Communists

1032 quotes found

"It could hardly have been anticipated, for example, that a long-time follower of Mao Zedong, at five feet in height barely visible beside him, would use the power of the Chinese Communist Party to give his country a market economy: "It doesn't matter if the cat is white or black," Deng Xiaoping liked to say, "so long as it catches mice." Deng's views on cats—by which he meant ideologies—got him into trouble with Mao during the Cultural Revolution, and at the time of Nixon's 1972 visit to Beijing, Deng was in exile with his family growing vegetables, chopping wood, working in a tractor repair plant, and nursing his son, whom Red Guards had thrown from the roof of a building, permanently paralyzing him. Mao called Deng back to Beijing the following year, acknowledging that he had "done good deeds seventy percent of the time and bad deeds thirty percent"—only to purge him again in 1976. Always resilient, Deng fled to southern China, hid out, and patiently awaited yet another rehabilitation. It came shortly after Mao's death in September of that year, and by the end of 1978 Deng had outmaneuvered all of his rivals to become China's "paramount" leader. He had already by then turned the tables on his predecessor by claiming that Mao had been right seventy percent of the time and wrong thirty percent: this now became party doctrine. Among the "right" things Mao had done were reviving China as a great power, maintaining the Communist Party's political monopoly, and opening relations with the United States as a way of countering the Soviet Union. Among the "wrong" things was Mao's embrace of a disastrously administered command economy. With this pronouncement on percentages, Deng won himself room to pursue a very different path."

- Deng Xiaoping

0 likesHeads of governmentMilitary leaders from ChinaDiplomats of ChinaCommunistsRevolutionaries
"It was no longer possible to say that only the Western world could become rich through capitalism, so a new narrative took hold: although a few developing countries might be able to enter global markets from the periphery, it is only because they are very small, almost insignificant. Strangely enough, today you sometimes hear the opposite: that developing countries might make it, but only if they are very large. This is due to the transformation of two giants, China and India, which for decades were held back by, in one case, a communist despot, and in the other a democratic but strictly protectionist command economy. Therefore, people said that Chinese and Indians will be successful all over the world – except in China and India. But then, in 1976, China’s dictator Mao Zedong, as the US economist Steven Radelet put it, ‘single-handedly and dramatically changed the direction of global poverty with one single act: he died’. His successor, Deng Xiaoping, began to accept the private enterprise that peasants and villagers secretly engaged in and extended it to the entire economy. All the restrained creativity and ambition was finally let loose and China grew at record speed. Ironically, intellectuals around the world – modern-day Max Webers – soon explained that this is itself not that strange, as Confucianism made it easy to modernize the economy."

