Wide Asleep in America: Bio / Contact

Nima Shirazi is a writer, musician, and political commentator from New York City.

My analysis of United States policy and Middle East issues, particularly with reference to current events in Israel, Palestine, and Iran, can be found in numerous other online and print publications, such as Mondoweiss, Foreign Policy Journal, Antiwar, Palestine Chronicle, Monthly Review, ConsortiumNews, Dissident Voice, ColdType, Media With Conscience, Brave New World, Atlantic Free Press, Information Clearing House, OpEdNews, Countercurrents, Indymedia (UK), Media-ocracy, The Rag Blog, Fluxed Up World, PalTalk News Network, The Passionate Attachment, VoltaireNet, The People's Voice, Axis of Logic, Future Fast Forward, Salem-News, Middle East Online, World Can’t Wait, CASMII, Ramallah Online, Kenya Imagine, The Palestine Telegraph, Woodstock International and Sabbah Report.

My research has been cited by Le Monde Diplomatique's Alain Gresh, former Republican Congressional staffer Mike Lofgren, and political scientist Norman Finkelstein, among others.

I have been interviewed on Dr. Wilmer Leon's XM satellite radio program "On with Leon," by international news outlets Russia Today and Fars News, and has been a guest on Al Jazeera English's The Stream, Liberty Network's "Antiwar Radio" with Scott Horton (twice), the Pacifica Radio - Los Angeles (KPFK 90.7) show "Middle East in Focus" with Don Bustany, and the MNN television program "Conversations with Harold Hudson Channer."

I'm also a member of the Gulf/2000 Project, an academic forum and online resource service sponsored by the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University.

Contact

wideasleepinamerica (at) gmail (dot) com
@WideAsleepNima

Words of the Wiser

"Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect."
- Mark Twain

"There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people."
- Howard Zinn

"I'm for truth, no matter who tells it. I'm for justice, no matter who it is for or against. I'm a human being, first and foremost, and as such I'm for whoever and whatever benefits humanity as a whole."
- Malcolm X

"The roots of violence: wealth without work, pleasure without conscience, knowledge without character, commerce without morality, science without humanity, worship without sacrifice, politics without principles."

- Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi

"When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered."

- Martin Luther King, Jr.

"The world is a dangerous place, not because of those who do evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing."

- Albert Einstein

"Whatever fosters the growth of civilization works at the same time against war."
- Sigmund Freud

"We must join with the tens of millions all over the world who see in peace our most sacred responsibility."
- Paul Robeson

"How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world."
- Anne Frank

"Justice is conscience, not a personal conscience but the conscience of the whole of humanity. Those who clearly recognize the voice of their own conscience usually recognize also the voice of justice.”
- Alexander Solzhenitsyn

"Safeguarding the rights of others is the most noble and beautiful end of a human being."

- Kahlil Gibran

"America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves."
- Abraham Lincoln

"Fascism is capitalism plus murder."

- Upton Sinclair

"Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms - of the Old World, travel through South America, search out every abuse, and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival. "

- Frederick Douglass

"If I sit silently, I have sinned."

- Mohammad Mossadegh

"One must always try to be as radical as reality itself."

- Vladimir Lenin

"They must find it difficult, those who have taken authority as truth, rather than truth as authority."

- Gerald Massey

"I don't want them to believe me, I just want them to think."
- Marshall McLuhan

"Perhaps it is a universal truth that the loss of liberty at home is to be charged against provisions against danger, real or pretended from abroad."
- James Madison

"Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty."
- Henry David Thoreau

"Intelligent discontent is the mainspring of civilization."
- Eugene V. Debs

"The civility of no race can be perfect whilst another race is degraded. It is a doctrine of the oldest and of the newest philosophy, that man is one, and that you cannot injure any member, without a sympathetic injury to all members."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"In times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act."
- George Orwell

"We have a government of corporations, for corporations, by corporations."
- Pete Seeger

"I'm witnessing this chronic, insidious genocide and I'm really scared, and questioning my fundamental belief in the goodness of human nature. This has to stop. I think it is a good idea for us all to drop everything and devote our lives to making this stop."
- Rachel Corrie

