Paragraphs - Part2

• Daniel Yergin
• Michael T. Klare
• Stuart Ewen
• Chalmers Johnson
• Barbara W. Tuchman
• ---
• Book Details
• Paragraphs Index
• Paragraphs (Part 1)
• Paragraphs (Part 3)
• ---
• Back to Index

"Three years after his discovery at Spindletop, he [James Guffey] returned to Beaumont and surveyed the derrick covered but now depleted hill, which had been so rapidly overproduced. After traipsing all over the oil field, he was moved to an epitaph. 'The cow was milked too hard,' he said. 'Moreover, she was not milked intelligiently.'"
-D. Yergin (The Prize, Page 91)

"In Tarbell's narrative [The History of Standard Oil Company], [John D.] Rockefeller, despite his much-professed devotion to Christian ethics, emerged as an amoral predator. 'Mr. Rockefeller,' she wrote, 'has systematicallyplayed with loaded dice, and it is doubtful if there has been a time since 1872 when he has run a race with a competitor and started fair.'"
-D. Yergin (The Prize, Page 105 )

"At 26 Broadway, the directors had gloomily gathered in the office of William Rockefeller to await the verdict. Little was said as the minutes went by. Archbold, his face taut, bent over the ticker, scanning for some word. When the news came, everybody was shocked. No one had been prepared for the devastating extent of the Supreme Court's decision; Standard was given six months to dissolve itself. 'Our Plan' was to be shattered by judicial fiat. There was dead silence. Archbold started to whistle a little tune, just as he had done many years earlier, when, as a boy, he waded throught the mud of Titusville to buy and bargain for oil. Now he walked over to the mantel. 'Well gentlemen,' he said after a moment's further consideration, 'life's just one damned thing after another.' Then he began to whistle again."
-D. Yergin (The Prize, Page 109 )

"[George] Reynolds described one of the Baktiari [Persian tribal confedaracy] leaders as 'a man as full of intrigues as the egg of a nightingale is pregnant with music.'"
-D. Yergin (The Prize, Page 145 )

"I have spent a fortnight upon Oil Company business, mediating between Englishmen who cannot always say what they mean and Persions who do not always mean what they say. The English idea of an agreement is a document in English which will stand attack by lawyers in a Court of Justice: the Persian idea is a declaration of general principles on both sides, with a substantial sum in cash, annually or in a lump sum."
-Arnold Wilson, quoted by D. Yergin (The Prize, Page 148 )

Shortly thereafter, [Admiral J.A.] Fisher arranged for Marcus Samuel to meet Churchill in order to make the case for oil [over coal in the Royal Navy]. But Churchill was not all that impressed with the chairman of Shell Transport and Trading. In a follow-up note to Churchill, Fisher first apologized for Samuel: "He is not as good at exposition but he began as a pedlar selling 'sea' shells! (Hence the name of his Company) and now he has six million sterling of his own private money. 'He's a good teapot though he may be a bad pourer'!"
-D. Yergin (The Prize, Page 155 )

"It was the wartime petroleum shortage of 1917 and 1918 that really drove home the necessity of oil to British interests and pushed Mesoptamia back to center stage. Prospects for oil development within the empire were bleak, which made supplies from the Middle East of paramount importance. Sir Maurice Hankey, the extremely powerful secretary of the War Cabinet, wrote to Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour that, 'oil in the next war will occupy the place of coal in the present war, or at least a parallel place to coal. The only only big potential supply that we can get under British control is the Persian and Mesopotamian supply.' Therefore, Hankey said, 'control over these oil supplies becomes a first-class British war aim.'"
-D. Yergin (The Prize, Page 188 )

"The news of the San Remo agreement of 1920, the understanding between the British and the French over the division of any possible Mesopotamian oil, stunned Washington and the oil industry. The accord was thunderously denounced in the American press as old-fashioned imperialism; it was regarded as all the more obnoxious because it seemed to violate the principle of equal rights among the victorious Allies."
-D. Yergin (The Prize, Page 195 )

Faisal of Iraq

Faisal's task was enormous; he had not inherited a well-defined nation, but rather a collection of diverse groups -- Shia Arabs and Sunni Arabs, Jews and Kurds and Yazidis -- a territory with few important cities, most of the countryside under the control of local sheiks, and with little common political or cultural history, but with a rising Arab nationalism. The minority Sunni Arabs held political power, while the Shia Arabs were the most numerous. To complicate things further, the Jews were the largest single group among inhabitants of Baghdad, followed by Arabs and Turks. To this religious and ethnic mosaic, Britain sought to import constitutionalism and a responsible parliament. Faisal depended upon Britain to support his new kingdom, but his position would be gravel impaired if he were seen as being too beholden to London. The British Government had to cope not only with Arab nationalism in Iraq but also with the oil men who were clamoring fro some word on the status of the Iraqi concession. Britain was all fro oil development, hoping that the potential oil revenues would help finance the new Iraqi government and further reduce its own financial burdens."
-D. Yergin (The Prize, Pages 200-201 )

Toward the Red Line

There remained the question of the critical 'self-denying' clause, by which all the participants agreed to work jointly together -- and only jointly -- in the region. As Gulbenkian later told it, at one of the final he called for a large map of the Middle East, then took a thick red pencil and drew a line along the boundaries of the now-defunct Turkish empire. 'That was the old Ottoman Empire which I knew in 1914,' he said. 'And I ought to know. I was born in it, lived in it, and served in it.' Gulbenkian may have, however, been adding his own embellishment to what was already decided. For, several months earlier, the british, using Foreign Office maps, and the French, with maps from the Quai d'Orsay, had already fixed the same boundaries. Whoever the author of the boundaries, this far-reaching oil settlement was therafter called 'The Red Line Agreement.'"
-D. Yergin (The Prize, Pages 203-204 )

"The equation -- oil equals power -- had already been proven on the battlefields of Worl War I, and from that conflict emerged a new era in relations between oil companies and nation-states. These relations were, of course, fueled by the volatile dynam,ics of supply and demand: who had the oil, who wanted it, and how much was it worth. Yet now more than the economics of the marketpalce had to be factored into the equation. If oil was power, it was also a symbol of sovereignty. That inevitably meant a collision between the objectives of oil companies and the interests of nation-states, a clash that was to become a lasting characteristic of international politics."
-D. Yergin (The Prize, Page 229)

"Neither politics not experience not temperment made [Roosevelt's Secretary of the Interior, Harold L.] Ickes sympathertic to the business of oil, but he was to come to its rescue and chanpion its future. In his view, the stakes were very high indeed. 'There is no doubt about our absolute and complete dependence upon oil,' he said. 'We have passed from the stone age, to bronze, to iron, to the industrial ange, and now to an age of oil. Without oil, American civilization as we know it could not exist.'"
-D. Yergin (The Prize, Page 254)

"Meanwhile in Mexico, by 1937 wages had supplanted the chronic debates over taxes, royalties, and the legal satus of the oil concessions as the number one point of contention. The oil workers union went out on strike in May 1937, with the other unions planning to undertake a general strike in support. [President Lazaro] Cardenas was spending much of his time away from mexico City -- in the Yucatan , supervising land distribution to the Indians, and in the small port of Acapulco, where he was overseeing the development of a hotel and bathing beach. But now, with wholesale turmoil threatening, he intervened; the industry could not be closed down, not a general strike tolerated. Instead, the president set up a commission to review the companies' books and activities.

There was little basis for dialogue. Professor Jesus Silva Herzog, the key member of the review commission, described company officials as 'men without respect who were unaccustonmed to speaking the truth.'"
-D. Yergin (The Prize, Page 274-275)

"Though Mexican Eagle, a British company, was by far the largest producer, much of the agitation against oil companies was based upon the strong anti-United States sentiment that seemed to unite the country. 'The one respect in which I have found Mexicans of all classes completely unanimous,' observed an Englisg diplomat, 'is their conviction that it is a fixed principle of American policy to prevent the economic development and political consolidation of their country.'"
-D. Yergin (The Prize, Page 275)

"As he [Admiral Kichisaburo Nomura] told the U.S. Chief of Naval Operations, 'his lips and his heart' were 'at variance.' But he was a messenger, not a decision maker. Some years later, trying to explain how he had felt during the tense days of 1941, Nomura simply said, 'When a big house falls, one pillar cannot stop it.'"
-D. Yergin (The Prize, Page 314)

"On Saturday, December 6, Roosevelt decided to send a personal note directly to the Emperor, seeking to dispel 'the dark clouds' that had so ominously gathered. The message did not go off until nine o'clock that evening. Shortley after sending it, Roosevelt told some visitors, 'This son of man has just sent his final message to the Son fo God.'"
-D. Yergin (The Prize, Page 324)

