Maoists

"We want only peace, to build up our country. World opinion is paying great attention to the threat against Democratic Kampuchea. They are anxious. They fear Kampuchea cannot oppose the Vietnamese. This could hurt the interests of the Southeast Asian countries and all of the world's countries."

"Our policy was to provide an affluent life for the people. There were mistakes made in carrying it out. Several thousand people may have died."

"The standard of the [[Russian Revolution|[Bolshevik] revolution]] of November 7, 1917, was raised very high, but Khrushchev pulled it down. The standard of Mao's [[Chinese Civil War|[Chinese] revolution]] of 1949 stands high until now, but it has faded and is wavering: it is no longer firm. The standard of the [Cambodian] revolution of April 17, 1975, raised by Comrade Pol Pot, is brilliant red, full of determination, wonderfully firm and wonderfully clear-sighted. The whole world admires us, sings our praises and learns from us."

"Everything I did, I did for my country."

"First, I would like to tell you that I came to carry out the struggle, not to kill people. Even now, and you can look at me, am I savage person? My conscience is clear."

"There's what we did wrong and what we did right. The mistake is that we did some things against the people — by us and also by the enemy — but the other side, as I told you, is that without our struggle there would be no Cambodia right now."

"Tuol Sleng was a Vietnamese exhibition; a journalist wrote that. People talk about Tuol Sleng, Tuol Sleng, Tuol Sleng, but when we look at the pictures, the pictures are the same. When I first heard about Tuol Sleng, it was on VOA [Voice of America]. I listened twice."

"Whoever wishes to blame or attack me is entitled to do so. I regret I didn't have enough experience to totally control the movement. On the other hand, with our constant struggle, this had to be done together with others in the communist world to stop Kampuchea becoming Vietnamese."

"When I die, my only wish is that Cambodia remain Cambodia and belong to the West. It is over for communism, and I want to stress that."

"We did not yet have laws or order. We were like children just learning to walk."

"I was responsible for everything so I accept responsibility and blame but show me, comrade, one document proving that I was personally responsible for the deaths."

"Dreams of a Communist utopia inspired Pol Pot to kill more than a million Cambodians. Mao, Stalin, and Hitler had more victims, but Pol Pot, without a war, destroyed a greater proportion of his population than anyone else in history. His three years in power so devastated the country that, nearly 30 years later, it is still recovering. He led such a clandestine existence that few reliable details of history are known and virtually nothing about his private life"

"There was, to be sure, a great deal to regret about the Cold War: the running of risks with everyone's future; the resources expended for useless armaments; the environmental and health consequences of massive military-industrial complexes; the repression that blighted the lives of entire generations; the loss of life that all too often accompanied it. No tyrant anywhere had ever executed a fifth of his own people, and yet the Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot did precisely this in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. The future will surely remember that atrocity when it has forgotten much else about the Cold War, and yet hardly anyone outside of Cambodia noticed at the time. There was no trial for crimes against humanity: Pol Pot died in a simple shack along the Thai border in 1998, and was unceremoniously cremated on a heap of junk and old tires. At least there was no mausoleum."

"In Cambodia, the Cambodian people, communists and patriots, have risen against the barbarous government of Pol Pot, which was nothing but a group of provocateurs in the service of the imperialist bourgeoisie and of the Chinese revisionists, in particular, which had as its aim to discredit the idea of socialism in the international arena... The anti-popular line of that regime is confirmed, also, by the fact that the Albanian embassy in the Cambodian capital, the embassy of a country which has given the people of Cambodia every possible aid, was kept isolated, indeed, encircled with barbed wire, as if it were in a concentration camp. The other embassies, too, were in a similar situation. The Albanian diplomats have seen with their own eyes that the Cambodian people were treated inhumanly by the clique of Pol Pot and Yeng Sari. Pnom Pen was turned into a deserted city, empty of people, where food was difficult to secure even for the diplomats, where no doctors or even aspirins could be found. We think that the people and patriots of Cambodia waited too long before overthrowing this clique which was completely linked with Beijing and in its service."

