"The past is not over; it's undergoing a remix."
This quote suggests that historical events, though they may have occurred in the past, continue to influence and shape our present and future in unpredictable ways. Just as a song's melody and lyrics can be rearranged and modernized (remixed), history is not static but subject to ongoing interpretation, reinterpretation, and application in contemporary contexts. Essentially, Grandin implies that understanding the past and its impact on our present is essential for shaping a more informed and equitable future.
"Empires have always been about control: control of land, resources, and people."
This quote underscores that empires are fundamentally about dominance and control. They aim to assert power over territories, resources, and populations. This control can be economic (resources), political (land and governance), and social (people). By exerting such control, empires seek to expand their influence, increase their wealth, and maintain their position of power in the global sphere.
"Capitalism isn't just an economic system—it's also a moral universe."
This quote by Greg Grandin suggests that capitalism transcends its traditional definition as an economic system, extending into the realm of ethics or morality. In essence, he argues that capitalism shapes our values and behaviors beyond mere financial transactions. The 'moral universe' refers to the ethical norms, principles, and beliefs that guide capitalistic societies, often centered around self-interest, growth, and competition. Understanding this perspective can help us examine how these moral foundations may impact social structures, cultural narratives, and even global dynamics.
"The history of the world is not one long tale of progress; it's a succession of amnesiacs struggling to remember the past."
This quote by Greg Grandin underscores the human tendency to forget historical lessons, leading to repetition of mistakes across societies and eras. It suggests that, instead of viewing history as a linear progression towards some ultimate goal or ideal, we should understand it as a series of experiences from which we must learn continually. By forgetting our past, we are doomed to relive it, making the same errors and facing similar challenges over and over again. Recognizing this cycle is essential for fostering meaningful change, growth, and progress in the world.
"To understand modern America, you have to understand the wars that were fought on its shores and the genocides committed in its name."
This quote by Greg Grandin suggests that the history of modern America can't be fully grasped without understanding the conflicts and acts of violence—including wars and genocides—that have occurred within its borders or been perpetrated under its auspices. These events, he implies, have shaped American identity, values, and foreign policy, and they continue to reverberate in contemporary societal dynamics. The quote encourages us to examine the impact of these historical actions on America's development and the lessons they hold for the nation today.
Most critical histories of U.S. involvement in Iran rightly began with the joint British-U.S. coup against democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953, which installed Pahlavi on the Peacock Throne. But it was Kissinger who, in 1972, greatly deepened the relationship between Washington and Tehran.
- Greg Grandin
Within days of Richard Nixon's inauguration in January 1969, national-security adviser Kissinger asked the Pentagon to lay out his bombing options in Indochina. The previous president, Lyndon Baines Johnson, had suspended his own bombing campaign against North Vietnam in hopes of negotiating a broader cease-fire.
- Greg Grandin
On April 14, 1986, when the Reagan administration launched an airstrike on Libya in clear violation of international law, Kissinger did the rounds on news shows to justify the bombing. The day after the bombing, Kissinger appeared on ABC's 'Good Morning America' to voice his 'total support.' Attacking Libya, he said, was 'correct' and 'necessary.'
- Greg Grandin
In the 1960s, as a rising defense intellectual, Kissinger was a Nelson Rockefeller man, firmly entrenched in the center-right establishment. When he attended the infamous 1964 Republican convention in San Francisco, he was horrified by Goldwater supporters, whom he likened to fascists.
- Greg Grandin
Kissinger's unusually high body count and singular moral imperiousness has the effect, among his critics, of obscuring his didactic utility. An outsized personality who has committed outsized mayhem, Kissinger eclipses his own context. Yet, as animals were to the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, Kissinger is good to think with.
- Greg Grandin
Is Donald Trump a fascist? It's an interesting question that has generated insightful commentary over the past few months, with the best answers situating Trumpian illiberalism within America's long history of racial oppression, slavery, Jim Crow apartheid, and the ongoing backlash to the loss of white privilege.
- Greg Grandin
Starting in the early 1800s, Southerners in the United States began to defend slavery as their 'peculiar institution,' and northerners didn't mind, since the phrase suggested that chattel bondage was quarantined from the rest of the nation: that it was, or soon would be, a relic of its past and would not define its future.
- Greg Grandin
Harriet Washington, in 'Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present,' documents the smallpox experiments Thomas Jefferson performed on his Monticello slaves. In fact, much of what we now think of as public health emerged from the slave system.
- Greg Grandin
In the early 1800s, both Spain and Portugal disseminated the smallpox vaccine throughout the Americas via the 'arm to arm of the blacks,' that is, enslaved Africans and African-Americans, often children, who were being moved along slave routes as cargo from one city to another to be sold.
- Greg Grandin
The CIA's always-useful World Fact book says that a staggering 6.3 million Colombians have been internally displaced (IDP) since 1985, with 'about 300,000 new IDPs each year since 2000,' the year Bill Clinton enacted Plan Colombia. Added up, that's 2.4 million people during Clinton's eight-year presidency.
- Greg Grandin
It is a job requirement of U.S. envoys to El Salvador to be skilled in the art of the threat. And Aponte, named ambassador in 2010, is a pro. In particular, she's been tasked with making sure the former insurgent FMLN, which first won the presidency in 2009 and was reelected in 2014, reconciles itself to neoliberal reality.
- Greg Grandin
In particular, Kissinger was a key player during a transformative period of the imperial presidency, in the 1960s and '70s, when the Vietnam War undermined the traditional foundations on which it had stood since the early years of the Cold War: elite planning, bipartisan consensus, and public support.
- Greg Grandin
Haiti and the Dominican Republic don't just share an island, Hispaniola, but a history, one that includes all the signal events that went into creating the modern world: Columbus, conquest, genocide, slavery, imperial war, revolution, and U.S. counterinsurgencies and military occupations.
- Greg Grandin
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