"From the very start, the capture of Baku and the other Caucasian oil fields was central to Hitler's concept of his Russina campaign. 'In the economic field,' one historian [Paul Carell (Hitler Moves East)] has written, 'Hitler's obsession was oil.' To Hitler, it was the vital commodity of the industrial age and for economic power. He read about it, he talked about it, he knew the history of the world's oil fields. If the oil of the Caucusus -- along with the 'black earth,' the farmlands of the Ukraine -- could be brought into the German empire, then Hitler's New Order would have within its borders the resources to make it invulnerable."
-D. Yergin (The Prize, Page 334)

"On May 12, 1944, a combat force involving 935 bombers, plus fighter escorts, bombed a number of synthetic fuel factories, including the giant I.G. Farben plant at leuna. As soon as Albert Speer realized what happened, he rushed by plane to Leuna to see the damage for himself. 'I shall never forget the date May 12,' he later wrote. 'On that day the technological war was decided.' The results of the attack, and the broken twisted pipe systems that he now saw as he toured the plant site, made real 'what had been a nightmare to us for more than two years.' A week after the attack, Spper flew off to report personally to his Fuhrer. 'The enemy has struck us at one of our weaker points,' he told Hitler. 'If they persist at it this time, we will soon have no longer any fuel production worth mentioning. Our one hope is that the other side has an Air Force General Staff as scatter brained as ours.'"
-D. Yergin (The Prize, Page 346-347)

"As Roosevelt was later to explain, 'Old Dr. New Deal' had to call in his partner 'Dr. Win-the-War.' And what Dr. New Deal had found unpalatable and unhealthy about Big Oil -- its size and scale, its integrated operation, its self-reliance, its ability to mobilize capital and technology -- was exactly what Dr. Win-the-War would prescribe as the urgent medicine for wartime mobilization."
-D. Yergin (The Prize, Page 372)

"When he came back to Washington in early 1944, [Everette Lee] DeGolyer reported that the proven and probable reserves of the region -- Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Qatar -- amounted to about 25 billion barrels. Of that, Saudi Arabia accounted for about 20 percent -- perhaps 5 billion barrels. He was a conservative man, and he applied the same standards for 'proven' and 'probable' reserves on behalf of the United States government as he would have in appraising the reserves for a bank. In fact, he suspected that the reserves would be much, much larger. And, indeed, estimates that sounded like lunacy -- 300 billion barrels for the region and 100 billion for Saudi Arabia alone -- resulted from his trip. One of the members of his mission told officials in the State Department, 'The oil in this region is the greatest single prize in all history.'

More important than any specific numbers was DeGolyer's overall judgement of the significance of these huge reserves of oil: 'The center of gravity of world oil production is shifting from the Gulf-Caribbean area to the Middle East -- to the Persian Gulf area,' he said, 'and is likely to continue to shift until it is firmly established in that area.' That judgement, delivered by a man with roots so deep in the American industry, constituted a eulogy for America's receding place in world oil -- the end of its dominion. The United States was to produce almost 90 percent of the oil used by the Allies in World War II, but that was the high water mark for its role as supplier to the world. Its remaining days as an exporter would soon disappear. Yet DeGolyer's words were more than just a eulogy. They were a prediction about a dramatic reorientation in the oil industry that would have a profound impact on the direction of world politics."
-D. Yergin (The Prize, Page 393)

"'The law of diminishing returns is becoming operative,' said the director of reserves for the petroeum Administration for War in 1943. 'As new oil fields are not being formed and as the number is ultimately finite, the time must come sooner or later when the supply is exhausted.' For the United States, he added, 'the bonanza days of oil discovery, for the most part, belong to history.'

Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes shared that view, and the title of an article he published in December 1943 left no one in doubt where he stood -- 'We're Running Out Of Oil!' In the article, the Old Curmudgeon warned ominously that 'if ther should be a Worl War III, it would ahve to be fought with someone else's petroleum, because the United States wouldn;t have it...America's crown, symbolizing supremacy as the oil empire of the world, is sliding down over one eye.'"
-D. Yergin (The Prize, Page 395)

"Whether or not Washington actually acted as an overt marriage broker, it was clear that enlarging the participation would further the fundamental goals of American strategy: to increase Middle Eastern production, thus conserving Western Hemisphere resources, and to enhance the revenues going to Ibn Saud, thus ensuring that the concession remained in American hands. As Navy Secretary James Forrestal put it in 1945, he did not 'care which American company or companies developed the Arabian reserves' so long as they were 'American.' In the spring of 1946, Socal opened talks with Stabdard Oil of New Jersey."
-D. Yergin (The Prize, Page 412)

"Ibn Saud was as outspoken and admanat against Zionism and Israel as any Arab leader. He said that Jews had been the enemies of Arabs since the seventh century. American support of a jewish state, he told Truman, would be a detha blow to American interests in the Arab world, and should a Jewish state come into existence, the Arabs 'will lay siege to it until it dies of famine.'
[...]
In his opposition to a Jewish state, Ibn Saud held what a British official called a 'trump card': He could punish the United States by canceling the Aramco concession. That possibility greatly alarmed not only the interested companies, but also, of course, the US State and Defense departments."
-D. Yergin (The Prize, Page 425)

"Saudi Arabia became the dominant focus of American policymakers. Here was, said one American official in 1948, 'what is probably the richest economic prize in the world in foreign investment.' And here the United States and Saudi Arabia were forging a unique new relationship. In October 1950 Harry Truman wrote a ltter to King Ibn Saud. 'I wish to renew to Your Majesty the assurances which have been made to you several times in the past, that the United States is interested in the preservation of the independence and territorial integrity of Saudi Arabia. No threat to your Kingdom could occur which would not be a matter of immediate concern to the United States.' That sounded very much like a guarantee."
-D. Yergin (The Prize, Page 427-428)

"Fortune magazine announced in 1957 that he was America's richest man and its sole billionaire. He was stoic in the face of that news. 'My bankers kept telling me,' he said, 'that it was so, but I was hoping I wouldn't be found out.' He added a sensible admonition. 'If you can count your money, you don't have a billion dollars.'"
-D. Yergin (The Prize, Page 443)

"The British saw things differently, right from the beginning. They thought that the Americans failed to understand how hard it was to negotiate with Mossadegh; some British officials regarded the communist danger as much exaggerated. 'Mossadegh was a Moslem, and in 1951 he would not have turned to the Russians,' said Peter Ramsbotham, secretary of the British Cabinet's special Persia Committee. The real danger was to an existing interest in Iran and to established political and economic arrangements in the Middle East. Some of the British regarded Mossadegh as a 'lunatic.' What could be done with such a man? Add to that the fact that Mossadegh, in the words of the British ambassador, Sir Francis Shephard, had to be watched very carefully because he was 'cunningand slippery and completely unscrupulous.' In the ambassador's view, the Iranian Prime Minister looked 'rather like a cab horse' and diffused a 'slight reek of opium.' But in what was about to unfold, perhaps nothing galled the British so much as the fact that their national champion, Anglo-Iranian, and Great Britain itself would be outwitted by an old man in pajamas."
-D. Yergin (The Prize, Page 457-458)

"For their part, American officials did not find oil company executives the easiest people to deal with. In mid-1953, Richard Funkhouser, a senior oil strategist in the State Department, advised his colleagues, in a long analysis on Mid-Eastern, that 'it is of critical importance to the success of any approach that the oil men be handled most carefully and diplomatically. Oil officials seem overly sensitive to any indication that the indistry isn't perfect...Emotion, pride, loyalty, suspicion make it difficult to penetrate to reason.'"
-D. Yergin (The Prize, Page 471)

"In September [1956], Eisenhower insisted, in a message to [British PM Anthony] Eden, that there was a danger in 'making of Nasser a much more important figurethan he is.' To this, Sir Ivone Kirkpatrick, the permanent Undersecretaryof the Foreign Office, provided a sharp rejoinder: 'I wish the President were right. But I am convinced that he is wrong...If we sit back while Nasser consolidates his position and gradually acquires control of the oil-bearing countries, he can, and is, according to our information, resolved to wreck us. If Middle east oil is denied to us for a year or two, our gold reserves will disappear. If our gold reserves disappear, the sterling area disintegrates. If the sterling area disintegrates and we have no reserves, we shall not be able to maintain a force in Germany or, indeed, anywhere else. I doubt whether we shall be able to pay for the bare minimum necessary for our defense. And a country that cannot provide for its defense is finshed.'"
-D. Yergin (The Prize, Page 488)

"And if the OPEC member countries had a common economic goal -- to increase their revenues -- the political rivalries among them were considerable. In 1961, when Kuwait became completely independent of Britain, Iraq not only claimed ownership of the small country, but threatened invasion. Iraq backed off only after Britain dispatched a small military squadron to help defend Kuwait. But Iraq did temporarily suspend its membership in OPEC in protest. The two major producers, Iran and Saudi Arabia, looked upon each other with apprehension and envy, even as the ascent of Nasser and nationalism in Egypt and throughout the Middle East posed a threat to their dynasties as well as their political leadership in the region. The Shah wanted to increase his revenues as speedily as possible, and he believed that could only be achieved by selling more oil, not by holding back production and raising the price. And he wanted to be sure that Iran regained and held on to a position of preeminence that befitted his own ambitions. 'Iran must be restored to number one producer,' he said. 'International oil prorationing is nice in theory but unrealistic in practice.'"
-D. Yergin (The Prize, Page 524)