- Deng Xiaoping

0 likesHeads of governmentMilitary leaders from ChinaDiplomats of ChinaCommunistsRevolutionaries
"For the Napoleonic myth is based less on Napoleon’s merits than on the facts, then unique, of his career. The great known world-shakers of the past had begun as kings like Alexander or patricians like Julius Caesar; but Napoleon was the ‘little corporal’ who rose to rule a continent by sheer personal talent. (This was not strictly true, but his rise was sufficiently meteoric and high to make the description reasonable.) Every young intellectual who devoured books, as the young Bonaparte had done, wrote bad poems and novels, and adored Rousseau could henceforth see the sky as his limit, laurels surrounding his monogram. Every businessman henceforth had a name for his ambition: to be—the clichés themselves say so—a ‘Napoleon of finance’ or industry. All common men were thrilled by the sight, then unique, of a common man who became greater than those born to wear crowns. Napoleon gave ambition a personal name at the moment when the double revolution had opened the world to men of ambition. Yet he was more. He was the civilized man of the eighteenth century, rationalist, inquisitive, enlightened, but with sufficient of the disciple of Rousseau about him to be also the romantic man of the nineteenth. He was the man of the Revolution, and the man who brought stability. In a word, he was the figure every man who broke with tradition could identify himself with in his dreams. For the French he was also something much simpler: the most successful ruler in their long history. He triumphed gloriously abroad; but at home he also established or re-established the apparatus of French institutions as they exist to this day. Admittedly most—perhaps all—his ideas were anticipated by Revolution and Directory; his personal contribution was to make them rather more conservative, hierarchical and authoritarian. But his predecessors anticipated: he carried out. The great lucid monuments of French law, the Codes which became models for the entire non-Anglo-Saxon bourgeois world, were Napoleonic. The hierarchy of officials, from the prefects down, of courts, of university and schools, was his. The great ‘careers’ of French public life, army, civil service, education, law still have their Napoleonic shapes. He brought stability and prosperity to all except the quarter-of-a-million Frenchmen who did not return from his wars; and even to their relatives he brought glory. No doubt the British saw themselves fighting for liberty against tyranny; but in 1815 most Englishmen were probably poorer and worse off than they had been in 1800, while most Frenchmen were almost certainly better off; nor had any except the still negligible wage-labourers lost the substantial economic benefits of the Revolution. There is little mystery about the persistence of Bonapartism as an ideology of non-political Frenchmen, especially the richer peasantry, after his fall. It took a second and smaller Napoleon to dissipate it between 1851 and 1870. He had destroyed only one thing: the Jacobin Revolution, the dream of equality, liberty and fraternity, and of the people rising in its majesty to shake off oppression. It was a more powerful myth than his, for after his fall it was this, and not his memory, which inspired the revolutions of the nineteenth century, even in his own country."

- Eric Hobsbawm

0 likesAcademics from the United KingdomNon-fiction authors from the United KingdomHistorians from the United KingdomCommunistsMarxists
"Much less useful, I think however, is the search for deep structures and particularly the search for la conscience. I may be entirely heterodox, but I don't think historians have an awful lot to learn from Freud, who was a bad historian, whenever he actually wrote anything about history. I have no opinions about Freud's psychology, but I regard the belated discovery of Freud in France some forty years after the rest of the world as by no means an unqualified plus. It seems to me it is a minus, insofar as it diverts attention into the unconscious or deep structures from, I won't say conscious, but anyway logical cohesion. It neglects system. It seems to me the problem of mentalities is not simply that of discovering that people are different, and how they are different, and making readers feel the difference, as Richard Cobb does so well. It is to find a logical connection between various forms of behaviour, of thinking and feeling, to see them as being mutually consistent. It is, if you like, to see why it makes sense, let us say, for people to believe about famous robbers that they are invisible and invulnerable, even though they obviously are not. We must see such beliefs not purely as an emotional reaction but as part of a coherent system of beliefs about society, about the role of those who believe, and the role of those about whom the beliefs are held."

- Eric Hobsbawm

0 likesAcademics from the United KingdomNon-fiction authors from the United KingdomHistorians from the United KingdomCommunistsMarxists
"The Russian Revolution really has two interwoven histories: its impact on Russia and its impact on the world. We must not confuse the two. Without the second, few except a handful of specialist historians would ever have been concerned with it. Outside the USA not many people know more about the American Civil War than that it is the setting of Gone with the Wind. And yet it was both the greatest war between 1815 and 1914 and by far the greatest in American history, and can also claim to have been something like a second American revolution. It meant and means much inside the USA but very little outside, for it had very little obvious effect on what happened in other countries, other than those beyond its southern borders. On the other hand, both in Russian history and in twentieth-century world history the Russian Revolution is a towering phenomenon - but not the same kind of phenomenon. What has it meant for the Russian peoples? It brought Russia to the peak of its international power and prestige - far beyond anything achieved under the Tsars. Stalin is as certain of a major permanent place in Russian history as Peter the Great. It modernized much of a backward country, but although its achievements were titanic - not least the ability to defeat Germany in the Second World War - their human cost was enormous, its dead-end economy was destined to run down and its political system broke down. Admittedly, for most of its inhabitants who can remember, the old Soviet era certainly looks far better than what the former Soviet peoples are going through now, and will go on doing so for a good long while. But it is too early to draw up a historical balance-sheet."

