Democracy Suppression Quotes

After installing friendly leaders in Iran and Guatemala, the United States lost interest in promoting democracy in either country.

The U.S. and its allies will do anything they can to prevent authentic democracy in the Arab world.

Despite all the gains for democracy in the world, in many countries anyone who wants to publish truths unwelcome to the government risks suppression and criminal punishment.

Voter suppression laws, overzealous filibuster use, you name it - the Republicans use every tactic they can to stop our democracy from actually selecting the person with the most support.

We say that if America has entered the war to make the world safe for democracy, she must first make democracy safe in America. How else is the world to take America seriously, when democracy at home is daily being outraged, free speech suppressed, peaceable assemblies broken up by overbearing and brutal gangsters in uniform; when free press is curtailed and every independent opinion gagged? Verily, poor as we are in democracy, how can we give of it to the world?

From horrific incidents of police brutality and complicity in indiscriminate attacks by triads on citizens to arbitrary mass arrests and the banning of demonstrations, the government has employed nearly every weapon in its war chest to intimidate Hong Kongers into silence and to suppress their popular struggle for democracy and freedom.

If you look at US internal documents, they explain very clearly what the threat of Cuba was. So, back in the early 1960s the State Department described the threat of Cuba as Castro's successful defiance of US policy, going back to the Monroe Doctrine. The Monroe Doctrine established the US claim to dominate the Western hemisphere and Castro was successfully defying that. That's not tolerable. It is like somebody saying "let's have democracy in Greece," and we just can't tolerate that so we have to destroy the threat at its roots.

In some countries that are darlings of the West, like Egypt, everyone knows the result of national elections years in advance: The man in power always wins. In others, like Saudi Arabia, the very idea of an election is unthinkable.

Arab society features apartheid of women, apartheid of homosexuals, and apartheid of Christians, Jews, and democracy.

The cold war provided the perfect excuse for Western governments to plunder and exploit the Third World in the name of freedom; to rig its elections, bribe its politicians, appoint its tyrants and, by every sophisticated means of persuasion and interference, stunt the emergence of young democracies in the name of democracy.

The freedoms which had been so hard won from colonial domination were being crushed by Soviet-inspired and funded military and political forces. Their clear intention was to deprive the people of their democratic freedoms. As history shows, this is what had happened in the Soviet Union and in Cuba, and continues to be the case in other parts of the world.

Too many…especially in Europe, conflate democracy as process—free elections with a free press to determine who gets to run a particular country—with electoral outcomes. They define a democratic election as one in which the right people win. Under the former definition, any reasonably free election is a victory for democracy, even if the winner is a bad person with bad ideas. But under the latter definition, elections that bring the wrong candidates to power are considered undemocratic. An electoral victory by a party that wants to crack down on illegal immigrants? A failure of democracy. Victory by a party that refuses to rework society around the preferences of people who feel they were born into bodies of the wrong sex? A gain for authoritarianism. Victory by a party that rejects green-energy mandates as too expensive and impractical? An attack on everything democracy is about. … [It] becomes the duty of democracy advocates to suppress their domestic opponents. The police should investigate citizens who post “antidemocratic” tweets about trans people or migration. Governments can and should ban antidemocratic candidates or outlaw antidemocratic political parties for the crime of advocating “undemocratic” ideas. It doesn’t matter if these ideas are popular. The more popular an “antidemocratic” idea becomes, the more necessary it is to suppress its supporters. This approach is madness—an unmitigated and total disaster for the democratic cause.

Talk loud enough about human rights and it gives the impression of democracy at work, justice at work. There was a time when the United States waged war to topple democracies, because back then democracy was a threat to the Free Market. Countries were nationalising their resources, protecting their markets.... So then, real democracies were being toppled. They were toppled in Iran, they were toppled all across Latin America, Chile.

LGBT people are at the heart of President Vladimir Putin's crackdown on democracy.

Putting it in plain terms, the general public must be reduced to its traditional apathy and obedience, and driven from the arena of political debate and action, if democracy is to survive.

The price of oil and the price of freedom always move in opposite directions in oil rich ‘petrolist’ states. The higher the average global crude oil prices rises, the more free speech, free press, free and fair elections, an independent judiciary, the rule of law, and independent political parties are eroded.

We should recall that during the Second World War and the Great Depression there was an upsurge in popular, radical democracy. In all over the world. It took different forms, but it was there, everywhere. In Greece it was in the Greek revolution, and so on. And it had to be crushed. In countries like Greece, it was crushed by violence. In countries like Italy, where the US forces entered in 1943, it was crushed by attacking and destroying the anti-German partisans and restoring the traditional order.