Tariq Ali Quotes
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Germany is a capitalist state nurtured carefully and brought back to prosperity by the United States, and it is very loyal to the United States. I don't even think the Germans enjoy full sovereignty. There are some things which they cannot do if the United States doesn't wish them to do it.
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The war in Afghanistan, the first war of the twenty-first century, shows the United States doing what it wants to do, not caring about who it antagonizes, not caring about the effects on neighboring regions.
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I think the big tragedy of the Cuban Revolution was that it became dependent on the Soviet Union, and it became dependent on the Soviet Union under a very reactionary bureaucratic regime led by Leonid Brezhnev.
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I think to compare Germany to the Third Reich is utterly ludicrous.
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I think the United States and its British attack dog are not taken seriously anywhere in the world and can play no role in helping a political solution.
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In many parts of the Islamic world, secular forces, where they exist, tend to be so unsure of themselves, so lacking in self-confidence, that in many cases they line themselves up fairly squarely behind the imperial project and that then creates a big vacuum in which the Islamists become the dominant power because they are the only ones then who are seen as resisting.
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The whole history of the 20th century is a history of resistance groups which are either nationalist or, in large parts of the Muslim word, religious groups.
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Terror breeds terror. I am completely opposed to both state terror and those who respond in a similar way. There is no justification for any group that associates itself with the Left to kill innocents and encourage suicide bombings.
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I do think the Cubans have to change some of the political structures there and allow critical voices, for their own sakes, because unless there is accountability the revolution will totally atrophy.
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The European Union is a union of the extreme center. It's a banker's union. You see how they operate in country after country, appointing technocrats to take over and run countries for long periods. They did it in Greece; they did it in Italy; they considered it in other parts of Europe.
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The West and its media have barely covered the recent wave of repression in Turkey. The reason is simple. They are paying billions to Ankara to control and take back the refugees of the Syrian war. They are fearful that if they offend Tayyip Erdogan he will use the refugees as a political weapon. So they keep quiet.
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In many parts of the world, including the Arab world, the Latin American world, and even parts of the Western world, there is a tradition of writers being quite engaged. Particularly in the Arab world you have had very, very strong traditions of literature and poetry and most of the writers have been deeply committed to the cause of the Arab nation.
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The function of a bourgeois democracy is to secure the consent of the masses to their own exploitation and oppression.
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The current Eurozone is obviously dysfunctional. And serious people within Germany and elsewhere know this to be the case and know things cannot function this way forever.
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That natural disasters are required to provide Americans with a glimpse of reality in their own country is an indication of the deep rot infecting the official political culture.
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The sobbing of the weak today is the sobbing of the victims of neoliberal policies. They consist of billions of people all over the world.
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The judgement makes no sense at all. It exposes the country, Turkey, to ridicule. It would have been so much better if Ahmet Davotgulu had behaved like a medieval jester, but no such luck for poor Turkey. Its Prime Minister is not taken seriously by too many people.
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People are increasingly beginning to feel that democracy itself is being destroyed by this latest phase of globalization and that politics doesn't matter because it changes nothing.
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The European Union is effectively a union dominated by the German political and economic elite. Its main function is to serve as a nucleus for financial capitalism and to ease the road for that capitalism. The other functions just irritate everyone: it's undemocratic; decisions are not made by parliament; the European Parliament is not sovereign.
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The implication strongly is that Osama bin Laden is a Hitler, even though he has no state power at all. It's just grotesque if you seriously think about it.
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The United States is now The Empire. There isn't an empire; there's The Empire, and that empire is the United States.
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Basically, we are witnessing the twilight of democracy.
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Tragedies are always discussed as if they took place in a void, but actually each tragedy is conditioned by its setting, local and global. The events of 11 September 2001 are not exception.
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The Internet has been an invaluable acquisition. I wonder how we would do without it. Information can be sent from one country to the other within the space of minutes, crossing channels, crossing oceans, crossing continents. But still, we can't compete with the might and power and wealth of those who dominate, control, and own the means of the production of information today.
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It was civil disobedience that won them their civil rights.
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It's a total failure of the Western imagination that the only enemy they can see is Adolph Hitler.
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There are different versions of Islam... it is meaningless to claim to speak in the name of a ‘real’ Islam.
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Even if you reject everything, it is always better to know what it is you are rejecting.
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Effectively, the EU is a very powerful bureaucracy, dominated now by the German elite, which is backed by the rest of the European Union members.
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During the Gulf War, journalists used to challenge government news managers and insisted they wouldn't just accept the official version of events.
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