- Eric Hobsbawm

0 likesAcademics from the United KingdomNon-fiction authors from the United KingdomHistorians from the United KingdomCommunistsMarxists
"In 1968 I was a member of an attentive and admiring student audience whom Eric Hobsbawm was addressing on the theme, as I recall, of the limits of student radicalism. I remember very well his conclusion, since it ran so counter to the mood of the hour. Sometimes, he reminded us, the point is not to change the world but to interpret it. But in order to interpret the world one has also to have a certain empathy with the ways in which it has changed. His latest book is a challenging, often brilliant, and always cool and intelligent account of the world we have now inherited. If it is not up to his very best work it should be recalled just how demanding a standard he has set. But there are one or two crucial changes that have taken place in the world—the death of Communism, for instance, or the related loss of faith in history and the therapeutic functions of the state about which the author is not always well pleased. That is a pity, since it shapes and sometimes misshapes his account in ways that may lessen its impact upon those who most need to read and learn from it. And I missed, in his version of the twentieth century, the ruthlessly questioning eye which has made him so indispensable a guide to the nineteenth. In a striking apologia pro vita sua, Eric Hobsbawm reminds us that historians are “the professional remembrancers of what their fellow-citizens wish to forget.” It is a demanding and unforgiving injunction."

- Eric Hobsbawm

0 likesAcademics from the United KingdomNon-fiction authors from the United KingdomHistorians from the United KingdomCommunistsMarxists
"Every today is at the same time both a cradle and a shroud: a shroud for yesterday, a cradle for tomorrow. Today, yesterday, and tomorrow are equally near to one another, and equally far. They are generations, they are grandfathers, fathers, and grandsons. And grandsons invariably love and hate the fathers; the fathers invariably hate and love the grandfathers. Today is doomed to die — because yesterday died, and because tomorrow will be born. Such is the wise and cruel law. Cruel, because it condemns to eternal dissatisfaction those who already today see the distant peaks of tomorrow; wise, because eternal dissatisfaction is the only pledge of eternal movement forward, eternal creation. He who has found his ideal today is, like Lot's wife, already turned to a pillar of salt, has already sunk into the earth and does not move ahead. The world is kept alive only by heretics: the heretic Christ, the heretic Copernicus, the heretic Tolstoy. Our symbol of faith is heresy: tomorrow is an inevitable heresy of today, which has turned into a pillar of salt, and to yesterday, which has scattered to dust. Today denies yesterday, but is a denial of denial tomorrow. This is the constant dialectic path which in a grandiose parabola sweeps the world into infinity. Yesterday, the thesis; today, the antithesis, and tomorrow, the synthesis."

- Yevgeny Zamyatin

0 likesScience fiction authorsCommunistsNovelists from RussiaShort story writers from RussiaSatirists from Russia
"I claimed that "individualist anarchism and communist anarchism are the same, or nearly so, in terms of moral motivations and ultimate goals". I know that one could counter my claim with hundreds of texts and plenty of deeds of self-proclaimed individualist anarchists, which would demonstrate that individualist anarchist and communist anarchist are separated by something of a moral abyss. However, I deny that that kind of individualists can be included among anarchists, despite their liking for calling themselves so. If anarchy means non-government, non-domination, non-oppression by man over man, how can one call himself anarchist without lying to himself and the others, when he frankly claims that he would oppress the others for the satisfaction of his Ego, without any scruple or limit, other than that drawn by his own strength? He can be a rebel, because he is being oppressed and he fights to become an oppressor, as other nobler rebels fight to destroy any kind of oppression; but he sure cannot be anarchist. He is a would-be bourgeois, a would-be tyrant, who is unable to accomplish his dreams of dominion and wealth by his own strength and by legal means, and therefore he approaches anarchists to exploit their moral and material solidarity. Therefore, I think the question is not about "communists" and "individualists", but rather about anarchists and non-anarchists. And we, or at least many of us, were quite wrong in discussing a certain kind of alleged "anarchist individualism" as if it really was one of the various tendencies of anarchism, instead of fighting it as one of the many disguises of authoritarianism."