"The Shah made clear exactly where he stood in a meeting with his old friend, Kim Roosevelt, who had helped organize the countercoup that put the Shah back in power a decade earlier. He 'was tired of being treated like a schoolboy ' by the United States, the Shah now told Roosevelt. He listed all the ways he was helping Western interests, including 'Iran's stand up fight against the incursions of Nasser.' But 'indifference' and 'maltreatment' were all he got in return. 'America does better by it's enemies than it does by its friends,' he added. The special relationship between Iran and America, he warned, 'is coming to an end.'"
-D. Yergin (The Prize, Page 534)

"Yet putting aside politics and personalities, the supply-demand balance that emerged at the beginning of the 1970s was sending a most important message: Cheap oil had been a tremendous boon to economic growth, but it could not be sustained. Demand could not continue growing at the rate it was; new supplies needed to be developed. That was what the disppearance of spare capacity meant. Something had to give, and that something was price. But how, and when? Those were the all-critical questions. Some thought the decisive year would be 1976, when the Tehran and Tripoli agreements were due to expire. But the supply-demand balance was already very taut.

He added one over-arching point. 'Control of the flow of resources has been of strategic concern throughout history. Asserting control over a vital source of energy would permit Middle Eastern states to regain the power position vis-a-vis the West, which this region lost long ago.' Placke emphasized that he was no pleading for maintaining the status quo. That was impossible. But what was important was to understand how the world was changing and to prepare for it. The greatest sin was inattention."
-D. Yergin (The Prize, Pages 586-587)

"Ever since the 1950s, members of the Arab world had been talking about using the hazily defined 'oil weapon' to achieve their various objectives regarding Israel, which ranged from its total annihilation to forcing it to give up territory. Yet the weapon had always been deflected by the fact that Arab oil, while it seemed endlessly abundant, was not the supply of last resort. Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma -- those states could always and quickly put additional oil into the world market. But once the United States hit 100 percent in terms of production rates, that old warrior, American production, could not rise up again to defend against the oil weapon."
-D. Yergin (The Prize, Page 593)

"After two decades of talk and several failed attempts, the oil weapon had finally been successfully used, with an impact not merely convincing, but overwhelming, and far greater than even its proponents might have dared to expect. It had recast the alignments and geopolitics of both the Middle East and the entire world. It had transformed [the] world oil and the relations between producers and consumers, and it remade the international economy. Now it could be resheathed. But the threat would remain."
-D. Yergin (The Prize, Page 632)

"The hostage crisis transmitted a powerful message: that the shift of power in the world oil market in the 1970s was only part of a larger drama that was taking place in global politics. The United States and the West, it seemed to say, were truly in decline, on the defensive, and, it appeared, unable to do anything to protect their interests, whether economic or political. As Carter succinctly summed matters up two days after the hostage seizure, 'They have us by the balls.' Iran was not the only scene of unrest. The hapless United States was under attack by a variety of opponents in the Middle East who wanted to eject the United States from the area. Later in November 1979, a few weeks after the hostage taking, some seven hundred armed fundamentalists, bitterly opposed to the Saudi government and its links to the West, seized the Great Mosque in Mecca, in what was supposed to be the frist stage of an uprising. They were dislodged only with difficulty. The larger Saudi uprising never materialized, but the assault did send shock waves through the Islamic world. In early December, there was a Shia protest in al-Hasa, in the heart of the oil region in the eastern part of Saudi Arabia. Then came another dramatic and much larger shock a few weeks later in December. The Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan."
-D. Yergin (The Prize, Page 701)

"For over forty years, from the late 1940s until 1990, the overarching goal of U.S. strategy was to create and maintain a global system of alliances capable of containing and, if necessary, defeating the Soviet Union. All other considerations, including the pursuit of America's own national interests, were subordianted to the all encompassing mission of 'containment.' Since the end of the Cold War, however, the requirement for far flung alliances has appeared less urgent, while the need to promote America's own security interests has seemed more pressing. The maintenance of NATO and other alliance systems remains an important priority, but other objectives -- of a more self-interested, tangible character -- have come to dominate the American strategic agenda."

"Among these objectives, none has so profoundly influenced American military policy as the determination to ensure U.S. access to overseas supplies of vital resources. As the American economy grows and U.S. industries come to rely more on imported supplies of critical materials, the protection of global resource flows is becoming the increasingly prominent feature of American security policy. This is evident not only in the geographic dimension of strategy -- the growing emphasis on military operations in the the Persian Gulf, the Caspian, and other energy producing areas -- but also in its operational aspects. Whereas weapons technology and alliance politics once dominated the discourse on military affairs, American strategy now focuses on oil-field protection, the defense of maritime trade routes, and other aspects of resource security."
-M. Klare (Resource Wars, Pages 5-6)

"Ever since the Cold War's end, political analysts of all persuasions have attempted to identify the central defining principle of the new international environment -- what Thomas Friedman of the New York Times has termed 'The One Big Thing.' Several authors have attempted to identify this 'one big thing,' most prominently Samuel Huntington, who claims that global security dynamics will be governed by a 'clash of civilizations'; Robert Kaplan, who vividly depicts a world overtaken by population excess and anarchy; and Friedman himself, who, in 'The Lexus and the Olive Tree,' argues that economic 'globalization' has become the world's dominant feature. Each of these explanations has something to contribute to our understanding of international dynamics, and each has entered into the gloabl policy debate; none, however, provides a fully satisfactory analysis of current world affairs."
-M. Klare (Resource Wars, Page 13)

"Clearly, it is not possible to explain the dynamics of global security affairs without recognizing the pivotal importance of resource competition. For almost every country in the world, the pursuit or protection of essential materials has become a paramount feature in national security planning. As shown by Operation CENTRAZBAT, resource concerns also figure in the organization, deployment and actual use of many of the world's military forces. While the competition for resources may not be 'The One Big Thing' that lies at the heart of all international relations, it helps explain much of what is happening in the world today."
-M. Klare (Resource Wars, Page 14)

"Each of these three factors -- the relentless expansion in worldwide demand, the emergence of significant resource shortages, and the proliferation of ownership contests -- is likely to introduce new stresses into the international system. The first two will inevitably intensify competition between states over access to vital materials; the third will generate new sources of friction and conflict. Each factor, morever, will reinfirce the destabilizing tendencies of the others; as resource consumption grows, shortages will emerge more rapidly and governments will come under mounting pressure to solve the problem at any cost; this, in turn, will heighten the tendency of states to seek maximum control over contested sources of supplies, thereby increasing the risk of conflict between countries that share or jointly claim a given resource deposit."
-M. Klare (Resource Wars, Page 23)

"Resource competition will not, of course, prove the sole source of conflict in the twenty-first century. Other factors -- ethnic hostility, economic injustice, political competition and so on -- will also lead to periodic outbreaks of violence. Increasingly, however, these factors will be linked to disputes over the possession of (or access to) vital materials. However divided two states or societies may be over matters of politics or religion, the likelihood of their engaging in mutual combat becomes considerably greater when one side believes that its essential supply of water, food, or energy is threatened by the other. And with the worldwide availability of many key resources facing eventual decline, the danger of resource disputes intruding into other areas of disagreement can only increase."
-M. Klare (Resource Wars, Page 25)

"More recently, in May 2000, the head of the Caspian Sea working group in the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Andrei Y. Urnov, told an audience in Washington, 'It hasn't been left unnoticed in Russia that certain outside forces are trying to weaken our position in the Caspian basin, to drive a wedge between us and other Caspian states.' As if to confirm these perceptions, Sheila Heslin of the U.S. National Security Council told a Senate investigating committee that the goal of American policy in the Caspian is 'in essence to break Russia's monopoly of control over the transportation of oil from the region.'"
-M. Klare (Resource Wars, Page 89)

"Washington has two key objectives: first, to develop Caspian basin energy as an alternative to Persian Gulf supplies; second, to ensure that the Caspian oil and gas travel to markets in the West without passing through Russia or Iran. 'This is about America's energy security, which depends upon diversifying our sources of oil and and gas worldwide,' Energy Secretary Bill Richardson explained in 1998. 'It's also about preventing inroads by those who don't share our values.' To bypass Russia and Iran, the United States wants the major oil consortia to build new oil and gas pipelines running beneath the Caspian Sea from Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan to Azerbaijan, and then onward to Georgia and Turkey. Although far more costly than alternative routes through Russia and Iran, such a network is claimed by American officials to be the least susceptible to interdiction by hostile forces."
-M. Klare (Resource Wars, Page 90)

"The potential for instability is further heightened by the legacy of the Soviets' crazy quilt pattern of administrative borders. To diffuse nationalist impulses and to otherwise promote its interests, the Soviet leadership created interrepublic borders that often bore little relationship to the actual distribution of ethnic groups. For example, Moscow incorporated the Armenian populated enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh within Azerbaijan instead of Armenia. Similarly, a large Tajik inhabited area was incorporated into Uzbekistan, and a number of Uzbek populated areas were assigned to Tajikistan and Krygyzstan.