"He said that he knows that many people in the country hate him so much and think he's responsible for the killings. He said that he knows many people died. When he said this he nearly broke down and cried. He said he must accept responsibility because the line was too far to the left, and because he didn't keep proper track of what was going on. He said he was like the master in a house he didn't know what the kids were up to, and that he trusted people too much."

"Pol Pot makes a very powerful impression on those who hear him for the first time. After that, they want to come back... those who attend his seminars feel enlightened by his teaching, his explanations and his vision... he's like a father to us."

"Dictators, perhaps because they know their own lies so well, have usually realized the power of history. Consequently, they have tried to rewrite, deny, or destroy the past. Robespierre in revolutionary France and Pol Pot in 1970s Cambodia each set out to start society from the beginning again. Robespierre’s new calendar and Pol Pot's Year Zero were designed to erase the past and its suggestions that there were alternative ways of organizing society."

"Pol Pot, the communist Khmer Rouge leader who created the democidal hell known as Democratic Kampuchea, only ruled Cambodia for four years, but in that short time he murdered millions of innocent people — half the population — impoverished the country, killed all intellectuals, or even people who wore spectacles, and tried to restart time at a diabolic Year Zero."

"In his murderous, almost psychotic, schemes for a communist utopia, Pol Pot, Brother Number One, outran anything in George Orwell's imagination. During a reign of just under four years, he oversaw the deaths of between two and five million men, women and children — over a third of the entire population of Cambodia."

"He was always a good husband. He tried his best to educate the children not to be traitors. Since I married him in 1985, I never saw him do a bad thing ... what I would like the world to know was that he was a good man, a patriot, a good father."

"In April 1998 one of history's most reviled mass murderers died. This was a leader who showed his people no mercy. As ruler of Cambodia Pol Pot was responsible for killing 2 million people. That's a quarter of the country's population. During his four year reign Pol Pot tortured and starved the Cambodians to death. Men, women, children and babies were often brutally clubbed to death with hammers and buried alive. As the architect of a brutal social experiment driven by racial and political hatred Pol Pot's regime left behind a tragic legacy of misery and mass graves."

"Springer would rather risk his workers and staff being injured by a bomb than risk losing a couple of hours of work time, and therefore profit, as a result of a false alarm. For capitalists, profit is everything, and the people who make it for them are dirt. We regret that workers and staff were injured."

"Some people say robbing banks is not political. Since when is the question of financing a political organization not a political question? The urban guerrilla in Lain America calls bank robberies "expropriation actions." Nobody is claiming that robbing banks will be all it takes to change the oppressive social order. For revolutionary organizations, it mainly represents the solution o their financial problems. It makes logical sense, because is no other solution to the financial problem. It makes political sense , because it is an expropriation action. It makes tactical sense, because it is a proletarian action. It makes strategic sense, because it finances the guerrilla."

"Dare to struggle; dare to win! Attack and smash the power of imperialism! It is the duty of every revolutionary to make the revolution!We call on all militants in the Federal Republic to make all American establishments targets of their attacks in their struggle against US imperialism! Long live the RAF!"

"The political-military actions of the urban guerrilla are never directed against the people. The RAF's attacks target the imperialist apparatus, its military, political, economic, and cultural institutions and its functionaries in the repressive and ideological state structures."

"In its offensive against the state, the urban guerilla cannot resort to terrorism as a weapon. The urban guerilla operates in the rift between the state and the masses, working to widen it and to develop political consciousness, revolutionary solidarity, and the proletarian power against the state."

"Life in the penal institution is one in which work time, free tie, and quiet time are carefully divided, and the prisoner is bound to this division. Life in the penal institution is life in barracks. It consists of sitting around. Life in the penal institution is divided into time for oppression, time for bondage, and time of dead silence. The time of unconsciousness are over. The time for realism has begun."

"Either a human or pig Either to survive at any price or to struggle until death Either part of the problem or part of the solution Between the two there is nothing."

"It is pointless to explain the right thing to the wrong people. We’ve done enough of that. We don’t want to explain the action to free Baader to babbling intellectuals, to those who are freaked out, to know-it-alls, but rather to the potentially revolutionary section of the people. That is to say, to those who can immediately understand this action, because they are themselves prisoners. Those who want nothing to do with the blather of the “left,” because it remains without meaning or consequence. Those who are fed up!"