- Errico Malatesta

0 likesAnarchistsCommunistsAtheistsPeople from Campania
"In the anarchist milieu, communism, individualism, collectivism, mutualism and all the intermediate and eclectic programmes are simply the ways considered best for achieving freedom and solidarity in economic life; the ways believed to correspond more closely with justice and freedom for the distribution of the means of production and the products of labour among men. Bakunin was an anarchist, and he was a collectivist, an outspoken enemy of communism because he saw in it the negation of freedom and, therefore, of human dignity. And with Bakunin, and for a long time after him, almost all the Spanish anarchists were collectivists (collective property of soil, raw materials and means of production, and assignment of the entire product of labour to the producer, after deducting the necessary contribution to social charges), and yet they were among the most conscious and consistent anarchists. Others for the same reason of defence and guarantee of liberty declare themselves to be individualists and they want each person, to have as individual property the part that is due to him of the means of production and therefore the free disposal of the products of his labour. Others invent more or less complicated system of mutuality. But in the long run it is always the searching for a more secure guarantee of freedom which is the common factor among anarchists, and which divides them into different schools."

- Errico Malatesta

0 likesAnarchistsCommunistsAtheistsPeople from Campania
"Every new idea stems from one or a few individuals, is accepted, if viable, by a more or less sizeable minority and wins over the majority, if ever, only after it has been superseded by new ideas and new needs and has already become outdated and rather an obstacle, rather than a spur to progress. But do we, then, want a minority government? Certainly not. If it is unjust and harmful for a majority to oppress minorities and obstruct progress, it is even more unjust and harmful for a minority to oppress the whole population or impose its own ideas by force which even if they are good ones would excite repugnance and opposition because of the very fact of being imposed. And then, one must not forget that there are all kinds of different minorities. There are minorities of egoists and villains as there are of fanatics who believe themselves to be possessed of absolute truth and, in perfectly good faith, seek to impose on others what they hold to be the only way to salvation, even if it is simple silliness. There are minorities of reactionaries who seek to turn back the clock and are divided as to the paths and limits of reaction. And there are revolutionary minorities, also divided on the means and ends of revolution and on the direction that social progress should take. Which minority should take over? This is a matter of brute force and capacity for intrigue, and the odds that success would fall to the most sincere and most devoted to the general good are not favourable. To conquer power one needs qualities that are not exactly those that are needed to ensure that justice and well-being will triumph in the world."

- Errico Malatesta

0 likesAnarchistsCommunistsAtheistsPeople from Campania
"In Bulgaria, the key development was not people power, but rather a crisis in the Communist Party as the elderly leader (he was born in 1911), Todor Zhivkov, First Secretary of the Bulgarian Communist Party since 1954, no longer enjoyed the confidence of many of his colleagues, and did not have that of Gorbachev. Zhivkov had been completely slavish to the internal policies of the Soviet Union. As was true in all of the Eastern Bloc countries, standards of living, industrialisation, urbanisation, education, medical care and longevity went up in Bulgaria, from the early 1950s into the mid-1980s; having a southerly location helped considerably in encouraging a healthy diet. However, no dissent was tolerated. The intellectual discontent that ebbed and waned in Poland would never have been tolerated in Bulgaria. The Derzhava Sigurnost, Bulgaria’s KGB, were heavily repressive. From the mid-1980s, Zhivkov had expelled ethnic Turks from Bulgaria, forcing some 200,000–300,000 of them to flee to Turkey. Zhivkov did not have the mentality of a reformer although in the last month or so of his rule he introduced pseudo-reforms. However, in November 1989, opposition by Politburo colleagues led to his resignation. A pro-Gorbachev group took power in Bulgaria only to find itself under pressure from public expectations. Elections, held in June 1990, led to the former Communists winning power. Nevertheless, their inability to deal with the serious economic crisis and with strikes resulted in the formation in December of a coalition. The new constitution, promulgated in July 1991, was that of a democratic state."