"These territorial allocations were relatively unimportant during the Soviet era. But they assumed great significance in 1992 when the various internal borders became the outer perimeters of sovereign states. In this new situation, some ethnic constituencies have wound up as minority groups in states controlled by other, unfriendly groups. This has led to the outbreak of seperatist conflicts in some areas (notably in Abkhazia and Nagorno-Karabakh) and to periodic flare-ups of ethnic unrest in others. Although cease fires have been arranged in some areas of fighting, including Abkhazia, Nagorno-Karabakh, and Tajikistan, none of the major disputes have been fully resolved, and the potential for renewed conflict appears substantial."
-M. Klare (Resource Wars, Page 105)

"A number of other factors are likely to increase the frequency and severity of water disputes in the decades ahead. As population grows, societies need more water for both human daily use and for food production (usually through increased irrigation). To complicate matters, global population growth is heavily concentrated in those areas of the world -- North Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia -- where the supply of water is already proving inadequate for human needs. Rapid urbanization in these areas and the expanding use of water in industrial processes are also contributing to an increase in demand. This means that the stakes in future clashes over the distribution of shared resources will rise and the price for losing out in such a contest will become even more severe."
-M. Klare (Resource Wars, Page 140)

"The end of superpower involvement in resource contests has not been followed by the adoption of new systems of international conflict management. Although the United Nations has attempted to resolve many of the internal struggles now under way, it has generally lacked the capacity and the know-how to succeed at this efforts. The U.N.'s effectiveness has been further hampered by the unwillingness of the major powers -- especially the United States -- to provide troops, funds, and equipment for international peacekeeping operations. As a result, fighting has continued in Angola, Sierra Leone, and Somalia despite a series of U.N. sponsored interventions."
-M. Klare (Resource Wars, Page 194)

"The conflicts in Bougainville, Sierra Leone, and Borneo are characteristic of an assortment of disputes over valuable supplies of gems, minerals, and timber that are now occurring in various parts of the world. Other such hostilities are under way in Angola, Brazil, Burma, Cambodia, Columbia, Congo, Indonesia, Liberia, and the Philippines. In all of these countries, warlords and local elites -- some with government support, some without -- seek to dominate a particular mineral or logging region and garner whatever revenues can be derived from its exploitation. Very often, this means driving off the people who have long inhabited the area or depriving them of any benefits from the appropriation of their traditional lands."
-M. Klare (Resource Wars, Page 208)

"The distinctive features of this new strategic geography look very different from those of the Cold War era, with its military blocs and confrontation zones. Regions that once occupied central stage, such as the east-west divide in Europe, will lose all strategic significance, while areas long neglected by the international community, such as the Caspian basin and the South China Sea, will acquire expanded significance. Attracting the greatest interest will be places that harbor particularly abundant supplies of vital materials -- oil, water, diamonds, minerals, old-growth timber -- along with the supply routes that connect these areas to major markets around the world. These regions will command attention from the media, dominate the deliberations of international policy makers, and invite the heaviest concentrations of military power.

"To better appreciate the nature of this emerging landscape, imagine a map of the world on which the major deposits of vital materials are represented by different colours: black for oil and coal, blue for water, white for diamonds and gems, green for timber, and red for copper, iron and other key minerals. Once the map is tinted in this fashion, our eyes will naturally jump to those areas with the greatest profusion and intensity of colour: the Amazon region and Southeast Asia for green, the Persian Gulf for black, sub-Saharan Africa for white and red, and so on. The result is a new strategic geography in which resource concentrations rather than political boundaries are the major defining features."

"Although every area of the world would possess fragments of colour, the greatest concentration of hues on such a map would be found in the wide territory straddling the equator. Included in this band is the northern half of South America (including Amazonia), Central Africa (including the headwaters of the Nile), the Persian Gulf, South and Southeast Asia, Indonesia, and the islands of the western Pacific. Together, these areas encompass the world's principal sources of petroleum, many important supplies of minerals, all of its tropical timber, and several of its most important river systems."
-M. Klare (Resource Wars, Pages 214-215)

"There is a high degree of correlation between areas of conflict and concentrations of critical materials within this broad equatorial band. Even wars that are generally blamed on other factors -- such as fighting in Columbia, Timor, or Sudan -- often possess upon examination a hidden resource-related element. It is the main thesis of this book that areas within this band will continue to suffer recurring resource conflict in the decades ahead. And nowhere, according to our imaginary map, is such a conflict likely to be more protracted and bloody than in Africa."
-M. Klare (Resource Wars, Page 217)

"As we move deeper into the twenty-first century, the global human community faces a momentous choice: we can either proceed down the path of intensified resource competition, which will lead to recurring outbreaks of conflict throughout the world; or we can choose to manage global resource stockpiles in a cooperative fashion. Selecting the latter path will not prove easy: many states and private interests will resist the establishment of a system which gives international agencies a degree of control over the allocation of valuable minerals in time of scarcity. But we must ask: would it not be better to share resources equitably in times of need? Is it not in our long term interest to make every effort to avert future shortages through collaborative research and action?"
-M. Klare (Resource Wars, Pages 225-226)

"Public relations cannot be understood simply as an array of value-free techniques employed for steering news coverage or influencing public opinion. The rise and consequence of public relations within our world must also be placed in relation to the motives, the assumptions and the history of power."
-S. Ewen (PR!, Page 33)

"Acknowledging the already considerable power of advertising in American society; by 1917 [George] Creel was approaching the conclusion that 'people do not live by bread alone; they live mostly by catch phrases.' If advertising could sell soap or face cream or biscuits, he reasoned, why not a war? 'The work of the Committee [on Public Information] was so distinctly in the nature of an advertising campaign,' he explained some years later, 'that we turned almost instinctively to the advertising profession for advice and assistance.'"
-S. Ewen (PR!, Page 112-113)

"Overall, in terms of the evolution of twentieth-century publicity, the CPI [Committee on Public Information] was built around a conception of the mass media that had never before been applied. Looming over each individual division was a conception of the mass media that saw them as parts of an interwoven perceptual environment. It was the espoused goal of the CPI to impregnate the entire fabric of perception with the message of the war."
-S. Ewen (PR!, Page 116)

"The war had also elevated the function of unreason, of the 'night mind,' for people engaged in the business of shaping public opinion. Reflected within this shift was a transformed conception of human nature itself. In their discussions of the public -- of people in general -- Brahmins of public opinion, educated by the war, were becoming increasingly conversant with psychological aspects of human perception. In the citadels of the Enlightened West, a naive faith in reason was beginning to fade from view. Publicists were beginning to look for unconscious or instinctive triggers that might be pulled to activate public passions."
-S. Ewen (PR!, Page 127)

"Speaking with an interviewer from the New York Evening Post in the spring of 1921, for example, [Ivy] Lee wandered from a fairly familiar description of the press agent's calling to announce his growing attraction to psychoanalysis. 'I have found' he confessed, 'the Freudian theories concerning the psychology of the unconscious mind of great interest.' Then Lee added, 'Publicity is essentially a matter of mass psychology. We must remember that people are guided more by sentiment than by mind.'"
-S. Ewen (PR!, Page 132)

"Without doubt, the war and the CPI had, for a generation of American intellectuals, accentuated the importance of psychological factors of persuasion. Yet Lee's fascination with mass psychology and the emotions of the crowd also reveal a vector of thinking that had begun to reveal itself before the war. From the turn of the century -- even as most publicists continued to pay tribute to the majesty of facts -- another current of intellectual thought was emerging, one that argued that the entity known as 'the public mind' was innately more susceptible to emotional entreaties than it was to rational appeals.