"They are the ones who must understand the action; those who receive no compensation for the exploitation they must suffer. Not in their standard of living, not in their consumption, not in the form of mortgages, not in the form of even limited credit, not in the form of midsize cars. Those who cannot even hope for these baubles, who are not seduced by all of that. Those who have realized that the future promised to them by their teachers and professors and landlords and social workers and supervisors and foremen and union representatives and city councilors is nothing more than an empty lie, but who nonetheless fear the police. It is only necessary that they—and not the petit bourgeois intellectuals— understand that all of that is over now, that this is a start, that the liberation of Baader is only the beginning!"

"If the red army is not simultaneously built, then all conflict, all the political work carried out in the factories and in Wedding and in the Märkisch neighborhood6 and at Plötze and in the courtrooms is reduced to reformism; which is to say, you end up with improved discipline, improved intimidation, and improved exploitation. That destroys the people, rather than destroying what destroys the people! If we don’t build the red army, the pigs can do what they want, the pigs can continue to incarcerate, lay off, impound, seize children, intimidate, shoot, and dominate. To bring the conflict to a head means that they are no longer able to do what they want, but rather must do what we want them to do."

"Forget about the cowardly shits, the bootlickers, the social workers, those who only attempt to curry favor, they are a lumpen mob. Figure out where the asylums are and the large families and the subproletariat and the women workers, those who are only waiting to give a kick in the teeth to those who deserve it. They will take the lead. And don’t let yourselves get caught. Learn from them how one avoids getting caught—they know more about that than you. DEVELOP THE CLASS STRUGGLE ORGANIZE THE PROLETARIAT START THE ARMED STRUGGLE BUILD THE RED ARMY!"

"Some comrades have already made up their minds about us. For them, it is the “demagoguery of the bourgeois press” that links these “anarchist groups” with the socialist movement. In their incorrect and pejorative use of the term anarchism, they are no different than the Springer Press. We don’t want to engage anyone in dialogue on such a shabby basis."

"Almost everything the newspapers have written about us—and the way they write it—has clearly been a lie."

"Using the smokescreen of “the common good,” the government has established state control and curbed the union bureaucracy with its wage guidelines and its notion of concerted action."

"To dismiss the student movement as a petit bourgeois revolt is to reduce it to the grandiose claims that accompanied it, to deny its roots in the contradiction between bourgeois society and bourgeois ideology; it means recognizing its obvious shortcomings while ignoring the theoretical level that this anticapitalist protest managed to achieve."

"The student revolt in the Federal Republic and West Berlin—with its street fighting, its arsons, its use of counterviolence, its pathos, as well as its exaggerations and ignorance… in short, with its practice—has the merit of having reconstructed Marxism-Leninism, at least in the consciousness of the intelligentsia, as that political theory without which the political, economic, and ideological factors and their outward manifestations cannot be combined into an overall analytical perspective. Without this, internal and external relationships cannot be described."

"The student movement was based on the contradiction between the theory of academic freedom and the reality of monopoly capitalism’s control of the universities. Precisely because it was based on this, and not merely on ideology, it didn’t run out of steam before it had established the relationship between the crisis in the universities and the crisis of capitalism, if only in theory."

"Unlike the proletarian organizations of the New Left, the Red Army Faction doesn’t deny its roots in the history of the student movement, a movement that reshaped Marxism-Leninism into a weapon of class struggle and established the international basis for revolutionary struggle in the metropole."

"We believe that without a revolutionary initiative, without the practical revolutionary intervention of the vanguard, the socialist workers and intellectuals, and without concrete anti-imperialist struggle, there will be no unifying process. Unity can only be created through the common struggle of the conscious section of the working class and the intellectuals, one which they do not stage-manage, but which they model, or else it will not happen at all."

"There will be no leadership role for Marxist-Leninists in future class struggles if the vanguard doesn’t hold up the red banner of proletarian internationalism, if the vanguard can’t answer the question of how to establish the dictatorship of the proletariat, of how to develop the power of the proletariat, of how to break the power of the bourgeoisie, if it isn’t prepared to do anything to answer these questions. The class analysis we require cannot be developed without revolutionary practice or revolutionary initiative."