- Todor Zhivkov

0 likesPoliticians from BulgariaHeads of governmentCommunistsAnti-fascistsMayors
"In their native countries, Roosevelt and Churchill are regarded as examples of wise statesmen. But we, during our jail conversations, were astonished by their constant shortsightedness and even stupidity. How could they, retreating gradually from 1941 to 1945, leave Eastern Europe without any guarantees of independence? How could they abandon the large territories of Saxony and Thuringia in return for such a ridiculous toy as the four-zoned Berlin that, moreover, was later to become their Achille’s heel? And what kind of military or political purpose did they see in giving away hundreds of thousands of armed Soviet citizens (who were unwilling to surrender, whatever the terms) for Stalin to have them killed? It is said that by doing this, that they secured the imminent participation of Stalin in the war against Japan. Already armed with the Atomic bomb, they did pay for Stalin so that he wouldn’t refuse to occupy Manchuria to help Mao Zedong to gain power in China and Kim Il Sung, to get half of Korea!… Oh, misery of political calculation! When later Mikolajczyk was expelled, when the end of Beneš and Masaryk came, Berlin was blocked, Budapest was in flames and turned silent, when ruins fumed in Korea and when the conservatives fled from Suez – didn’t really some of those who had a better memory, recall for instance the episode of giving away the Cossacks?"

- Kim Il-sung

0 likesCommunistsMarxist-LeninistsHeads of stateNationalistsRevolutionaries
"And on December 17th the Romanian dictator Nicolai Ceausescu, desperate to preserve his own regime, ordered his army to follow the Chinese example and shoot down demonstrators in Timisoara. Ninety-seven were killed, but that only fueled the unrest, leading Ceausescu to call a mass rally of what he thought would be loyal supporters in Bucharest on December 21st. They turned out not to be, began jeering him, and before it could be cut off the official television transmission caught his deer-in-the-headlights astonishment as he failed to calm the crowd. Ceausescu and his wife, Elena, fled the city by helicopter but were quickly captured, put on trial, and executed by firing squad on Christmas Day. Twenty-one days earlier, Ceausescu had met with Gorbachev in the Kremlin. Recent events in Eastern Europe, he warned, had placed "in grave danger not just socialism in the respective countries but also the very existence of the communist parties there." "You seem concerned about this," Gorbachev responded, sounding more like a therapist than a Kremlin boss. "[T]ell me, what can we do?" Ceausescu suggested vaguely: "[W]e could have a meeting and discuss possible solutions." That would not be enough, Gorbachev replied: change was necessary; otherwise one might wind up having to solve problems "under the marching of boots." But the East European prime ministers would be meeting on January 9th. And then Gorbachev unwisely assured his anxious guest: "You shall be alive on the 9[th of] January.""

- Nicolae Ceaușescu

0 likesCommunistsLeninistsPresidents of RomaniaNationalistsAnti-fascists
"In 1947 the Communists ousted their erstwhile allies from government, and in 1952 Dej became de facto dictator of Romania. With the elevation of his mentor, Ceausescu was able to secure his own position, and when Dej died in 1965, Ceausescu became party leader and head of state. Many Romanians hoped their new leader would inaugurate a period of greater liberalization and reform. In August 1968 such expectations intensified after Ceausescu’s denunciation of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, and his defiant line made him a genuinely popular figure within Romania, and earned plaudits from the West. Nevertheless, he was quick to assure the Soviets that his country would remain a loyal member of the Eastern Bloc. Early optimism started to dissipate as Ceausescu began to fantasize about turning Romania into a world industrial power house; and as he did so, prospects for liberalization receded. Instead, Ceausescu became obsessed with shoring up his monopoly of power, and to this end he introduced a process of continual job rotation by which functionaries at every level were ordered to change position regularly, with the intention that no one would be able to build up a power base to challenge him. The fact that the system also led to administrative chaos does not seem to have troubled Ceausescu, who in March 1974 assumed the ability to rule by decree alone. His wife Elena became increasingly powerful as vice-premier, politburo member and self-declared ‘Mother of the Nation’: the Ceausescus ruled as a gruesome partnership and stories of her greed, ruthlessness and vainglory abounded."

