Good Talk

“In truth there is no dividing line between cruel leaders and oppressed citizens. The Kims rule by making everyone complicit in a brutal system, implicating all, from the highest to the lowest, blurring morals so that no one is blameless.”
― Hyeonseo Lee, The Girl with Seven Names: Escape from North Korea

“To make the country ours, before and after the American Revolution, we had to displace or annihilate the indigenous people who had lived here for thousands of years. We had expanded by using deception and force, by military forays into Florida to persuade Spain to “sell” that to us (no money changed hands), by invading Mexico and taking almost half its land.”
― Howard Zinn, You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times

“Crimes against humanity remain considerably harder to prosecute than war crimes, narrowly defined, in part because criminal nation-states are unlikely to prosecute themselves, and because international diplomatic practice—particularly by the United States—has blocked the creation of an international criminal court that would have jurisdiction to try perpetrators of these atrocities.”
― Christopher Simpson, The Splendid Blond Beast: Money, Law, and Genocide in the Twentieth Century

“Wilson preferred to sidestep the issue of war crimes altogether and leave it unresolved in any treaty ending the war.”
― Christopher Simpson, The Splendid Blond Beast: Money, Law, and Genocide in the Twentieth Century