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GORE VIDAL
People have accused me of being the first American
writer to refer to "our empire." We've always,
always been in the Empire business, whether it was
taking the land away from the Indians, picking a war
with Mexico in 1846. Ulysses Grant was a young lieutenant
in that war, and he used to say "I have always
felt that the civil war was the judgment of God on
the United States for what it had done in Mexico.
Which was to treat a weaker power as if we were some
insolent European empire, exerting our will over another
people to seize their land. We've been at this a long
time.
Vidal's
Recent Letters and Commentary from the New York Review
of Books
...the empire has wrecked our society -- $5 trillion
of debt, no proper public education, no health
care -- and done the rest of the world incomparable
harm. Interview,
Salon.com |
A republic can only be a small place, a city-state,
maybe 2, 3 million people at most. Enlarge it
and centralize it, and any chance of a proper
republic was finished. Thomas
Jefferson, PBS, Ken Burns Documentary |
The
End of History
Apparently, it is perfectly natural for a freedom-loving
democracy , addicted to elections, to have bases
and spies and now F.B.I. terrorist fighters and
drug hounds in every country on earth. |
Once alienated, an "inalienable right"
is apt to be lost forever, in which case we are
no longer even remotely the last best hope of
Earth but merely a seedy imperial state whose
citizens are kept in line by Swat teams and whose
way of death, not life, is universally imitated.
Taking
Liberties, The Guardian |
| ...under
our system any president is a stooge of the great
financial forces that own or govern the country.
Perpetual
War for Perpetual Peace, The Guardian
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