Quotes from Michael Parenti

What we do know of Stalin's purges is that many victims were Communist party officials, managers, military officers, and other strategically situated individuals whom the dictator saw fit to incarcerate or liquidate. In addition, whole catagories of people whom Stalin considered of unreliable loyalty—Cossacks, Crimean Tarters, and ethnic Germans—were selected for internal deportation

Capitalism is a rational system, the well-calculated systematic maximization of power and profits, a process of accumulation anchored in material obsession that has the ultimately irrational consequence of devouring the system itself-and everything else with it.

The struggle over environmentalism is part of the class struggle itself, a fact that seems to have escaped many environmentalists. The impending eco-apocalypse is a class act. It has been created by and for the benefit of the few, at the expense of the many.

During the recount, GOP agitators shipped in from Washington, D.C., by the Republican national leadership stormed the Dade County Canvassing Board, punched and kicked one of the officials, shouted and banged on their office doors, and generally created a climate of intimidation that caused the board to abandon its recount and accept the dubious pro-Bush tally.

If profits are going up, then the economy is "doing well"—even if the working public is falling behind in real wages and living conditions, as happened during much of 2001–2007.

free-market world holocaust.

Aid programs are not intended to effect serious social betterment. At best, they finance piecemeal projects of limited impact. More often, they are used to undermine local markets, drive small farmers off their land, build transportation and office facilities needed by outside investors, increase a country's debt and economic dependency, and further open its economy to multinational corporate penetration. Free Market for the Few

Fascism is nothing more than a final solution to the class struggle, the totalistic submergence and exploitation of democratic forces for the benefit and profit of higher financial circles.

The feeling of being marginalized, a stranger in one's own land, is part of what makes many ethnics so responsive to any kind of media representation, sometimes even a derogatory one. A starving person will eat foul food.

The only countervailing force that might eventually turn things in a better direction is an informed and mobilized citizenry. Whatever their shortcomings, the people are our best hope. Indeed, we are they. Whether or not the ruling circles still wear blackshirts, and whether or not their opponents are Reds, la lutta continua, the struggle continues, today, tomorrow, and through all history.

Decentralized parochial autonomy is the graveyard of insurgency - which may be one reason why there has never been a successful anarcho-syndaclist revolution.

In 1979 the nuclear plant at Three Mile Island, Pennsylvania, experienced a temporary shutdown when the reactor core overheated and almost caused a meltdown. The near disaster was well reported. Left largely unreported was the aftermath: livestock on nearby farms aborted and died prematurely, and households experienced what amounted to an epidemic of cancer, birth defects, and premature deaths.17 The aftereffects of Three Mile Island remain one of America's best kept secrets.

My father's mother, Grandma Marietta, was a living portrait of her generation: a short squat woman who toiled endlessly in the home. She shared the common lot of Italian peasant women: endless cooking, cleaning, and tending to the family, with a fatalistic submergence of self. "Che pu fare?" ("What can you do?") was the common expression of the elderly women.

media hosts quickly change the subject, or break for a commercial, or inject an identifying announcement: "We are talking with [whomever]." The purpose is to avoid going any further into a politically forbidden topic, no matter how much the unwelcome comment might seem to need a follow-up query.

Nobody can hate like brothers," the saying goes, especially brothers (and sisters) who had a hard childhood ruled over by immigrant parents who themselves saw life as a series of impending catastrophes.

The notions that fit the prevailing climate of opinion are more likely to be accepted as objective, while those that clash with it are usually seen as lacking in credibility. More often than we realize, we accept or decline an idea, depending on its acceptability within the dominant culture.

Racism blurs and buries economic grievances. Whites are less likely to act against their bosses, being themselves too busy trying to keep African Americans down. Thus the working populace is divided against itself, making it difficult for White and Black workers to act in unison against the moneyed class.

So the plutocrats direct the legitimate grievances of the middle Americans toward innocent foes, and in return the middle Americans vote for the plutocrats thinking they are thereby defending their own precarious socio-economic interests.

All the more reason to look for ways of uniting Caucasian Americans, African Americans, and all people of color in common struggle.

The human capacity for discontent should not be underestimated. People cannot live on the social wage alone. Once our needs are satisfied, then our wants tend to escalate, and our wants become our needs. A rise in living standards often incites a still greater rise in expectations. As people are treated better, they want more of the good things and are not necessarily grateful for what they already have.

Every ruling class has wanted only this: all the rewards and none of the burdens. The operational code is: we have a lot; we can get more; we want it all.

I have never seen John Kerry give anything but an engineered response.

The enormous gap between what US leaders do in the world and what Americans think their leaders are doing is one of the great propaganda accomplishments.

The first atrocity, the first war crime committed in any war of aggression by the aggressors is against the truth.