Anti Fascists

"We should regard ourselves as a part of the strength of the revolution and at the same time constantly make ourselves a target of revolution. We should revolutionize ourselves in the revolution. Without doing this is impossible to make the revolution a success."

"The Red Guards and other revolutionary organizations of the young people in the colleges and middle schools are the shook force fighting in the van in the great cultural revolution, and a powerful reserve force of the People’s Liberation Army."

"Our attitude towards imperialist wars of, aggression has always been clear-cut. First, we are against them, and secondly, we are not afraid of them. We will destroy whoever attacks us. As for revolutionary wars waged by the oppressed nations and peoples, so far from opposing them, we invariably give them firm support and active aid. It has been so in the past, it remains so in present and, when we grow in strength as time goes on, we will give them still more support and aid in the future. It is sheer daydreaming for anyone to think that, since our revolution has been victorious, our national construction is forging ahead, our national wealth is increasing and our living conditions are improving, wo too will lose our revolutionary fighting will, abandon the cause of world revolution and discard Marxism-Leninism and proletarian internationalism."

"Comrade Mao Tse-tung’s great merit lies in the fact that he has succeeded in integrating the universal truth of Marxism-Leninism with the concrete practice of the Chinese revolution and has enriched and developed Marxism-Leninism by his masterly generalization and summation the experience gained during the Chinese people’s protracted revolutionary struggle."

"In the last analysis, whether one dares to wage a tit-for-tat struggle against armed aggression and suppression by the imperialists and their lackeys, whether one dares to fight a people’s war against them, means whether ono dares to embark on revolution. This is the most effective touchstone for distinguishing genuine from fake revolutionaries and Marxist-Leninists."

"It must be emphasized that Comrade Mao Tse-tung’s theory of the establishment of rural revolutionary base areas and the encirclement of the cities from the countryside is of outstanding and universal., practical importance for the present revolutionary struggles of all the oppressed nations and peoples, and particularly for the revolutionary struggles of the oppressed nations and peoples in Asia, Africa, and Latin America against imperialism and its lackeys."

"The great proletarian- cultural revolution is aimed precisely at eliminating bourgeois ideology, establishing proletarian ideology, remoulding people’s souls, revolutionizing their ideology, digging out the roots of revisionism, and consolidating and developing the socialist system."

"The question now is not whether we do or do not study but whether we can truly grasp and apply what we study. To grasp and apply truly, we must combine study with reality. Only by linking it with reality can we understand it, fix it in our minds and apply it. Without linking it with reality, we cannot understand it, fix it in our minds and apply it."

"Each leader has the privilege of choosing the way he will leave [the political scene], [...] Andreas Papandreou chose to deny reality."

"There are many scandals in Greece [...] The only difference in my case is that here someone is saying, himself, what he did with Papandreou."

"Andreas was not a philanderer. He was a serial monogamist."

"He's one of the most fascinating characters [modern] Greek history has produced, but after all the sound and fury, he signifies nothing."

"One of the most courageous and committed politicians I have ever met."

"Andreas Papandreou corrupted the Greek psyche and gave to Greeks an entitlement culture based on their existence and not on their ability to work and take risks."

"Andreas is an actor who does not believe in anything. He loves himself, power and women, and that's all."

"Greece's only successful fascist regime probably was Andreas Papandreou's [...] Both the military regime of John Metaxas, from 1936 to 1941, and the junta from 1967 to 1974, never achieved a broad level of popular response to their message, which was seen as artificial, even ridiculous. By contrast, Papandreou's posturings and habits reassured a people who harbored a mistrust and envy of the West that their way of life was legitimate. Much like Mussolini, Papandreou succeeded as the embodiment of a nationalist-populist resentment. He was the ideal Greek every-man. He threatened America and backed up these threats by embracing America's enemies—Qaddafi and the terrorists. Papandreou danced the traditional Greek dances in public. He distributed the wealth to his partisans as a reward for their loyalty. Even with the Liani affair, in a male-oriented society like Greece's there was a certain resonance. Papandreou projected the Mussoliniesque image of the nation's first lover. His divorce and humiliation of Margaret Chant not only reinforced his (and Greece's) break with America, but also with another threatening demon of the Greek male, feminism."

"I may not believe in a Turkish threat, you may not believe in a Turkish threat, but the Greek public believes in it, and that makes it Greek reality and you have to deal with it in those terms."

"He [Andreas Papandreou] wanted to build a state with better salaries and services. But in the end, the money just went into the bureaucracy and not to the people. In fact, we built up such a large state that we had to keep borrowing just to pay its expenses. This was a terrible mistake."

