Michael Totten Quotes

108 Sourced Quotes

Government officials are almost always the worst sources and interview subjects. That's true everywhere in the world. They live in rarefied bubbles. They lie. They leave things out, sometimes because they want to and sometimes because they have to. They're often incompetent and even more often shockingly ignorant. Everyone has opinions, and lots of people have agendas, but nobody has an agenda the way government officials have agendas.

Michael Totten
New Man is a utopian fantasy. Humans will only work long and hard hours for no pay if they're forced; hence Cuba's repressive political system.

Michael Totten
The United States has a long history of successfully integrating immigrants, including Arab immigrants... Two-thirds of American Muslims earn more than 50,000 dollars a year, and a fourth earn more than 100,000 dollars a year. That's hardly the profile of a failed immigrant group. Europe, though, has a much harder time with this sort of thing, and Germany is in an uproar.

Michael Totten
There are various ways to signal a yellow if not a red. Retired Admiral James Stavridis shared a few ideas in Foreign Policy magazine. Michael Barone has more. Parking destroyers in the Black Sea off Yalta might be a good place to start. The U.S. sent ships to that region when Russia invaded Georgia in 2008. The Russians didn't withdraw from occupied Abkhazia or South Ossetia, but at least they stopped where they were, withdrew from Gori, and left the capital Tbilisi alone.

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

Michael Totten
The American president, the Commander-in-Chief of the United States Armed Forces, is practically a foreign policy dictator. You can start wars without going through Congress. Congress and the public will complain, don't kid yourself about that, but it will be too late. You can end wars—or at least choose to stop fighting and let them continue without you. You can order daring raids against the likes of Osama bin Laden if you think you know where they're hiding, you can forge and unmake alliances, and you can initiate all kinds of black ops that the public is unlikely to discover as long as they don't catastrophically fail.

Michael Totten
Iran probably wouldn't be that aggressively secular if it had a genuinely representative government—unlike Iran, Azerbaijan spent more than a half century under communist rule—but it would almost certainly look like Lebanon or Turkey where there's a healthy balance between the secular and the devout. The Iranian government wouldn't need to send thousands of undercover 'morality police' into the streets in the first place if adherence to strict Islamic codes was what everybody actually wanted.

Michael Totten
The general public hates modern art. In an online poll, The Escapist magazine asked if modern art even qualifies as art in the first place. Only one person in five said that it does.

Michael Totten
Whether we and the Ukrainians like it or not, Ukraine is still a buffer state within Moscow's sphere of influence. The US has little more leverage there than Russia has in Canada. And since ethnic Russians outnumber ethnic Ukrainians in the Crimea by more than two-to-one, a Russian invasion of that part of the country is a bit like a French invasion of Quebec—troublesome indeed, and infuriating to the capital, but different from, say, a North Korean invasion of Quebec. That's why Russia could take it without firing a shot and why nobody shot at the Russians.

Michael Totten
British Muslims are losing the war against ISIS. So says Sunny Hundal in a new essay in Quartz magazine. 'For the vast majority of Muslims who disdain its ideology', he writes, 'the challenge that presents to them is deadlier and far more difficult because they are caught in a pincer movement: with public and government suspicion on one side, and a seductive and supposedly empowering ideology on the other'. According to the FBI, around 200 American Muslims have left the United States to join ISIS. And according to the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence, 600-700 British Muslims have left the United Kingdom just this year alone.

Michael Totten
Even a draconian absolute gun ban wouldn't work. Under what theory would a war on guns work any better than the war on drugs? Does anyone seriously believe that the government could ever take so many weapons away from so many people that terrorists would have to resort to running around with butter knives? Come on.

Michael Totten
Trump said Russia and Assad are fighting ISIS in Syria, but it's not true. Russia is fighting in western Syria to prop up the Assad regime against rebel fighters while ISIS territory is in eastern Syria well outside Russia's theater of operations.

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
You know who isn't in frenemy territory? The Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu. Only in an upside-down world does it make any kind of sense to pal around with Erdogan and slam Netanyahu, as Obama has done.

Michael Totten
Nearly all Che's victims were Cuban. Would Americans love a foreign implant who murdered thousands, forced thousands more into slavery, and drove more than a million to exile? Of course not.

Michael Totten
You might think today's identitarians champion this sort of thing, but they don't. On the contrary, they hate it.

Michael Totten
I'd love to see the United States recognize Taiwan as a sovereign nation as long as the Pacific Rim doesn't blow up. For one thing, Taiwan is a sovereign nation whether or not Beijing and Washington say so. It has its own democratically elected government and its own institutions. It makes its own domestic, foreign and trade policies with zero input from the Chinese Communist Party. Its citizens have their own passports with "Republic of China" written across the top. Recognizing these facts is just an acknowledgement of reality.

Michael Totten
Contrary to popular belief—and propaganda out of the Kremlin—neither the Assad regime nor Vladimir Putin's Russia are fighting ISIS. Their only concern is keeping the Arab Socialist Baath Party propped up in its rump state in Damascus and along the Mediterranean. ISIS still has a free hand to do whatever it wants out in the desert.

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

Michael Totten
Plenty of Crimeans are unhappy about it, of course. A fourth are ethnic Ukrainians, an eighth are Tatars, and one would have to be a truly obnoxious determinist to suggest every Russian on the peninsula is thrilled being occupied by a foreign army just because they speak the same language. Ukrainians elsewhere in the country (especially outside the ethnically Russian east) are mobilizing for war.

Michael Totten
With legal same-sex marriage sweeping both Europe and North America, one can safely say the West has never been less homophobic.

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
We all have to deal with the world as it is, but sacrificing Taiwan to the wolves is outrageous. Taiwan had a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council until Richard Nixon, neverminding tens of millions of corpses, gave it to Mao Zedong. Nixon told Taiwan that the US was engaging instead with the mainland Chinese.

Michael Totten
In Europe the lunatic fringe is going mainstream. Maddening as this is, I really do worry for them. I'm beginning to think something terrible might happen over there.

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
Americans are good at solving problems. We've put men on the moon, cured countless diseases, and invented nearly all modern technology from televisions and telephones to microchips and the Internet. We created a durable democracy that has lasted more than 200 years, ended slavery, destroyed Hitler's Nazi regime, and bested the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Surely, then, we can solve terrorism, or at least drastically reduce it, but let's get one thing clear. There is no such thing as The Answer. There is no silver bullet, no magic wand, no perfectly calibrated piece of legislation that Congress can pass to make terrorists leave us alone.

Michael Totten
I don't think it's right to compare German gullibility to American gullibility by pointing out, for example, that lots of Americans falsely believe Saddam Hussein was involved with the September 11 attacks. There is a qualitative difference between believing Saddam was behind an attack on America and believing that the American government was behind an attack on America. It is at least plausible that Saddam had something to do with it, even though he didn't. The idea that the U.S. government committed that deed is insane.

Michael Totten
People in Scotland don't enjoy having decisions made for them in England any more than the English like having decisions made for them in Belgium. Nationalism in Britain cut both ways.

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
By obsessing over politics above all else, identitarian artists of the twenty-first century resemble the Socialist Realists from the Soviet Union in the early- to mid-twentieth century. One could charitably call Socialist Realism an artistic style, one that glorified peasants, factory workers, and Communist values, but it was nurtured by a totalitarian police state and was the only style allowed by the government lest hapless artists wished to live out the remaining days of their lives in a Siberian slave labor camp.

Michael Totten