No individual contributed more to this perspective than Gustave Le Bon, whose widely acclaimed writings -- particularly The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind -- put the nascent field of social psychology on the map."
-S. Ewen (PR!, Page 132-133)

"Throughout history, Le Bon had theorized, social stability had always been the handiwork of 'a small intellectual aristocracy.' With [Wilfred] Trotter's call for a rule by 'conscious and instructed intelelct,' he was proposing not only the restoration of an elite coterie of thinkers, but of 'an aristocracy' that was particularly versed in the science of social psychology and thus qualified to shepherd the unconscious lives of the public."
-S. Ewen (PR!, Page 143)

"'The democratic realists of the twenties,' [Robert B.] Westbrook wrote, focussed their criticism of democracy on two of its essential beliefs:

At the heart of this perspective was the problem of how to mediate between the democratic aspirations of ordinary men and women and the conviction that elites must be able to govern withhout the impediment of an active and participatory public. For [Walter] Lippmann, the ability to 'manufacture consent,' to employ techniques that could assemble mass support behind executive action was the key to solving this modern puzzle. In two important books -- the widely hailed Public Opinion, published in 1922, and a lesser-known book, The Phantom Public, which appeared five years later -- Lippmann laid out his ideas on how this formidable objective might be accomplished."
-S. Ewen (PR!, Page 147)

"Developing ideas that would become twentieth-century public relations catechism, [Walter] Lippmann cautioned that to govern the way that the press will cover an event, access to that event must be consciously restricted. 'A group of men who can prevent independent access to the event' are in a position to 'arrange news to suit their purposes.' He continued:

Central to Lippmann's vision of successful propaganda were his insights regarding the unparalleled powers of persuasion being uncovered by modern technologies of mass communication, particularly the cinema. Social psychologists, from Le Bon onward, had repeatedly declared the power of symbols to galvanize the crowd mind, but such pronouncements rarely moved beyond a cryptic, somewhat cabalistic, plane of analysis. Lippmann was among the first to take such metaphysical assertions and ground them in a practical analysis of the modern media system. He delineated the specific ways that images and narrative conventions worked on an audience and how they might be used."
-S. Ewen (PR!, Page 152)

"Raised in a world that looked towards fact-based journalism as the most efficient lubricant of persuasion, Lippmann turned towards Hollywood, America's 'dream factory,' for inspiration. Never before had an American thinker articulated in in such detail the ways that images could be used to sway public consciousness. Appeals to reason were not merely being discarded as futile, they were being consciously undermined to serve the interests of power. It is here, at the turning point where Lippmann unqualifiedly abandoned the idea of meanngful public dialogue, that the dark side of his ruminations on the power of the image was most dramatically revealed."
-S. Ewen (PR!, Page 154)

"In its adamant argument that human beings are essentially irrational, social psychology had provided Lippmann -- and many others -- with a handy rationale for a small, intellectual elite to rule over society. Yet a close reading of Lippmann's argument suggests that he was less concerned with the irrational core of human behaviour than he was with the problem of making rule by elites, in a democratic age, less difficult."
-S. Ewen (PR!, Page 157)

"Broaching a theme that he would repeat -- to the embarassment of many in the public relations profession -- for decades to come, [Edward] Bernays announced that 'the conscious and intelligient manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses' had become an indispensable feature of 'democratic society.' With the masses pounding at the door of 'the higher strata of society,' he noted, ruling elites were turning to propaganda as the scientifically informed tool through which public submission might be achieved.

"...Bernays was beginning to delineate a pragmatic outline for how a public relations specialist might be trained to 'become a creator of circumstance.' First, the public relations specialist must be a careful student of the media..."

"...Third -- confirming the adage that an acorn never falls too far from the tree -- Bernays contended that, above all, the public relations counsel must be a watchful student of the public psyche. 'If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind,' he asked rhetorically, 'is it not possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing it?'"
-S. Ewen (PR!, Page 167-169)

"Elsewhere, Bernay's approach to the public mind blended Freudianism with [Wilfred] Trotter's instinct theory. '[T]he individual and the group are swayed by only a very small number of fundamental desires and emotions and instincts,' he declared. 'Sex, gregariousness, the desire to lead, the maternal and paternal instincts, are all dominating desires of the group.' These desires, he offered, are 'sound mechanisms' upon which a public relations expert 'can base his 'selling arguments''"
-S. Ewen (PR!, Page 170)

"Within this elitist strategy -- which embellished on Lippmann's notion that it was imperative for leaders to anticipate and forestall the public's 'critical scrutiny' of issues -- a profound metamorphosis of the way that society defined information was being normalized. If, at the turn of the century 'news' had been understood as a faithful extension of an objective world, Bernays approached 'news' as an essentially subjective category, something that took place -- and could be generated -- in the pliant minds of the audience at whom a parcel of information was being directed. If news had once been understood as something out there, waiting to be covered, now it was seen as product ot be manufactured, something designed and transmitted to bring about a visceral public response."
-S. Ewen (PR!, Page 171)

"In the simultaneous unfolding of a national media system and of a modern machinery for measuring public opinion, a social infrastructure for this so-called two way exchange of interests being built. The mass media, dominated by commercial interests, would provide subservient channels thorugh which a broad public might be schooled to a corporate point of view. The polling system and a burgeoning market research establishment would provide the channels through which the public would be known and responded to. Pollsters would henceforth be the messengers through whom the public interest woudl ostensibly be articulated. Abstract, statistical renditions of democracy and of the public itself were appearing; ideals or memories of a participatory public were being annulled."
-S. Ewen (PR!, Page 186)

"Public opinion measurement, in its quest for useful demographic categoreis, also served to reproduce and fortify nondemocratic tendencies that persisted in the society at large. This contradiction is apparent in [Elmo] Roper's account of how population samples were routinely categorized for the Fortune magazine surveys. '[O]urs is a sliding scale.' The population was analyzed, he explained, according to 'economic status.' Roper went on to itemize the breakdown. 'At the top are the "A's" who might also be called the "prosperous."' Following these, he described the B's, the upper middle class; the C's, the lower middles, and the D's, 'or the poor.'

Revealingly, Roper reported that this scale was applied only to surveys of the white population. 'Depending upon the nature of the study being conducted,' he wrote, 'we sometimes have a fifth group, "N," composed of Negroes. In a society torn by institutional racism, in which many African Americans did not enjy the rights of citizenship, the classifications used in the Roper poll only fortified this tendency. Though differences among whites were distinguished by a hierarchy of economic status, African Americans were analyzed only in terms of race. In an eloquent instance of the ability of polling to validate injustice, and of its limited utility as a democratizing device, the American population was seen simply as A,B,C,D and N."
-S. Ewen (PR!, Page 187-188)

"Reading the pronouncements of persuasion professionals and surveying American material culture from World War I onward, one finds that the spin toward an eloquence of images is unambiguous. As historian Roland Marchand discussed, advertisers of the twenties and thirties embraced a belief that images were the most efficient tools for bypassing the critical thought processes of consumers. Motivational psychologists speculated that if words stimulated thought and provoked unwelcome 'conflict and competition,' pictures were capable of unleashing 'a ready-made and predictable response.'"
-S. Ewen (PR!, Page 210)

"When Roosevelt took office in March 1933, bad times had gotten worse. 'The interval between Roosevelt's election in November, 1932, and his inauguration in March, 1933,' noted historian William Leuchtenburg, 'proved the most harrowing four months of the depression. Three years of hard times had cut national income more than half; the crash of five thousand banks had wiped out nine million savings accounts.'

[Rexford G.] Tugwell, who had left his professorship at Columbia University to become a member of Roosevelt's inner circle of advisers -- his Brain Trust -- described the United States at the time of FDR's first inauguration, as a society nearing the brink of popular rebellion. 'I do not think it is too much to say,' he wrote in his journal, 'that on march 4 we were confronted with a choice between an orderly revolution -- a peaceful and rapid departure from the past concepts -- and a violent and disorderly overthrow of the whole capitalist structure.'"
-S. Ewen (PR!, Page 236-237)

"This widely publicized idea -- that in order for Americans' political rights to mean anything, Americans' economic well-being must be likewise guaranteed -- was the glue that brought a nation together at the height of the Great Depression. It was a promise that as America moved toward the future, the activites of private enterprise would be tolerated only insofar as they sustained the general welfare of all Americans. When they didn't, it would be the social enterprise of government to ensure that the precept of 'the greater good' would be enforced."
-S. Ewen (PR!, Page 262)

"For many in the upper echelons of corporations and for the political Right, the combined impact of New Deal publicity was alarming -- even more so than its precursor in the Progressive Era. During that earlier time, an anxious middle class served as a defensive buffer between corporate power and the wrath of the masses. This protection had solidified during the twenties, when growth of consumer industries and the spirit of boosterism tied middle class ideals to the hitching post of business. Now, it seemed, the fragile middle class and the 'Hoe Man' had become allies, joined by power and publicity of the federal government."
-S. Ewen (PR!, Page 287)

"Others were more apocalyptic in their descriptions of the crisis and in their call to arms. 'American Industry -- the whole capitalist system' -- wrote [Carl] Byoir in 1938, 'lives in the shadow of a volcano. The volcano is public opinion. It is in eruption. Within an incredibly short time it will destroy busines or it will save it.'"
-S. Ewen (PR!, Page 294-295)

"Symbolically, the World's Fair would be inclusive. All faces -- farmers, workers, consumers -- would be seen within its venues. Few from among these groups, however, would be heard from. Enveloping a corporately controlled apparatus, a lavish spectacle of democracy emerged as a stand-in for democratic participation.