- Nicolae Ceaușescu

0 likesCommunistsLeninistsPresidents of RomaniaNationalistsAnti-fascists
"Ceausescu determined to combine the values of socialism with an ever more strident Romanian nationalism. This resulted in an increasingly bizarre series of campaigns aimed at cementing Romania’s national greatness. In March 1984, for example, concerned at the country’s low birth rate, Ceausescu decreed that women of child-bearing age were required to have monthly gynaecological examinations under the watchful eye of the Securitate, and if they were not pregnant had to justify why not. By the 1980s, as the country faced a mounting debt crisis, Ceausescu resolved to pay off Romania’s creditors by the end of the decade. To achieve this he ordered the mass exportation of the country’s agricultural produce and industrial manufactures. The result was a collapse in the standard of living, and the deaths of thousands as a result of poor nutrition and lack of modern medical care. Ceausescu responded by introducing austerity measures such as the ‘Rational Eating Programme’, which set per capita limits on consumption. The long-suffering people of Romania were finally released from the tyrant’s grip when the popular revolutions of 1989 brought the totalitarian regimes of Eastern Europe crashing down. The fall of the ‘Genius of the Carpathians’ proved to be bloody: after a summary trial, on Christmas Day 1989 he and his wife Elena were executed by firing squad as he sang the ‘Internationale’ and she shouted “You motherf-1s!’"

- Nicolae Ceaușescu

0 likesCommunistsLeninistsPresidents of RomaniaNationalistsAnti-fascists
"Like Alia, Nicolae Ceausescu spat on all talk of reform in Romania. He took one of his regular opportunities to strut before an adoring multitude on 21 December when he appeared on the balcony of his grandiose Central Committee premises in Bucharest. The crowd had been filtered through the usual mechanisms. The police were on guard as was customary. Ceausescu, flanked by wife and close aides, strode forward to address the usually subservient ‘masses’. Barely had he begun to speak than grumbling voices were heard. The Conduc tor, as he styled himself in a manner uncomfortably reminiscent of fascist dictators, was unaccustomed to this. On instinct he harangued his critics. The crowd turned surly. It was like a scene from a clichéd film ‘epic’ about ancient Rome. (This was fitting since Ceausescu had always tried to identify himself with the greatness of the Roman Empire.) People muttered, advanced, shouted and raised their fists. The security forces refrained from trying to restore order. Ceausescu suddenly understood the danger he was in. He scuffled in panic from the scene, took a helicopter to the countryside and briefly attempted to rally support. No one came to his aid. Leading communists were among those who stepped forward to announce the collapse – the most sudden and glorious collapse in a half-year of such collapses – of communist power. There was no mercy for the Ceausescu couple. The new authorities did not want them alive and able to tell the story of the part played by their successors in the maintenance of communism before 1989. They were shot on 25 December."

