An interesting quote (and inquiry into its authenticity).  --  Abraham Lincoln, in a letter written in 1864, supposedly foresaw that the American Republic might be undone by "enthroned" corporations as "the money power of the country" tried to "prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed."  --  ADDENDUM (Jan. 12, 2006):  Snopes, the urban legend web site, however, examines the authenticity of this quotation and concludes that it is "spurious." ...


Now that it has become apparent that under the rubric of the "war on terrorism" the U.S. is becoming that which it deplored -- an empire aiming at world domination -- and running an elaborate worldwide gulag of detention centers, prisons, and camps, including, the New York Times revealed a week ago, secret facilities so covert that even the president of the United States doesn't know (and doesn't want to know) where they are or what is done there, and that all kinds of human rights abuses, up to and including murder, are frequent there, it is interesting to reread the opening passage of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago, about the moment of arrest....


The Iraqis have long experience of Western imperialism. -- During the First World War, the English, the French, and the Russians, without, of course, any consultation with the local populations, reached secret agreements on how they would divide up "Asiatic Turkey" (the holdings of the Ottoman Empire in Asia), and British armies set out to enforce their imperial claims. The British Empire suffered an important defeat in April 1916, when a British expeditionary force was stopped on the way to Baghdad and forced to surrender. -- The British, determined to restore imperial prestige in the region, massed 600,000 troops and resumed operations on the Mesopotamian front in the fall of 1916. They entered Baghdad on March 11, 1917, and a week later the commander of British forces, Sir Stanley Maude, issued this proclamation....