In 1927, Lippmann had written that the key to leadership in the modern age would depend on the ability to manipulate 'symbols which assemble emotions after they ahve been detached from their ideas.' The public mind is mastered, he continued, through an 'intensification of of feeling and a degradtion of significance.' In a variety of ways, the New York World's Fair served as a laboratory in which these ideas were tested in a popularly accessible form. Symbols that had come to the fore in the thirties -- the people, the farmer, the worker, the consumer, the greater good, economic democracy -- were detached from the issues and ideas that had proelled them forward and became credentials for corporate institutions against which may of these issues and ideas had originally been aimed. In a vast and buoyant extravaganza, feelings were uplifted; meanings were overhtrown."
-S. Ewen (PR!, Page 335)

"In business circles there was a high-spiritedness that hadn't been seen since the late twenties. Addressing a National Association of Manufacturer's (NAM) Executives Conference in Philadelphia in 1943, J. Howard Pew, president of Sun Oil, observed that industry's contribution to the war effort was already laying 'the foundation for a better understanding of American business' among the public at large. 'Slandered and vilified as it was in the thrities, subjected to crushing regulations and restrictions,' he announced, corporate America was finally vindicating itself, serving 'the nation and the world so well in this hour of peril.'"

"W.J.Wier; of Chicago's Lord and Thomas advertising and public relations agency; offered a typical example of this hopeful way of thinking. 'Here we sit with the greatest force for moving mass psychology that the world has ever seen,' he proudly announced to his fellow publicists, picturing the vigor of America's war propaganda machine. 'Nothing that Goebbels has can hold a cndle to it.'"
-S. Ewen (PR!, Page 340-341)

"With the war now over, nervous recollections of a seething popular antipathy toward giant enterprises returned to haunt the reveries of business leaders. In the citadels of power, men who had -- not long before -- been vilified as 'economic royalists' were concerned that a restive populace might, once again, clamor at their gates. In ways hard to fathom from the vantage point of the market-governed world in which we live, the New Deal, its aggressive social Keynesianism and a decade of popular mobilization had considerably intimidated corporate America."
-S. Ewen (PR!, Page 347)

"A grass roots pro-business movement, however, would not gain converts by speaking in the name of stockholders, bondholders, and coupon clippers. It needed to formulate a commercial vernacular that spoke to everyone. This would be a formidable chore, observed [Henry C.] Link of the Psychological Corporation. The prevailing drift of civic instruction, he reported, had thrown the merits of free enterprise into question. 'In recent decades,' Link contended, 'our schools and publications have done a better job in promoting socialism than in promoting the American system of private capitalism...a system that combines freedom with plenty.' To regain its legitimacy, Link advised, business must do more than simply trumpet its marvelous new products. It must also 'promote the principles, the ideas, the freedoms which make plenty possible.'

To do so, Link noted, there needed to be a shift from a public relations policy that had routinely emphasized the importance of corporate rights to one that spoke in terms of the rights of all people. It was necessary for 'a transfer in emphasis from free enterprise to the freedom of all individuals under free enterprise; from capitalism to the much broader concept: Americanism.'"
-S. Ewen (PR!, Page 360)

"Just as James Madison's Federalist Paper No. 10 provides an incisive glimpse into the thinking that propelled the Founding Fathers to draft a new Constitution for the United States in 1789, Bernay's 'Engineering of Consent' offers a revelaing look at the ideas that have come to inform the exercise of political and economic power in our own time. The essay remains one of the clearest statements of the assumptions and strategies that have guided public relations practices in the United States since the war's end."

"Preempting the ambivalence of incorruptiibility that surrounds the Constitution, Bernays opened his essay invoking the Bill of Rights. In his reading of these basic constitutional protections, however, he made one curious addition. Conveniently evading the issue of who controls or has access to the modern instruments of communications, Bernays declared that 'Freedom of speech and its democratic corollary, a free press, have tacitly expanded our Bill of Rights to include he right of persuasion.'"
-S. Ewen (PR!, Page 375)

"Bernays willingly conceded the 'possible evil' inherent in the use of such techniques, the ways they might be employed to serve 'anti-democratic purposes.' To Bernays, however; this caveat in no way invalidated the vital point of his argument. Given the scale of modern democratic society, he believed, the need to 'engineer consent' had become a necessary precondition for the exercise of power."
-S. Ewen (PR!, Page 376-377)

"Sticking to his guns and apparently unfazed by the Great Depression, Bernays painted a portrait of a governable public that was decidedly neo-Le Bonian in its outlook. His public was essentially visceral. It was not a subject, but an object, a thing that could be known and, once known, managed. The capacity to think was not a quality of those who were situated on the receiving end of Bernay's engineered public communications. Thought would only be a hindrance."

"This understanding of leadership and of the public underscored the importance of stagecraft. The ability to generate easily digested mental environments would determine what passed for truth. If Jefferson had once maintained that the 'diffusion of information' was essential to the livelihood of an informed democratic citizenry, Bernays' essay registered the moment in time when the 'diffusion of information' would increasingly serve as a gambit for the manufacture of instrumental truths."
-S. Ewen (PR!, Page 379)

"As the engineering of consent gained legitimacy -- and as the demographic study of public attitudes and the packaging of reality grew in sophistication -- the long and complicated relationship between publicity and democracy reached a critical juncture."

"Democracy and its antithesis -- the domination of the public sphere by moneyed elites -- were reconciled as one. In 1962, reflecting on his world and questioning the profession he had helped establish over the preceding twenty-five years, [Howard] Chase characterized this calamitous unity of opposites both succinctly and eloquently. 'The "engineering of consent,"' he wrote, 'implies the use of all the mechanics of persuasion and communication to bend others, either with their will or against their will, so some prearranged conclusion, whether or not their reaching that conclusion is in the public interest.' In the years since Chase drafted these words, the predicament for democracy that he so forthrightly described has only deepened."
-S. Ewen (PR!, Page 397-398)

"Looking at the historical development of public relations as a force in American society, one sees that a consequential change has taken place, one that throws simplistic pendulum theories into question. Coinciding with recurrent swings between public relations as a response to democratic mobilization and as an attempt to colonize the horizons of public expression, there has been a parallel development. Over the course of this century, while arenas of public interaction and expression have become scarce, the apparatus for molding the public mind and for appealing to the public eye has become increasingly pervasive, more and more sophisticated in its technology and expertise. Economic mergers in the media and information industries, in particular, are only reminders that though many are touched by the messages of these industries, fewer and fewer hands control the pipelines of persuasion."

These are big questions. Their answers, if they are to come, lie beyond the scope of any book. For those who continue to cherish democratic ideals, however, these questions point to an agenda for the future."
-S. Ewen (PR!, Page 409-410)

A telegraph exchange just before the Spanish-American war:

"There is no war. Request to be recalled."
-Frederic Remington, photographer

"Please remain. You furnish the pictures. I'll furnish the war."
-William Randolph Hearst

(The Sorrows of Empire, Page 40)

"This is not a peace treaty, it's a twenty year armistice."
-Marshall Ferdinand Foch, remarking on the Treaty of Versailles
(The Sorrows of Empire, Page 51)

"Missile defense isn't really meant to protect America. It's a tool for global dominance."
-Lawrence F. Kaplan
(The Sorrows of Empire, Page 85)

"Israel has provided the U.S. with sites in the Negev [desert] for military bases, now under construction, which will be far less vulnerable to Muslim fundamentalists than those in Saudi Arabia."
-Charles Glass
(The Sorrows of Empire, Page x)

"The modern American empire can only be perceived, and understood, by a close look at our basing policies, the specific way we garrison the earth. To trace the historical patterns of base acquisition is to reveal the sinews of what has until very recently, for most Americans, been a largely hidden empire."
-Chalmers Johnson
(The Sorrows of Empire, Page 188)

"...our nation is filled with military installations -- there are 969 seperate bases in the fifty states..."
-Chalmers Johnson
(The Sorrows of Empire, Page 188)

"According to the Pentagon's September 2001 Base Status Report, the United States has seventy-three bases in Japan. (A careful and well documented analysis by Japanese antibase activists gives the number as ninety-one.)
[...]
The Japanese government pays us $4 billion per annum to help defray the costs of these services, making Japan perhaps the only country that pays another country to carry out espionage against itself."
-Chalmers Johnson
(The Sorrows of Empire, Page 202)

"Numerous bases are 'secret' or else disguised in ways designed to keep them off the official books, but wek know with certainty that they exist, where many of them are, and more or less what they do. They are either DoD-operated listening posts of the National Security Agency [NSA] and the National Reconnaissance Office [NRO], both among the most secretive of our intelligience organizations, or covert outposts of the military-petroleum complex. Officials never discuss either of these subjects with any degree of candor, but that does not alter the point that spying and oil are obsessive interests of theirs."
-Chalmers Johnson
(The Sorrows of Empire, Page 155)