- Nicolae Ceaușescu

0 likesCommunistsLeninistsPresidents of RomaniaNationalistsAnti-fascists
"Ethiopian communists were hardly more effective in setting up a stable regime. Stirrings in the armed forces against Emperor Haile Selassie led in 1974 to the formation of the Co-ordinating Committee (Derg). This body steadily stripped the Emperor of his powers. Its own members were deeply divided and its first leader Lieutenant General Aman Andom was killed in factional strife. The radical wing of the Derg, headed by Major Mengistu Haile Mariam, took dictatorial control. Mengistu declared rural land to be ‘the property of the Ethiopian people’ and distributed it to peasant cooperatives. He quickly moved to a communist ideological commitment. Supporters of the Imperial regime resisted him even after the murder of the Emperor in August 1975. Ethnic groups, especially the Eritreans and the Somalis, fought to secede from the Ethiopian state. Mengistu also confronted opposition in the Derg. His response was to conduct a Red Terror. This finally lost him financial aid from the USA, which supported him against the Soviet-backed Eritrean rebels; but by then he could count on support from the USSR, which had ceased to favour the Eritrean rebels. In February 1977 Mengistu killed his surviving rivals and critics in the Derg. Finance, arms and military advisers in large quantities were transported to Ethiopia from Moscow. Cubans too were dispatched. Ethiopia had become a geostrategic outpost of world communism in the Horn of Africa."

- Mengistu Haile Mariam

0 likesCommunistsHeads of statePeople from EthiopiaAnti-apartheid activistsAtheists
"The poet that fully realizes the creative potential of conflict is César Vallejo. Poor, illegitimate, and shamed since childhood for his mestizo origin, he wrote from his experience as Garcilaso had done four hundred years before. But his orientation was radically different. Vallejo searched for unity, the connectedness of all peoples: "Oh exalted unity! Oh that which is one/for all!/Love against space and time!" and he found it in sound, in the intonation of his mother's voice. She held to the indigenous music while speaking Spanish. In "Trilce XXIII" the poet speaks of his mother, then he speaks to her. By the end we hear her voice as his when he says, "dí, mamá"...Poe, Mallarmé, and Baudelaire had already disrupted poetic diction by incorporating silence and the dark side of the soul. José María Eguren understood it as a philosophical and formal lesson. But Vallejo added two more elements: the Andean aesthetics of dissonance, which had been invisible in writing until then, and the ethical dimension of compassion. This was a monumental achievement. In a single poetic line, his verbs and nouns fight each other as people do in Andean ritual festivals, where dissonance operates through a clash perceived as unity (solidarity). In these festivals, dissonant sounds are experienced as "a single heartbeat"....Today, despite the onslaught of globalization, mestizo poetry continues to thrive. José Lezama Lima wrote that "a secret pulsation of the invisible moves towards the image, and the image desires to know and be known." The reciprocal exchange within the image is thus transformed into a new understanding of life force. A few decades before, Vallejo wrote that artists engender revolutions by creating "a cosmic hunger for human justice." The poet's work is to give shape to "the new chords that will produce those tones." Placing poetry in the vibratory field where perception participates in the co-creation of the world, Vallejo reclaims poetry's full potential, echoing the early vision of Huidobro: "Poetry is the life of life.""

- César Vallejo

0 likesPoets from PeruMarxistsCommunists
"Mengistu had built a confinement ward almost to rival Pol Pot’s in the lunatic asylum of communist politics. Far from being controllable, he had used Soviet and Cuban assistance more or less as he liked. The same was true in Afghanistan. Two communist groups, Khalq and Parcham, had existed since the mid-1960s. These were bitter rivals but formed themselve into a united People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan and campaigned against President Mohammed Daoud and his slow pace of reform. Modernity seemed to be postponed for decades. In April 1978 the Khalq carried out a successful coup against the Daoud government and Khalq leaders Hafizullah Amin and Nur Mohammed Taraki seized power. This came as a surprise to the Kremlin, which had been supporting Daoud. Parcham warned Moscow of the dangers of Khalq extremism. Amin pressed on with executions of the regime’s open enemies. Civil war broke out. Islamist rebellions of the various ethnic groups sprang up everywhere. Amin sought to win support by announcing a campaign for universal literacy and land reform. But little was achievable in an environment of unending violence and social insecurity. Amin had Taraki murdered in October 1979; he was also showing signs of wanting a rapprochement with Washington. It was in this situation of political disintegration and intensifying carnage that the Soviet leadership took its fateful decision to intervene militarily in December."

