On American Libraries

Nonplussed by World Events? . . . We are, too . . .

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“Government is reading your mail, and the Intelligence Services are reading the Government's mail. Who is in charge?" in Nelson McAvoy's Coded Messages: How the NSA and CIA Hoodwink Congress and the People

"The reform of consciousness consists entirely in making the world aware of its own consciousness, in arousing it from its dream of itself, in explaining its own actions to it."  —  Karl Marx, letter to Arnold Ruge, 1843, in Wilber W. Caldwell's 1968 — Dreams of Revolution

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“Americans cling to the myth of individualism as though it were the only normal way to live, unaware that it was unknown in the Middle Ages ... and would have been considered psychotic in classical Greece." —  Rollo May, in Gordon Moss's The Dawning Age of Cooperation 

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“The West has fiscalised its basic power relationships through a web of contracts, loans, shareholdings, bank holdings and so on. In such an environment it is easy for speech to be "free" because a change in political will rarely leads to any change in these basic instruments. Western speech, as something that rarely has any effect on power, is, like badgers and birds, free. In states like China, there is pervasive censorship, because speech still has power and power is scared of it. We should always look at censorship as an economic signal that reveals the potential power of speech in that jurisdiction. The attacks against us by the US point to a great hope: speech powerful enough to break the fiscal blockade.”  — Julian Assange

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"I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America.”
 — Alexis de Tocqueville

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Now watch what you say, Or they’ll be calling you a liberal, A radical, oh fanatical, criminal… — Supertramp, “The Logical Song,” in Monte Pearson's Perils of Empire

Watching the Smoke Signals... Suggested Readings