"Fuck your parliament and your constitution. We pay a lot of good American dollars to the Greeks. If your prime minister gives me talk about democracy, parliament and constitutions, he, his parliament, and his constitution may not last very long."
-Lyndon B. Johnson, to the Greek ambassador regarding Cyprus
(The Sorrows of Empire, Page 205)

"The central political idea of imperialism [is] expansion as a permanent and supreme aim of politics."
-Hannah Arendt
(The Sorrows of Empire, Page 257)

"Perhaps the most deceptive aspect of globalizaton was its claim to embody fundamental and enevitable technological developments rather than the conscious policies of Anglo-American political elites trying to advance the interests of their own countries at the expense of others."
-Chalmers Johnson
(The Sorrows of Empire, Page 260)

"The fact that the 'white man's burden' is either hypocrisy or racism has not prevented a few of the best Englishmen from shouldering the burden in earnest and making themselves the tragic and quixotic fools of imperialism."
-Hannah Arendt
(The Sorrows of Empire, Page 261)

"It is critically important to understand that the doctrine of globalism is a kind of intellectual sedative that lulls and distracts its Third World victims while rich countries cripple them, ensuring that they will never be able to challenge the imperial powers. It is also designed to persuade the new imperialists that 'underdeveloped' countries bring poverty on themselves thanks to 'crony capitalism', corruption and a failure to take advantage of the splendid opportunities being offered. The claim that free markets leads to propsperity for anyone other than the transnational corporations that lobbied for them and have the clout and resources to manipulate them is simply not borne out by the historical record."
-Chalmers Johnson
(The Sorrows of Empire, Page 262)

"There is no known case in which globalization has led to prosperity in any Third World country, and none of the world's twenty-four reasonably developed capitalist nations, regardless of their ideological explanations, got where they are by following any of the prescriptions contained in the globalization doctrine."
-Chalmers Johnson
(The Sorrows of Empire, Page 262)

"What has to be understood is that both the [International Monetary] fund and the bank are actually surrogates for the U.S. Treasury. They are both located at 19th and H Streets, Northwest, In Washington, DC, and their voting rules ensure that they can do nothing without the approval of the secretary of the Treasury."
-Chalmers Johnson
(The Sorrows of Empire, Page 264)

"Overseas bases, of which the Defense Department acknowledges some 725, come within the scope of the peacetime standing army and constitute a permanent claim on the nation's resources while being almost invariably inadequate for actually fighting a war. The great enclaves of Okinawa or Germany, have not been involved in combat since World War II and are not really intended to contribute to war-fighting capabilities. They are the headquarters for our proconsuls, visible manifestations of our imperial reach."
-Chalmers Johnson
(The Sorrows of Empire, Page 24)

"I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage countries is impeccable and we should face up to that."
-Lawrence Summers, chief economist of the World bank, 1991-1993
(The Sorrows of Empire, Page 268)

"In all the WTO system that came into being in 1995 is a deceptive but extremely effective tool of economic imperialism wielded by the rich nations against the poor ones. Within a few years after it was launched, however, the system started to fall apart. Post-September 11, the overemphasis on militarism and unilateralism in the United States has radically weakened the effectiveness of international law, eroding the facade of legality that supports the WTO rules. At the same time, the interests of American militarists and economic globalists have begun to clash, particularly over the rise of an obvious future superpower -- China. The economic globalists have invested more heavily in manufacturing in China than in any other place outside the Anglo-American world. The militarists, on the other hand, are already plotting to contain China, militarily if necessary, to decide future global supremacy."
-Chalmers Johnson
(The Sorrows of Empire, Page 272)

"If present trends continue, four sorrows, it seems to me, are certain to be visited on the United States. Their cumulative impact guarantees that the United States will cease to bear any resemblance to the country once outlined in our Constitution. First, there will be a state of perpetual war, leading to more terrorism against American wherever they may be and a growing reliance on weapons of mass destruction among smaller nations as they try to ward off the imperial juggernaut. Second, there will be a loss of democracy and constitutional rights as the presidency fully eclipses Congress and is itself transformed from an 'executive branch' of government into something more like a Pentagonized presidency. Third, an already well-shredded principle of truthfulness will increasingly be replaced by a system of propaganda, disinformation, and glorification of war, power, and the military legions. Lastly, there will be bankruptcy, as we pour our economic resources into ever more grandiose military projects and shortchange the education, health, and safety of our fellow citizens. All these trends can be resisted and other -- better -- futures can certainly be imagined. But it is important to be clear-eyed as possible about the present choices and the present path of our imperial leaders portend."
-Chalmers Johnson
(The Sorrows of Empire, Page 285)

"If allies don't like the new paradigm of space dominance, they'll just have to learn to accept it."
-Air Force Secretary, James Roche, April 2003
(The Sorrows of Empire, Page 311)

"The status of nobility derived from birth and ancestry, but had to be confirmed by 'living nobly' -- that is, by the sword. A person was noble if born of noble parents and grandparents and so on back to the first armed horseman. In practice the rule was porous and the status fluid and inexact. The one certain criterion was function -- namely the practice of arms."
-Barbara W. Tuchman
A Distant Mirror, Page 14

Merchants regularly paid fines for breaking every law that concerned their business and went on as before. The wealth of Venice and Genoa was made in trade with infidels in Syria and Egypt despite papal prohibition. Prior to the 14th century, it has been said, men 'could hardly imaginbe the merchant's strongbox without picturing the devil squatting on the lid.' Whether the merchant too saw the devil as he counted coins, whether lived with a sense of guilt, is hard to assess. Francisco Datini, the merchant of Prato, judging by his letters, was a deeply troubled man, but his agonies were caused more by fear of loss than by fear of God. He was evidently able to reconcile Christianity and business, for the motto on his ledger was 'In the name of God and profit.'"
-Barbara W. Tuchman
A Distant Mirror, Page 37-38

"Although the free consent of marriage partners was theoretically required by the Church, and the 'I will' considered the doctrinal essence of the marriage contract made before a priest, practical politics overlooked this requirement, sometimes with unhappy results. Emperor Ludwig in betrothing his daughter before she has learned to talk, offered to speak for her and was later considered to have earned the judgement of God when she remained dumb all her life."
-Barbara W. Tuchman
A Distant Mirror, Page 47

"If tournaments were an acting out of chivalry, courtly love was its dreamland. Courtly love was understood by its contemporaries to be love for its own sake, romantic love, true love, physical love, unassociated with property or family, and consequently focused on another man's wife, since only such an illicit liaison could have no other aim but love alone. (Love of a maiden was virtually ruled out since this would have raised dangerous problems, and besides, maidens of noble estate usually jumped from childhood to marriage with hardly an interval for romance.) The fact that courtly love idealized guilty love added one more complication to the maze through which medieval people threaded their lives. As formulated by chivalry. romance was pictured as extra-marital because love was considered irrelevant to marriage, was indeed discouraged in order not to get in the way of dynastic arrangements."
-Barbara W. Tuchman
A Distant Mirror, Page 66

"Tactics on the continent were simply the cavalry charge of knights followed by hand-to-hand fighting on foot, sometimes preceded or supplemented by archers and infantry, bioth of which the knights despised. In the Scottish wars, however, the English had found that foot soldiers equipped with the longbow and trained to keep a disciplined line could, by aiming at the horses, throw back a charge of mounted knights. A really useful discovery of this kind will take precedence over class disdain. Given the contant intercourse between France and England, the French must have seen the longbow in use, evidently without giving thought to its implications for themselves. French chivalry refused to concede a serious role in war to the non-noble, even though the Normans had once captured England by virue of of the archer who shot Harold through his eye."
-Barbara W. Tuchman
A Distant Mirror, Page 85

"This is the End of the World": The Black Death

"When death slowed production, goods became scarce and prices soared. In France the price of wheat increased fourfold by 1350. At the same time the shortage of labor brought the plague's greatest social disruption -- a concerted demand for higher wages. Peasants as well as artisans, craftsmen, clerks and priests discovered the lever of their own scarcity. Within a year after the plague had passed through northern France, the textile workers of St. Omer near Amiens had gained three successive wage increases. In an age where social conditions were regarded as fixed, such action was revolutionary.