"Fear can only prevail when victims are ignorant of the facts."
- Thomas Jefferson

"To protest in the name of morality against 'excesses' or 'abuses' is an error which hints at active complicity. There are no 'abuses' or 'excesses' here, simply an all-pervasive system."
- Simone de Beauvoir

"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident."
- Arthur Schopenhauer

"Freedom means the supremacy of human rights everywhere. Our support goes to those who struggle to gain those rights and keep them. Our strength is our unity of purpose. To that high concept there can be no end save victory."
- Franklin Delano Roosevelt

"Truth is so obscure in these times, and falsehood so established, that, unless we love the truth, we cannot know it."
- Blaise Pascal

"A state too expensive in itself, or by virtue of its dependencies, ultimately falls into decay; its free government is transformed into a tyranny; it disregards the principles which it should preserve, and finally degenerates into despotism."
- Simón Bolívar

"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."
- Voltaire

"The struggle of people against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting."
- Milan Kundera

"All those who seek to destroy the liberties of a democratic nation ought to know that war is the surest and shortest means to accomplish it."
- Alexis de Tocqueville

"Truth uncompromisingly told will always have its ragged edges; hence the conclusion of such a narration is apt to be less finished than an architectural finial."
- Herman Melville

"Believing in progress does not mean believing that any progress has yet been made."
- Franz Kafka

"Few of us can easily surrender our belief that society must somehow make sense. The thought that the state has lost its mind and is punishing so many innocent people is intolerable. And so the evidence has to be internally denied."
- Arthur Miller

"Everyone gives the title of barbarism to everything that is not in use in his own country."
- Michel de Montaigne

"Fascism itself can only be turned away if all those who are outraged by it show a commitment to social justice that equals the intensity of their indignation."
- Arundhati Roy

"Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires."
- John Steinbeck

"The basic principle, rarely violated, is that what conflicts with the requirements of power and privilege does not exist."
- Noam Chomsky

"Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule - and both commonly succeed, and are right."
- H.L. Mencken

"The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human."
- Aldous Huxley

"Many people would sooner die than think. In fact they do."
- Bertrand Russell

"If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor."

- Desmond Tutu

"Every empire...tells itself and the world that it is unlike all other empires, that its mission is not to plunder and control but to educate and liberate."
- Edward Said

"The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis."
- Dante Alighieri

"When fascism comes to this country, it will be wrapped in the flag, carrying a cross."
- Sinclair Lewis

"War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious."
- Smedley Butler

"Hard are the ways of truth, and rough to walk."
- John Milton

"A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."
- Max Planck

"Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety."
- Benjamin Franklin

"With the establishment of a relationship of oppression, violence has already begun. Never in history has violence been initiated by the oppressed. How could they be the initiators, if they themselves are the result of violence? How could they be the sponsors of something objective whose objective inauguration called forth their existence as oppressed? There would be no oppressed had there been no prior of violence to establish their subjugation."
- Paulo Freire

"The death of democracy is not likely to be an assassination from ambush. It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference, and undernourishment."
- Robert M. Hutchins

"I see how peoples are set against one another, and in silence, unknowingly, foolishly, obediently, innocently slay one another. I see that the keenest brains of the world invent weapons and words to make it yet more refined and enduring."
- Erich Maria Remarque

"The evil that is in the world almost always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence if they lack understanding."
- Albert Camus

"He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself."
- Thomas Paine

"We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. We must remember always that accusation is not proof and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process of law. We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men."
- Edward R. Murrow

"If voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal."
- Emma Goldman

"Dissent is what rescues democracy from a quiet death behind closed doors."
- Lewis H. Lapham

"We are healthy only to the extent that our ideas are humane."
- Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

"The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off."
- Gloria Steinem

"Activism is my rent for living on this planet."
- Alice Walker

"More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly."
- Woody Allen

"My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music."
- Vladimir Nabokov

Pages

Bio / Contact

Archive

What I Read

Words of the Wiser

Click for Truth

Friends of W.A.i.A