Terror breeds terror. I am completely opposed to both state terror and those who respond in a similar way. There is no justification for any group that associates itself with the Left to kill innocents and encourage suicide bombings.

The function of a bourgeois democracy is to secure the consent of the masses to their own exploitation and oppression.

Economics and politics are so intertwined and interlinked that politics now, mainstream politics, extreme center politics, are little else but a version of concentrated economics. And this means that any alternative - alternative capitalism, left Keynesianism, intervention by the state to help the poor, rolling back the privatizations - becomes a huge issue. The entire weight of the extreme center and its media is turned against it, which in reality now is beginning to harm democracy.

We have populations now in the West with a very short memory span. One reason for this short memory span is that television over the last fifteen years has seen a big decline in the coverage of the rest of the world.

The sobbing of the weak today is the sobbing of the victims of neoliberal policies. They consist of billions of people all over the world.

In many parts of the Islamic world, secular forces, where they exist, tend to be so unsure of themselves, so lacking in self-confidence, that in many cases they line themselves up fairly squarely behind the imperial project and that then creates a big vacuum in which the Islamists become the dominant power because they are the only ones then who are seen as resisting.

The U.S. is telling the Northern Alliance to kill Taliban prisoners. It's totally a breach of all the known conventions of war. Western television networks aren't showing this, but Arab networks are showing how prisoners are being killed and what's being done to them. Instead, we're shown scenes that are deliberately created for the Western media: a few women without the veil, a woman reading the news on Kabul television, and 150 people cheering.