"It is clear that the massive hunt for us is really directed against the entire socialist left in the Federal Republic and West Berlin. This circus cannot be justified by the small amount of money or the few cars and documents we are alleged to have stolen, or by the attempted murder they’re trying to pin on us. The ruling class has been scared out of its skin. They thought that they had this state and all of its inhabitants, classes, and contradictions under control, right down to the last detail: the intellectuals reduced to their magazines, the left isolated in its own circles, Marxism-Leninism disarmed, and internationalism demoralized. However fragile it may pretend to be, the power structure is not so easily damaged. One should not be tricked by this hue and cry into contributing to all this noise."

"Legality is a question of power. The relationship between legality and illegality has to be determined by examining the contradiction between reformist and fascist domination, whose representatives in Bonn are, on the one hand, the Social-Liberal coalition, and on the other, Barzel and Strauß."

"The concentration of violent power in the hands of the few can occur unopposed if it is done quietly, if unnecessary provocation, which can set a process of solidarity in motion, is avoided—that is something that was learned as a result of the student movement and the Paris May."

"Legality is the ideology of parliamentarianism, of social partnership, and of a pluralistic society. Legality becomes a fetish when those who insist upon it ignore the fact that phones are legally tapped, mail is legally monitored, neighbors are legally interrogated, and informants are legally paid. The organization of political work, if it is not to be under constant observation by the political police, must be simultaneously conducted both legally and illegally."

"The Black September action in Munich has simultaneously clarified both the nature of the imperialist ruling class and of the anti-imperialist struggle, in a way that no revolutionary action in West Germany or West Berlin has. It was simultaneously anti-imperialist, antifascist and internationalist. It indicated an understanding of historical and political connections, that are always the province of the people - that is to say, those from whom profit is sucked, those who are free from complicity with the system, those who have no reason to believe the illusions fostered by their oppressors, no reason to accept the fantasy illusions fostered by their oppressors, no reason to accept the fantasy their oppressors pass off as history, no reason to pay the slightest attention to their version of reality. It revealed the rage and the strength that these revolutionaries get from their close connection to the Palestinian people, a connection resulting in a class consciousness that makes their historical mission to act as a vanguard perfectly clear. Their humanity is firmly based in their knowledge that they must resist this ruling class, a class which as the historical end point of this system of class rule is also the most cunning and the most bloodthirsty that has ever existed. It is based in the knowledge that they must resist this system's character and its tendency towards total imperialist fascism - a form which has many fine representatives: Nixon and Brandt, Moshe Dayan and Genscher, Golda Meir and McGovern."

"The multinational corporations control everything in the countries that imperialism has deprived of the opportunity to develop. They use this control against them. At one and the same time, capital creates divisions, skims profits, and then uses these same projects, investments, and profits to play the countries dependent on them off against each other - they use the very raw materials they rely upon the Third World for to oppress the people of the Third World."

"This idiotic automobile production will be reduced to create a situation suitable to corporate interests: the wiping out of the liberation movements in the Third World. In this way the obstacle presented by the people of the Third World will be eliminated."

"Before 1988 Maoism did not exist. I begin with this counter-intuitive statement in order to clarify the particular theoretical position that is the concern of this book."

"The moment one speaks of returning to the concept of a revolutionary communist party, and motivates this return with a reclamation of past categories of struggle (i.e. the vanguard, proletariat-bourgeoisie, revisionism and anti-revisionism, revolutionary science), every defense mechanism conditioned by the collapse of the Eastern Bloc and the supposed triumph of world capitalism is mobilized to inoculate the reader from ideological contamination."

"Regardless of its mobilization of the name Maoism, it was only a precursor of contemporary Maoism—its skeleton, its DNA—and was ultimately conditioned by the fossil remains of a Leninism that had reached its limit, despite those moments where it yearned for more than Leninist orthodoxy."

