Hegemony Quotes - page 3
The Greek city-states politicised citizen and subject, creating institutions that were way ahead of anything in China or India. The politicians of antiquity exercised a political and military, if not economic, hegemony on the culture as a whole. The idea of democracy was first born and practised here.
Tariq Ali
Either we must make up our minds that we will not take part in a European war under any circumstances, or we must have national service; but we cannot make up our minds on the first of these points unless we are prepared to do what our ancestors to their eternal glory refused to do in the days of Napoleon, acquiesce in the hegemony of Europe by one titanic Power.
F. E. Smith, 1st Earl of Birkenhead
Reconstruction aspired to restore the foundations of freedom to a wayward South and it expected to triumph as effortlessly as 19th-century liberal notions of progress had promised. Instead, the same Romantic feudalism that had created the old Southern order reasserted its hegemony, and postwar Southern aristocrats appealed to a set of cultural and racial biases which safely defused the importance of property, and sharply restricted access to it. This might have been averted had the victorious Union been willing to pour the resources into Reconstruction it had devoted to winning the war. But Reconstruction became a symbol of how quickly political fatigue afflicts liberal democracies. Moreover, understanding Reconstruction as a bourgeois revolution which was strangled in its cradle by vengeful cotton nabobs offers some larger parallels to the optimistic era that prevailed between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise of Islamic state terrorism.
Allen C. Guelzo
The US - its bankrupt mortgage institutions nationalised and its gigantic war machine effectively funded by foreign borrowing - is in steep decline. With its financial system in the worst mess since the 1930s, the west's ability to shape events is dwindling by the day. Sermonising about "law-based international relations" is laughable after Iraq, and at bottom not much more than nostalgia for a vanished hegemony.
John N. Gray
World War II changed the demography. For a while, high seriousness was a part (only a part) of the mix. No one likes to think that the vector that has carried him into the demography could get lost in the demography, but that is what happens. Rock and roll-or the generating spirit of rock and roll-could get lost there, easily. And just think of all the ideas-and changes-there were implicit in the hegemony of rock and roll. We could be left with... just some of the music.
George W. S. Trow
Our magnanimous Imam (r. a.) managed to restore our dignity and eliminate the long-standing hegemony of autocracy and colonialism by returning to Islam, by adhering to Islam. He managed to give our people a sense of identity and made them feel that they can stand on their own feet, that they can say "yes" or "no" in the case of essential matters. Our people had been deprived of such things for centuries. It was Islam that gave these things to our people. In any country in any part of the world where the waves of Islamic Awakening are strengthened or started and the people and youth of that country feel that they are moving closer to Islam, there will be this renewed sense of identity and dignity.
Ali Khamenei
As it dragged on, the Iraq War exposed as hollow any American aspirations to global hegemony. Left behind when U.S. troops finally withdrew was their reputation for military supremacy. Meanwhile as reports of prisoner abuse, torture, and the killing of noncombatants mounted, American moral confidence lost its luster.
Andrew Bacevich
Imperialism
Capitalism
Faith
Rationalism
Primacy of the Spirit
Materialism
Idealism
Sensualism
Will-to-Power
Will-to-Riches
World as Object of Organization
World as Object of Plunder
Rank as Social Distinction
Society as a Collection of Individuals
Fulfillment of Duty
"Pursuit of Happiness"
Absolute Will to Biological Fertility
Race-Suicide, Birth Control, Puritanism, Bohemianism
Absolute Will to Increase Power
Surrender to the World Hegemony of the West
Hierarchy
Equality
Discipline
Freedom, Ethical Laissez-Faire
Authority
Parliamentarism
Aristocracy
Plutocracy
Society as Organic Unity
Class War
Sexual Polarity
Feminism
Europe as Imperium
Petty Statism
Europe as Nation
Chauvinism
Europe as Fatherland
Petty Nationalism
Order
Freedom
Stability
Constant Motion, Business Cycles
Art Practiced in Conformity with the Cultural Task
"L'Art pour l'Art"
Politico-Military Expansion
Financial-Military-Economic Expansion.
