Welcome once again to a $27-group / Political Revolution open thread, a weekly place where you can sit back, relax, and enjoy some inspiring quotes, good music, and (most importantly) a picture or two of foresterbob’s cat Noble Fur.
Here’s an interesting quote to start with, and which represents the theme of a lot of the quotes in tonight’s diary:
In my view, every person on this planet shares a common humanity. We all want our children to grow up healthy, to have a good education, have decent jobs, drink clean water and breathe clean air, and to live in peace. That’s what being human is about.
~ Bernie Sanders
That’s from Bernie Sanders’ recent speech at Westminster College about foreign policy.
Ah, but that’s not the theme referred to in the title of tonight’s diary! Since I often feature Bernie Sanders quotes in these $27 Quotes diaries, I thought I’d include another theme or two in tonight’s diary. Here’s a clue to the theme referred to in the title:
Day by day, I'm tired of playing games all the time So that's it. Now I quit. I am done with this for good.
No, that’s not a quote from Hillary Clinton’s recent book What Happened (although the quoted person is a leader whom I and many other people admire, despite some flaws in her policies and her personality).
I’ll let you ponder the source of the quote for a little while, but you’ll find the answer at the bottom of tonight’s diary. Meanwhile, here are some quotes which you won’t need to guess where they’re from or who said them.
I think what we have to do is take a hard look at where we are today in terms of foreign policy, and where we have been for many years. And I think the main point to be made is that no country, not the United States or any other country, can do it alone. That if we’re going to address the very deep and complicated international issues that exist, we need to do it in cooperation.
Bernie Sanders said that as part of an interview about US foreign policy which he did with Mehdi Hasan of The Intercept. It’s well worth reading in its entirety (and you can do that by going here) but I thought I’d share a few excerpts from it in tonight’s diary.
From the interview:
The senator makes clear that “unilateralism, the belief that we can simply overthrow governments that we don’t want, that has got to be re-examined.”
After referencing the Iraq War — “one of the great foreign policy blunders in the history of this country” — the senator touches on another historic blunder which, to his credit, few of his fellow senators would be willing to discuss, let alone critique. “In 1953, the United States, with the British, overthrew [Mohammed ] Mossadegh, the prime minister of Iran – and this was to benefit British oil interests,” he reminds me. “The result was the shah came into power, who was a very ruthless man, and the result of that was that we had the Iranian Revolution, which takes us to where we are right now.”
During the interview, Sanders said:
“Where we’ve got to be radical… is to understand that we cannot continue with simply using military as a means of addressing foreign policy issues. Where we have got to be radical and forceful, in an unprecedented way, is to force debate and discussion on the causes of international conflict – and certainly, we have not been doing that, and we need more American leadership to do that.”
More quotes coming up, but first a short break for some music. Here’s an alternative to using the military which hasn’t been discussed lately much on Daily Kos ...
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