Laden's culture doesn't permit the worship of images, they understand how powerful images are. We wouldn't have thought of creating a visual bomb. In a way, he's chopped down two iconic buildings, and used our very truth imagery, to express himself. It's fascinating... I mean, dreadful.

The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information.

Joe McCarthy and his Senate hearings were like witch-hunts.

Obviously the commercial news media tries to get you worked up and terrified so you'll buy products that they're advertising.

I think people have to set up little battles. They have to demonize people whom they disagree with or feel threatened by. But it's the ideological framing of the debate that scares me.

All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.

People in power need to control others in order to maintain power. One of the ways to do that is to take that which is threatening and demonize it.

All these stories are grist to the mill of the government because they build up a very useful war psychosis.

The key battleground in the war on terrorism, therefore, is in the minds of the American public.

It is standard practice for corrupt leaders who are seeking a certain political outcome to hype or manipulate a terror threat or a threat of violent domestic subversion. While sometimes the threat is manufactured, frequently the hyped threat is based on a real danger.

Our nation stands at a fork in the political road. In one direction lies a land of slander and scare; the land of sly innuendo, the poison pen, the anonymous phone call and hustling, pushing, shoving; the land of smash and grab and anything to win. This is Nixonland. America is something different.

For the flight and fall of the other villages, it is our leaders who are responsible, because of the dissemination of rumors exaggerating Jewish crimes and describing them as atrocities in order to inflame the Arabs ... they instilled fear and terror into the hearts of the Arabs of Palestine until they fled, leaving their homes and property to the enemy.

Here's your enemy for this week, the government says. And some gullible Americans click their heels and salute -- often without knowing who or even where the enemy of the week is.

The dissemination of propaganda designed to undermine the enemy's will to resist, demoralize his forces and sustain the morale of our supporters

In political warfare, you do not fight to prevail in an argument, but to destroy the enemy's fighting ability.

Food is as important to armies as ammunition—but more important than either is an unfailing supply of lies. You simply cannot murder your enemy in the most efficient manner if you know he is in every essential the same kind of a man as yourself.