- Hafizullah Amin

0 likesPresidents of AfghanistanCommunistsLeninistsMurdered peopleColumbia University alumni
"Interviewer: I know that the comparison between the Jewish fate and the Palestinian fate bothers you, because it hints at a kind of “contest” over who is the greater victim. Darwish: First of all, this comparison doesn’t bother me as long as we are speaking from a place of literary concern. In this domain, nationalism doesn’t exist. I think that this neurosis about whether or not one should accept the comparison will be resolved along with peace. The Jew won’t be ashamed to find the Arab element within him, and the Arab won’t be ashamed to acknowledge that he is also composed of Jewish elements. Especially when speaking about “Eretz Israel” in Hebrew and "Palestine" in Arabic. I am a son of all the cultures that have passed through the land—the Greek, the Roman, the Persian, the Jewish, the Ottoman. A presence that exists at the very core of my language. Every powerful culture passed through and left something. I am the son of all these fathers, but I belong to one mother. Does that mean that my mother is a prostitute? My mother is this earth; she received all of them. She was both a witness and a victim. I am also the son of the Jewish culture that was in Palestine. That’s why I don’t recoil from the comparison. But because of the political tension—which says that if Israel is here the Palestinians must be absent, and that if the Palestinians are here then Israel must be absent—we haven’t accepted the fact that we are the products of similar conditions and have competed with each other over who is the greater victim."

- Mahmoud Darwish

0 likesPoets from PalestineMuslimsCommunistsRefugeesLenin Peace Prize recipients
"...We should try to link our personal lives with the cause for which we struggle, with the cause of building communism...This, of course, does not mean that we should renounce our personal life. The Party of communism is not a sect, and so such asceticism should not be advocated. At a factory, I once heard a woman addressing her work-mates say: "Comrades working women, you should remember that once you join the Party you have to give up husband and children." Of course, this is not the approach to the question. It is not a matter of neglecting husband and children, but of training the children to become fighters for communism, to arrange things so that the husband becomes such a fighter, too. One has to know how to merge one's life with the life of society. This is not asceticism. On the contrary, the fact of this merging, the fact that the common cause of all working people becomes a personal matter, makes personal life richer. It does not become poorer, it offers deep and colourful experiences which humdrum family life has never provided. To know how to merge one's life with work for communism, with the work and struggle of the working people to build communism, is one of the tasks that face us. You, young people, are only just starting out on your lives, and you can build them so that there is no gap between your personal life and that of society..."

- Nadezhda Krupskaya

0 likesRevolutionariesMinisters of Russia and the Soviet UnionAuthors from RussiaMarxistsCommunists
"Confronted by the increase in the aggressive strivings on the part of American imperialism, directed against the socialist community and the peaceful life of the peoples of various continents, the Soviet Union and the other countries of socialism were forced to take steps to reinforce their defensive might, as the chief means of bridling the imperialistic forces of aggression. This finds the understanding and support of all the peace-loving forces. The Soviet Union and its Armed Forces have repeatedly proven their adherence to the cause of peace and their faithfulness to their pledges to serve as allies of their friends. We view the concern shown by the Soviet leadership for the Soviet Armed Forces to be noble efforts for preserving the peace and guaranteeing the peaceful life of the peoples of all the continents. Everyone who treasures peace and calm on the earth looks hopefully and trustingly toward the Soviet Union, justly seeing in the first state of workers and peasants a might defender and an invincible bulwark of peace on our planet. And so today, on the eve of the glorious anniversary of the Great October, it is especially gratifying for us to note that the Soviet Union, undeviatingly following the behests of the great Lenin, holds high the banner of peace and progress, under which newer and newer nations from various continents on the earth are consolidating themselves."

- Yumjaagiin Tsedenbal

0 likesCommunistsAtheistsHeads of statePrime Ministers of MongoliaMilitary leaders