"There has been very little understanding amongst the contemporary mainstream left about the history of the name Maoism. Since this mainstream left’s discourse is often determined by anarchist, autonomist, and Trotskyist/post-Trotskyist understandings of history, Maoism is a term attached to a vague understanding of the Chinese Revolution—that is, it is the Marxism practiced by the Chinese Revolution led by the figure of Mao Zedong—and is thus immediately relegated to the past. To speak of “Maoism” is to render oneself more than half-a-century out of date, or worse to enunciate a “Stalinism” with Chinese characteristics. Leaving aside, for the moment, the fact that some of these analyses of Maoism are themselves over-determined by an out-of-date Marxism, there is also the fact that they pass over the anti-revisionist Marxist-Leninist period in silence."

"If anything, Theory of the Subject is a work of Marxist philosophy that contains all of the contradictions reached by Marxism-Leninism, while being, at the same time, aware that these contradictions are contradictions insofar as they point to the necessity of a new rupture in revolutionary science."

"The process of continuity and rupture is internally defined by the process of universality and particularity."

"We need to recognize that Maoism as a concept stands over and above the name of Mao Zedong, just as Marxism and Leninism must stand over the name of Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin, respectively."

"Despite the Stonewall Rebellion, despite decades where queer persons were targeted by the forces of reaction, the RCP-USA maintained a chauvinist position when it came to this identity that, despite being veiled in revolutionary language, was no different in practice than the position of bourgeois society: gays and lesbians were treated as aberrant, their sexuality dismissed as “bourgeois decadence”, and queer members of the RCP-USA were directed towards bizarre re-education practices that were ultimately the same as fundamentalist Christian anti-gay programs"

"Creativity is thus important but creativity should manifest within the boundaries prescribed by history: that is, a creativity understood according to the strictures of the science. While it might be the case that it is creative and “undogmatic” to theorize in a manner that rejects these boundaries and the supposed strictures demanded by historical materialism, such creativity belongs in the fine arts and is rather useless when it comes to the sciences. At best this kind of creativity can pique the imagination and thus spur scientific thought forward; at worst it leads to muddle-headed para-scientific conjectures."

"...Class struggle will affect even Marxist theory where the ruling ideas of the ruling class will be unconsciously ( and sometimes consciously) adopted by some Marxists in a manner that sounds Marxist but it at the same time a rejection of the basis of the science, the necessity of class revolution."

"In the now-failed socialist societies of Russian and China revisionist trends emerged to eventually reinstate capitalism and the latter revolutionary context waged a valiant struggle in an attempt to defeat this trend: the Cultural Revolution"

"Revisionism is an immanent danger for the revolutionary movement; anti-revisionism is an immanent struggle within this movement so as to constantly redefine the movement’s basis. What is meant by “revision” here is a revision of the basis of Marxist theory, that which makes Marxism properly Marxism: the theory of class struggle. When Marxist theory is altered so as to argue that class struggle is no longer necessary, that class revolution is not the motive force of history and that social change can be brought about by a peaceful co-existence between classes (through rational debates, legal reform movements, etc.) then we find ourselves in a theoretical terrain that is no longer Marxist because it is a terrain that already exists, the terrain of liberalism. We will return to the meaning of “revisionist” itself in a later section; what matters at this point is to understand that an opportunistic rejection of the Marxist theory of class struggle that brands itself with the name “Marxist” is always a possibility with each and every creative adaptation of Marxist theory to particular contexts."

"Revisionists believe that the cardinal sin of communism is not opportunism but "infantile ultra-leftism" and, basing themselves on a selective reading of Lenin's analysis of ultra-leftism, will argue that any criticism of revisionist practice (any open demand for a revolutionary politics that produces militant practice) is the very ultra-leftism that threatens the left."

"With politicians and police on his side, the only hurdle to this Zamindar was this bourgeois, idealistic youth, influenced by the doctrines of Mao Zedong who led a peasant army to bring about a successful revolution. The void created by the State was slowly getting occupied by the youth. This idealistic youth had to rise. He had to protest. He had to fight. Then, one fine morning, in Naxalbari, a group of hungry and exploited peasants, armed with crude weapons rose to fight for what was rightfully theirs – the land and the crop. They attacked landlords, seized granaries and stole paddy, burnt all land records and forcibly took the land. And gave it back to the landless peasant. An uprising had begun. Illegal. And unconstitutional."

