{"quotes":[{"text":"That war [Bosnian war] in the early 1990s changed a lot for me. I never thought I would see, in Europe, a full-dress reprise of internment camps, the mass murder of civilians, the reinstiutution of torture and rape as acts of policy. And I didn't expect so many of my comrades to be indifferent - or even take the side of the fascists. It was a time when many people on the left were saying 'Don't intervene, we'll only make things worse' or, 'Don't intervene, it might destabilise the region. And I thought - destabilisation of fascist regimes is a good thing. Why should the left care about the stability of undemocratic regimes? Wasn't it a good thing to destabilise the regime of General Franco? It was a time when the left was mostly taking the conservative, status quo position - leave the Balkans alone, leave Milosevic alone, do nothing. And that kind of conservatism can easily mutate into actual support for the aggressors. Weimar-style conservatism can easily mutate into National Socialism. So you had people like Noam Chomsky's co-author Ed Herman go from saying 'Do nothing in the Balkans', to actually supporting Milosevic, the most reactionary force in the region. That's when I began to first find myself on the same side as the neocons. I was signing petitions in favour of action in Bosnia, and I would look down the list of names and I kept finding, there's Richard Perle. There's Paul Wolfowitz. That seemed interesting to me. These people were saying that we had to act. Before, I had avoided them like the plague, especially because of what they said about General Sharon and about Nicaragua. But nobody could say they were interested in oil in the Balkans, or in strategic needs, and the people who tried to say that - like Chomsky - looked ridiculous. So now I was interested.","author":"Christopher Hitchens","tags":["anti-war","bosnia-and-herzegovina","bosnian-war","ethnic-cleansing","genocide","humanitarian-intervention","interventionism","isolationism","leftism","neocons","neoconservatism","noninterventionism","pacifism","war"],"id":1585,"author_id":"Christopher+Hitchens"},{"text":"Pacifism is objectively pro-fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side, you automatically help out that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one. In practice, 'he that is not with me is against me'.","author":"George Orwell","tags":["anti-war","pacifism","war"],"id":2080,"author_id":"George+Orwell"},{"text":"We'll fight back, we'll fight back, we'll fight back,' a man near Doctor Stockstill was chanting. Stockstill looked at him in astonishment, wondering who he would fight back against. Things were falling on them; did the man intend to fall back upward into the sky in some sort of revenge?","author":"Philip K. Dick","tags":["1960s","anti-war","atom-bomb","sci-fi"],"id":12934,"author_id":"Philip+K.+Dick"},{"text":"For real men serve their country with random acts of kindness, not vicious acts of violence. And real soldiers have one duty, and one duty only; they have a duty to mutiny!","author":"Joss Sheldon","tags":["anti-war","jesus","mutiny","soldiers","war"],"id":16696,"author_id":"Joss+Sheldon"},{"text":"It is in unity that we find strength, in unity we find hope, and in unity we can stand firm as the darkness approaches. Let us stand together – and stand firm – against the many faces of hate.","author":"Nick Lowles","tags":["anti-extremism","anti-war","antifacism","peace","resistance","unity","unity-of-all-people"],"id":20336,"author_id":"Nick+Lowles"},{"text":"The more money you spend on guns, the less money you spend on people! More weapons, less happiness; more guns, more misery!","author":"Mehmet Murat ildan","tags":["anti gun","anti war","gun","gun control","guns","ildan-wisdom","ildan-wise-sayings","ildan-words","mehmet-murat-ildan","mehmet-murat-ildan","misery","money","spend-money","spend-money-well","spend-money-wisely","turkish-","turkish-literature","turkish-playwrights","turkish","turkish","turkish-wisdom-words","turkish-writers","unhappiness","unhappy","unhappy-society","weapons"],"id":86320,"author_id":"Mehmet+Murat+ildan"},{"text":"The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.","author":"Carl Sagan","tags":["anti-capitalism","anti-war","astronomy","earth","perspective"],"id":102553,"author_id":"Carl+Sagan"},{"text":"She wanted to tell him so much, on the tarmac, the day he left. The world is run by brutal men and the surest proof is their armies. If they ask you to stand still, you should dance. If they ask you to burn the flag, wave it. If they ask you to murder, re-create. Theorem, anti-theorem, corollary, anti-corollary. Underline it twice. It’s all there in the numbers. Listen to your mother. Listen to me, Joshua. Look me in the eyes. I have something to tell you.","author":"Colum McCann","tags":["anti-war","armies","children","lessons","let-the-great-world-spin","loss","mother","murder","pacifism","patriotism","politics","war"],"id":105967,"author_id":"Colum+McCann"},{"text":"You can walk around this culture now, as a proud supporter of the so called anti-war movement and it's made up of a lot of people I used to know … I'd like for them to be asked more often than they are, if your advice had been taken over the last 15 or so years; Slobodan Milosevic would still be the dictator of not just Serbia but also of a cleansed and ruined Bosnia and Kosovo. Saddam Hussein would still be the owner of Kuwait as well as Iraq, he would of nearly have doubled his holding of the worlds oil. The Taliban would still be in charge of Afghanistan. Don't you feel a little reproach to your so called high principle anti-war policy? Would that really have led to less violence, less cruelty?","author":"Christopher Hitchens","tags":["anti-war","anti-war-movement","war"],"id":107283,"author_id":"Christopher+Hitchens"},{"text":"You might think that the Left could have a regime-change perspective of its own, based on solidarity with its comrades abroad. After all, Saddam's ruling Ba'ath Party consolidated its power by first destroying the Iraqi communist and labor movements, and then turning on the Kurds (whose cause, historically, has been one of the main priorities of the Left in the Middle East). When I first became a socialist, the imperative of international solidarity was the essential if not the defining thing, whether the cause was popular or risky or not. I haven't seen an anti-war meeting all this year at which you could even guess at the existence of the Iraqi and Kurdish opposition to Saddam, an opposition that was fighting for 'regime change' when both Republicans and Democrats were fawning over Baghdad as a profitable client and geopolitical ally. Not only does the 'peace' movement ignore the anti-Saddam civilian opposition, it sends missions to console the Ba'athists in their isolation, and speaks of the invader of Kuwait and Iran and the butcher of Kurdistan as if he were the victim and George W. Bush the aggressor.","author":"Christopher Hitchens","tags":["al-anfal-campaign","anti-war","ba-ath-party","baghdad","communism","democratic-party-united-states","george-w-bush","invasion-of-kuwait","iran-iraq-war","iraq","iraq-war","iraqi-communist-party","iraqi-kurdistan","kurdish-people","kuwait","labour-movement","leftism","middle-east","opposition-to-the-iraq-war","peace-movement","republican-party-united-states","saddam-hussein","socialism"],"id":111392,"author_id":"Christopher+Hitchens"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":39,"pages":4,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}