"The response of the rulers was instant repression. In the effort to hold wages at the pre-plague levels, the English issued an ordnance in 1349 requiring everyone to work for the same pay as in 1347. Penalties were established for refusal to work, for leaving a place of employment to seek higher pay, and for the offer of higher pay by employers. Proclaimed when Parliament was not sitting, the ordinance was reissued in 1351 as the Statute of Laborers. It denounced not only laborers who demanded higher wages but particularly those who chose 'rather to beg in idleness than to earn their bread in labor.' Idleness of the worker was a crime against society, for the medieval system rested on his obligation to work. The Statute of Laborers was not simply a reactionary dream but an effort to maintain the system. It provided that every able-bodied person under sixty with no means of subsistence must work for whoever required him, that no alms could be given to able-bodied beggars, that a vagrant serf could be forced to work for anyone who claimed him. Down to the the 20th century this statute was to serve as the basis for 'conspiracy' laws against labor in the long struggle to prevent unionization."
-Barbara W. Tuchman
A Distant Mirror, Page 120

"Survivors of the plague, finding themselves neither destroyed nor improved, could discover no Divine purpose in the pain they had suffered. God's purposes were usually mysterious, but this scourge had been too terrible to be accepted without questioning. If a disaster of such magnitude, the most lethal ever known, was a mere wanton act of God or perhaps not God's work at all, then the absolutes of a fixed order were loosed from their moorings. Minds that opened to admit these questions could never again be shut. Once people envisioned the possibility of change in a fixed order, the end of an age of submission cam in sight; the turn to individual conscience lay ahead. To that extent the Black Death may have been the unrecognized beginning of modern man."
-Barbara W. Tuchman
A Distant Mirror, Page 123

"Indoors the noble residences were decorated with murals and tapestries, but furniture was meager. Beds, which served for sitting as well as sleeping, were the most important item. Charis were few; even kings and popes received ambassadors sitting on beds furnished with elaborate curtains and spreads; otherwise, people sat on benches. Torches in wall sconces lit the rooms and massive fireplaces were built into the walls. These wall chimneys 'in the French fashion,' as they were called in Italy, were the greatest luxury of middle-class homes. The only other warmth came from the oven and cooking fire and warming pans in bed at night. Like sanitation, heating was an arrangement that the age seems technologically equipped to have handled better than it did, were it not that man is as irrational about his comfort as about other activities."
-Barbara W. Tuchman
A Distant Mirror, Page 161

"Avoidance of pitched battle -- the strategy that was to save France -- evolved, like most military innovations, from defeat, ignominy and paucity of means. The person who perceived what the situation demanded was the Regent, a ruler who harkened to necessit, not glory."
-Barbara W. Tuchman
A Distant Mirror, Page 186-187

"In 1357, eight years after the first plague, London was reported still one-third empty, but, though uncrowded, its sanitation was still careless enough to elicit repeated ordinances requiring citizens to clean their premises. Though it was against the law to empty chamber pots into the streets, their contents and kitchen garbage were often flung out of windows, more or less aimed at the gutters which carried a steady stream of water. Barns for keeping horses, cattle, pigs, and chickens were located inside the walls as well as outside, causing complaints about accumulating piles of manure. At about this time London's aldermen organized a system of hired 'rakers' to carry the piles away in dump carts or in dung boats on the Thames."
-Barbara W. Tuchman
A Distant Mirror, Page 197

"Like Pope Boniface's claim to total papal supremacy, the terms of [the treaty of] Bretigny were obsolete. It was too late to transfer provinces of France like simple fiefs; unnoticed, the inhabitants had come to feel themselves French. Between the happening of a historical process and its recognition by rulers, a lag stretches, full of pitfalls."
-Barbara W. Tuchman
A Distant Mirror, Page 199-200

"Of all mankind's ideas, the equating of sex with sin has left the greatest train of trouble."
-Barbara W. Tuchman
A Distant Mirror, Page 211

"Of all the 'strange evils and adversities' predicted for the century, the effect of the schism on the public mind was among the most damaging. When each Pope excommunicated the followers of the other, who could be sure of salvation? Every Christian found himself under penalty of damnation by one or the other Pope, with no way of being sure that the one he obeyed was the genuine one. People might be told that the sacraments of their priest were not valid because he had been ordained by the 'other Pope,' or that the holy oil for baptism was not sanctified because it had been blessed by a 'schismatic' bishop. In disputed regions, double bishops might be appointed, each holding mass and proclaiming the ritual of the other a sacrilege. The same religious order in different countries mught have divided allegiance, with its monasteries under two competing priors and its abbeys torn by strife."
-Barbara W. Tuchman
A Distant Mirror, Page 335

"Charles V was not to be swerved from his philosophy of war. Not being a fighter himself, he was not prevented by personal pride from employing the lessons of experience, not did he hesitate to hurt the pride of chivalry by reminders of past defeats. His own initiation into war on the awful day at Poitiers had left a permanent mark. If a mystique of success enveloped the English in the conviction that 'they could not lose,' Charles suffered from the opposite psychology. From the major clashes of the early part of the war, he had concluded that the delivery of armed force could not be reliably directed and that war was too important to be left ot the chances of battle."
-Barbara W. Tuchman
A Distant Mirror, Page 361

"For the cobbler and his 300 companions, that day was at hand. Screaming and brandishing knives, they forced the Provost of Merchants to carry their demand for tax abolition to Anjou and the Chancellor. At the Marble Table in the palace courtyard, the Provost pleaded for a lifting of the 'intolerable burden.' With 'terrible shouts' the crowd confirmed his words, swearing they would pay no more but die a thousand times rather than suffer 'such dishonour and shame.' These unexpected words appear frequently in the protests, as if to add the dignity of knightly formula. The poor no less than the great needed to feel themselves acting nobly."
-Barbara W. Tuchman
A Distant Mirror, Page 368-369

"What had happened in the last thirty years, as a result of plague, war, oppression and incompetence, was a weakened acceptance of the system, a mistrust of government and governors, lay and ecclesiastical, an awakening sense that authority could be challenged -- that change was in fact possible. Moral authority can be no stronger that its acknowledgement. When officials were venal -- as even the poor could see they were in the bribing of tax commissioners -- and warriors a curse and the Church oppressive, the push for change gained strength."
-Barbara W. Tuchman
A Distant Mirror, Page 374

"The assumptions of autocrats are often behind the times. Economic forces were already propelling the decline of villeinage, and commutation continued, despite the crushing of the revolt, until the unfree peasant gradually disappeared." "
-Barbara W. Tuchman
A Distant Mirror, Page 377

"In France's misfortunes a young man of twenty, Charles, King of Navarre, grandson of Louis X, saw his opportunity. Whether he really aimed at the French crown, or at revenge for wrongs done him, or at stirring trouble for its own sake like Iago, is a riddle concealed in one of the most complex characters of the 14th century. A small slight youth with glistening eyes and a voluble flow of words, he was volatile, intelligent, charming, violent, cunning as a fox, ambitious as Lucifer and more truly than Byron 'mad bad and dangerous to know.' Seductive and eloquent, he could persuade his peers or sway a mob. He allowed himself the same unbridled acts of passion as Jean [II, King of France] and other rulers, but, unlike Jean, he was a plotter, subtle, bold absolutely without scruple, but so swerving and unfixed of purpose as to undo his own plots. His only constancy was hate. He is known to history as Charles the Bad."
-Barbara W. Tuchman
A Distant Mirror, Page 132

"After a last attempted poisoning -- this time of Burgundy and Berry -- Navarre died in horrid circumstances. Sick and prematurely old at 56, he was tormented by chills and shivering and at a doctor's orders was wrapped at night in cloths soaked in brandy to warm his body and cause sweat. To keep them in place the wrappings were sewn on each time, like a shroud, and caught fire one night from the valet's candle as he leaned over to cut a thread. To the King's shrieks of pain, the brandy-soaked cloth flamed around his body; he lived for two weeks with doctors unable to relieve his agony before he expired."
-Barbara W. Tuchman
A Distant Mirror, Page 436

"What is government but an arrangement by which the many accept the authority of the few? Circuses and ceremonies are meant to encourage the acceptance; they either succeed or, by costing too much, accomplish the opposite."
-Barbara W. Tuchman
A Distant Mirror, Page 455

"With no footing except French support, Clement's papacy would have vanished like smoke, and the ruinous schism brought to an end, if the French had made that their object. But they did not. To admit error and cut losses is rare among individuals, unknown among states. States function only in terms of what those in control perceive as power or personal ambition, and both of these wear blinkers. To impose Clement on Italy by power politics or force of arms had never been feasible."
-Barbara W. Tuchman
A Distant Mirror, Page 459

"Luxury and immorality, pride and dissension, superior Turkish training, discipline, and tactics all contributed to the fatal outcome. Nevertheless, what basically defeated the crusaders was the chivalric insistence on personal prowess -- which raises the question: Why do men fight? Wars may be fought for the glorification of man's feelings about himself, or for a specific goal in power, territiory, or political balance. Medieval war was not always impractical. Charles V cared nothing fro glorification if only he could het the English out of France."
-Barbara W. Tuchman
A Distant Mirror, Page 563

• Paragraphs Index
• Paragraphs (Part 1)
• Paragraphs (Part 3)
• ---
• Back to Index

Last modified July 15, 2005