"Today’s Naxalism isn’t limited to Zamindars or class struggle. In recent years, many other issues have added up which have aggravated the already worsening Naxalism. Issues like farmer suicide, informalization of the formal sector and contractualization of the industrial workforce, rising prices and soaring unemployment, development-induced displacements that include the creation of SEZs, EPZs, IT Parks and industrial hubs, environmental degradation etc., apart from gender and caste-based violence, have given Naxals more avenues to wage their war against the Indian State."

"I am utterly confused and tired. Everything is becoming clinical. I remember in 1985, a Leftist friend of mine had tried explaining the Naxal organizational structure to me, and finally exasperated, he’d said, ‘Trying to understand the Naxal movement is like peeling an onion. In the end, you will have only tears in your eyes and many disconnected and scattered layers of the onion.’"

"Recent studies say that the Naxals have well-established linkages with other insurgent groups and a few Muslim Fundamentalist Organizations (MFOs), which are actively involved in India. These links provide the movement not only with psychological support but also material support in the form of money and weapons."

"Naxalite spokespersons, on many occasions, have openly supported the actions and cause of the J&K terrorist groups. The Lashkar-e-Tayyeba (LeT) terrorists who carried out the attack on the American Centre at Kolkata in 2001 had escaped to Jharkhand and taken refuge in a Naxalite sympathizer’s house in Ranchi. In return for this and similar other favours the J&K terrorists who are well trained in handling sophisticated arms, impart training to the Naxalite groups. Intelligence agencies have also reported linkages between Maoist elements and the insurgent groups of the North-East i.e. the United Liberation Front of Asom, Nationalist Council of Nagaland, and People’s Liberation Army (ULFA, NSCN, PLA). North-East insurgent groups like the PLA and NSCN follow the Maoist ideology and were even trained and supported by China in the 1960s and 1970s."

"It has emerged that the Naxals have openly supported the activities of Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI) and both have been lately collaborating with each other. Naxalite groups in India have tried to sustain their fraternal and logistic links with Nepal’s Naxals. The outfits of India, along with Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist), have decided to work towards carving out a ‘Compact Revolutionary Zone’. The Indian groups have been extending moral, material, and training support to CPN (Maoist) cadres in guerrilla warfare, which has resulted in significant growth of Naxal violence since 2001. Cooperation between Naxals active in Nepal through Bihar, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, up to Andhra Pradesh, has provided the left extremists contiguous areas to operate, move, hide, and train. The Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) has been very active in Nepal and Bangladesh for long, especially along the borders, in their desire to encircle India and is giving support to numerous Indian militant groups based in Bangladesh. The ISI does not hesitate in providing moral and material support to these groups. This bond has been mutually beneficial to both the parties, as the left-wing extremists receive weapons from the ISI to be used against the Indian State."

"Linkage with Left-Wing Philippines Groups. A few media and intelligence reports from Southeast Asia state that the Naxalites in India have also developed links with the left-wing extremists of the Philippines, and through them, with other groups of Southeast Asia. The increasing expansion of Naxalism got further strengthened with covert support from other groups with a similar ideology in the Indian subcontinent. India’s ‘all weather adversary’ Pakistan has grasped the opportunity provided by Naxalism to further increase unrest in India and re-emphasize its dictum of ‘bleeding India by thousand cuts’."

"The US State Department's National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism has found that going by the number of terror attacks and the number of killings of innocent citizens every year from 2012 until now, the big-five terror group consists of the IS, Taliban, Boko Haram, al Qaeda, and the Communist Party of India (Maoist)."

"In an interview in 2007, Ganapathy, the Secretary-General of CPI-Naxals asserted, ‘We see the Islamic upsurge as a progressive anti-imperialist force in the contemporary world. It is wrong to describe the struggle that is going on in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, Kashmir, Chechnya as Islamic fundamentalism. Our party supports the Islamic upsurge.’ Commenting on the 26/11 massacre of Mumbai, Bimal, Politburo member, was quoted in Hindustan Times, saying: ‘We do not support the way they attacked the Victoria station, where most of the victims were Muslims. At the same time, we feel the Islamic upsurge should not be opposed as it is basically anti-US and anti-imperialist in nature. We, therefore, want it to grow.’"