Michael Totten Quotes

108 Sourced Quotes

Europe has always been a dark place and it hasn't changed at all.

Michael Totten
For years, Turkey has thrown more journalists into prison than any other country on Earth. That all by itself should tell you everything you need to know about Erdogan, but if the picture wasn't clear before, it had better be now. The failed coup attempt by Turkish army officers in July of this year unleashed Erdogan's inner Hugo Chavez.

Michael Totten
Every country in the world has a national anthem... It's perfectly normal.

Michael Totten
There were no violent Nazi-like demonstrations in the United States against Arabs or Muslims, not even on or after September 11, 2001, when ten times as many people were murdered in the most spectacular terrorist attack in world history.

Michael Totten
Europe has never been fertile ground for libertarians. It is not Montana, and it isn't Wyoming.

Michael Totten
The truth about Che now has its boots on. He helped free Cubans from the repressive Batista regime, only to enslave them in a totalitarian police state worst than the last. He was Fidel Castro's chief executioner, a mass-murderer who in theory could have commanded any number of Latin American death squads, from Peru's Shining Path on the political left to Guatemala's White Hand on the right.

Michael Totten
A mob set fire to the Saudi embassy in Tehran, stormed the compound and trashed its offices while Iranian security personnel stood aside. This is hardly anything new. The Iranian government has been violently contemptuous of worldwide norms of diplomacy ever since it seized power in 1979. The Iranian hostage crisis, where Islamist revolutionaries held 52 foreign servicemen and women hostage at the American Embassy for 444 days, was just the beginning. Four years later, Iran's terrorist proxies in Lebanon used to a suicide truck bomb to destroy the American embassy in Beirut. Ten years later they blew up the Israeli embassy in Argentina, also with a suicide truck bomb.

Michael Totten
Want a trip into bizarroland? Take a look at the Twitter feed for Iran's 'Supreme Guide' Ayatollah Khamenei. No, his Twitter feed hasn't been hacked by Al Sharpton. Nor is this a spoof site. It's the real online megaphone for the Iranian dictator. This pasty old man doesn't give a flying fork about black people, especially those who live in the United States. When he and his underlings chant 'Death to America', they don't mean death to white America. They're talking about the whole country, from our black president at the top to undocumented immigrants on the bottom and everyone in between.

Michael Totten
Russia has long been a paranoid land power. It's huge, mostly flat, and wide open to invasion. Just to name a few examples, it was invaded by the Mongols in the 13th century, Napoleon in the 19th, Nazi Germany in the 20th, and has been recently squeezed by NATO expansion in the former Soviet bloc. These events seared themselves into the Russian psyche. They breathe better with buffer states.

Michael Totten
We can only imagine the violent convulsions that will wrack the continent if something on the scale of 9/11 ever happens on that side of the ocean. And it's more likely to happen over there in the short and medium term than it is over here. Europe is already under much greater attack than the United States, and it has a far larger problem with Islamic radicalization.

Michael Totten
Russian civilization was born more than a thousand years ago in Kiev in the medieval state of Kievan Rus. If that city ever gives the finger to Moscow once and for all and joins the EU and NATO, that would be something to see. It's why Russia cares more about Ukraine than the West does and will probably get what it wants. No one in charge of the fate of that country is asking what the Ukrainians want. They should, but they aren't and they won't. Such is the fate of the vassals of Moscow.

Michael Totten
Colombia's scenery is spectacular, its literary and arts scene world class, its biodiversity unmatched by any nation on earth. While it still has a moderately high crime rate in some areas, the homicide rate is now as low as Portland, Oregon's. It's almost as if whatever dark force consumed Colombia for so many decades picked up and moved to the country next door.

Michael Totten
No more do I want to hear that Europeans are more sophisticated than Americans.

Michael Totten
Trump's national security advisor is much more eager to fight a huge war than George W. Bush or Barack Obama. If you voted for Trump because you want less war instead of more, you're probably out of luck.

Michael Totten
Did somebody have a nice little chat about the 2 billion dollars in aid money we give Egypt every year?

Michael Totten
Saudi Arabia is the most backward and medieval society in the entire world outside ISIS and Taliban-occupied territory. Tehran is like Amsterdam compared with Riyadh despite the Iranian government's theocratic regulations and draconian enforcers.

Michael Totten
Beijing wants to impose its rule on Taiwan like it has in Hong Kong, Tibet and East Turkestan. If any half-way moral and sensible person had their way, the reverse would happen and Taiwan would export its democratic Chinese model to its 900-pound cousin. That's probably what will eventually happen anyway, even if China militarily conquers Taiwan in the meantime.

Michael Totten
In 2005, Beirut looked and felt like a Middle Eastern version of Berlin in 1989... It turned out, Beirut was really more like Budapest in 1956.

Michael Totten
The Iranian regime murdered its way into power and tortures and murders to keep itself in power. It doesn't care about human rights any more than Kim Jong-un of North Korea.

Michael Totten
Just north of Iran in Azerbaijan, which would be part of Iran today if Russia hadn't conquered it roughly 200 years ago, more than 99 percent of women dress like women everywhere else in the world. I spent a week there and saw fewer Islamic headscarves than I see in Seattle—just two during the entire week. I assumed the young women wearing them were probably foreigners. If they were locals, they were as far out of the mainstream as Zoroastrians are in America. There's a statue in the capital that shows a woman removing her headscarf. It has been there for more than 100 years.

Michael Totten
The human spirit is a powerful force, though, and some Cubans can't take it. A million and a half fled to the United States to escape the instruments of Che Guevara's repression, many across the Florida Straits where the odds of survival are no better than two out of three. Others resisted at home, especially during the 1960s, the decade of global rebellion.

Michael Totten
Iraq has never been a coherent nation-state; arguably, it wouldn't exist if the British Empire hadn't installed the Kingdom of Iraq in 1932. Its three biggest communities—Sunni Arabs, Shi'a Arabs and Kurds¬—have proven themselves incapable of living together in peace. The country will probably never be both democratic and stable within its current borders. Splitting Iraq into its three constituent parts would be better for the people who live there. It would be better for us, too, insofar as this separation would prevent the kind of unstable anarchy that breeds both Sunni and Shia militias, including ISIS.

Michael Totten
Cosmopolitan 'citizens of the world' need to understand something. Nationalism isn't necessarily bad. It can be; that's for damn sure. But a lack of it can be just as destructive. Nationalism is exclusive, yes, but it's also inclusive. It draws a line between those on in the inside and those on the outside, but it also binds those on the inside together.

Michael Totten
Iranians, when left alone, are far more liberal-minded and modern than Saudis. The Iranian and Saudi governments, though, are remarkably similar in their fanatical absurdity. The Saudi government has always been more severe, but just at the moment when the Iranian regime is tightening the screws again, Saudi Arabia's own morality police are being stripped of some of their powers.

Michael Totten
Look at a map again. Iran is a powerful state in the middle of the same Eurasia where Putin is building his union. An alliance of some sort with Iran isn't strictly required, but it's certainly helpful. At the very least, Putin wants good relations with the Iranians. And he wants America and American-friendly regimes away from his underbelly for the same reason he wants them off his western flank in Europe, where he fears the West and its economic and military alliances might encroach.

Michael Totten