Francis Parker Yockey
According to Pompeo [U.S. Secretary of State], CCP general secretary Xi Jinping and the Communist Party of China (CCP) harbor a "decades-long desire for global hegemony.” This is ironic. Only one country – the US – has a defense strategy calling for it to be the "preeminent military power in the world,” with "favorable regional balances of power in the Indo-Pacific, Europe, the Middle East, and the Western Hemisphere.”
China's defense white paper, by contrast, states that "China will never follow the beaten track of big powers in seeking hegemony,” and that, "As economic globalization, the information society, and cultural diversification develop in an increasingly multi-polar world, peace, development, and win-win cooperation remain the irreversible trends of the times.”
US military spending totaled $732 billion in 2019, nearly three times the $261 billion China spent. The US.. has around 800 overseas military bases, while China has just one (a small naval base in Djibouti).
Xi Jinping
The two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, are vainly seeking world hegemony. Each in its own way attempts to bring the developing countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America under its control and, at the same time, to bully the developed countries that are not their match in strength.
Deng Xiaoping
September of the year 490 B.C. was to my mind a more cardinal moment of fate for Europe than August 1914. Western civilization...was saved in its infancy at Marathon, and ten years later by Leonidas and by the men of Salamis...had it not been for that decade there would have been nothing to prevent Eastern Europe being orientalized and the ultimate fight for the hegemony of Europe would have been left to the Persians and the Carthaginians. But for the Greeks there would have been no civilization as we know it, and we should all have been dark-skinned people with long noses...England is the natural home of liberty and free institutions, and in her endeavour to secure these blessings for the world no country ought to be quicker than she in acknowledging her debt to Hellas.
Stanley Baldwin
All of America's wars except the first-the war for independence - were wars for Empire. Keep that fact in mind as you hear the Memorial Day bloviations about the brave men and women who served our country in its times of peril. The United States has never been in peril, but Washington has delivered peril to numerous other countries in its pursuit of hegemony over others.
Paul Craig Roberts
The Syrian government has been fighting off a terrorist invasion of their country for eight years - an invasion financed, equipped and armed by the U.S. coalition and its allies in Turkey, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Israel. The "placing of armed groups in the proximity of civilians” is entirely the responsibility of the U.S. and its allies and with its statement, the UN demonstrated the extent to which it acts as an outpost for U.S. Empire, supporting U.S. hegemony and globalism in the region.
Vanessa Beeley
Nixon feared for our alliances if America abdicated in Indochina; he was concerned about the impact on Soviet restraint if the United States simply abandoned what four administrations had affirmed, and he believed that a demonstration of American weakness in Asia would destroy the opening to China based in part on America's role in thwarting Soviet moves toward hegemony in Asia. But as he entered office, he found that by the end of the Johnson administration, the goal of victory had been abandoned and a commitment had been made to end the bombing of North Vietnam and to seek a negotiated compromise solution. These objectives had been affirmed by both candidates in the presidential campaign. No significant American political or intellectual leader opposed them. When a negotiated solution proved unattainable, Nixon proceeded unilaterally to implement his concept of an honorable withdrawal.
Henry Kissinger
A lot of people talk about the Israeli lobby, and think that Israel is behind a lot of this. But I've studied it up close... Rather than Israel dictating policy to the United States, a cabal of neoconservatives have used the Israeli lobby as a facilitator. If this was all about Israel dictating policy, we'd have skipped Iraq and gone straight to Iran... The big picture in the Middle East is China... It's about leveraging control over Middle-Eastern and central-Asian oil, in order to dictate the pace of China's economic growth over the next 30 years. Because China's the biggest threat in the eyes of the neoconservatives... that's going to threaten American global economic hegemony... You deal with China indirectly at this point in time because you don't want direct confrontation.
Scott Ritter