"He's an unpredictable, very irresponsible man, ruthlessly ambitious, Andreas has to be Prime Minister of the world to be happy. But he has always had very generous feelings toward the Greek people."

"I no longer trust anyone, not even myself."

"I'm grateful to no one about anything."

"Don't worry, I’ll stop the audit. As long as I'm prime minister, nothing's going to happen."

"Tsovola give it [to them] all. (Τσοβόλα δώσ'τα όλα.)"

"The Greeks have betrayed me."

"Power to the people."

"It might be expected that an official would offer himself a present, but not one as big as 500 million drachmas."

"I accuse my accusers."

"Greece is rich but the Greeks are poor."

"Simitis is good, but he is not PASOK."

"National Independence, Popular Sovereignty, Social Liberation, Democratic Process."

"Time for "Change" has come."

"There are no institutions – only the people rule this country."

"Greece belongs to the Greeks.("Η Ελλάδα ανήκει στους 'Ελληνες.")"

"We consume more than we produce."

"Two things make the future real, the artist's imagination and the worker's hope. Fascism destroys both. Therefore the artist and the worker must unite to destroy Fascism. The Fascist artist is a traitor, the neutral is already dead. Art and anti-Fascism are synonymous."

"Why do I go on? Why I am doing this when I am 92 years and two months old? I could, after all, be sitting on a sofa in slippers with my feet up. So why do I do this? You think the man sitting opposite you is Manolis but you are wrong. I am not him. And I am not him because I have not forgotten that every time someone was about to be executed [during WWII], they said: 'Don't forget me. When you say good morning, think of me. When you raise a glass, say my name.' And that is what I am doing talking to you, or doing any of this. The man you see before you is all those people. And all this is about not forgetting them."

"We had absolute consciousness that it was a historic moment... No struggle for what you believe in is ever futile."

"If you know that I am an unbeliever, then you know me better than I do myself. I may be an unbeliever, but I am an unbeliever who has a nostalgia for a belief."

"My independence, which is my strength, implies my loneliness, which is weakness. (Italian: La mia indipendenza, che è la mia forza, implica la solitudine, che è la mia debolezza.)"

"Nothing is more anarchic than power. Power does what it wants. (Italian: Nulla è più anarchico del potere, il potere fa praticamente ciò che vuole.)"

"Seriousness is the only quality of people who have no other ones. (Italian: La serietà è la qualità di coloro che non ne hanno altre.)"

"There is a nice story which is rather revealing about the power of Keynes's arguments and their political content. It is about John Strachey, a Marxist. He was a cousin of Lytton Strachey ― they both had the same skill in writing. John Strachey wrote a book called The Coming Struggle for Power. In the 1930s this book was so influential in Cambridge, England, that, when I got there, every person had it on his bookshelf, prominently displayed. It was an exciting book, intellectually exciting to read. It was the Bible of Cambridge students. In my last year at Cambridge Strachey was invited by the Marshall Society, which was the general undergraduate society for economics student, to give a talk. In this talk he argued that Marx showed us the way to make the system work, an argument that met a very, very strong favorable response ― as his earlier writing had done. I had been asked in advance to move a vote of thanks at the end of the lecture; say a few words, if I could, about his lecture, but essentially to move a vote of thanks. I did, except I took the occasion to say that there would appear ― this was in November 1935 ― within a few months a book that would set out a superior method of analysis. It had been written by John Maynard Keynes. I didn't know whether Strachey would know the name. He motioned to me and said, "I'd like to thank you for your vote of thanks," and so on; "I'd like to find out more about the book by Keynes." And I told him, and he took down the name. At the time, I did not realize the connection between Keynes and Lytton Strachey and Lytton and John Strachey. A couple of years later I received a new book by John Strachey in the mail from the Left Book Club. I was astounded; it was absolutely Keynes. I mean, he was so much influenced by Keynes ― he had been so strongly influenced by Keynes that he became an instant, overnight, follower. Strachey really understood Keynes; it's a brilliant exposition and application to the British situation. It's rather more interesting than Keynes and deserves to be reprinted. It shows how Keynes had refuted Communism and how John Strachey, an extreme Marxist whose life up to then had been devoted to Marx and the Marxian course, had been completely changed by Keynes. Given that history, the later attacks on U.S. Keynesians, accusing them of being Communists, were incomprehensible to me."

"The institutions of democracy will be gradually and, if possible, imperceptibly withdrawn. The Press will become a better and better directed and drilled servant of the capitalist class. All other methods of disseminating information, notably the cinema and the wireless, will be more and more consciously monopolized. Power may be gradually withdrawn from a democratically elected Chamber (cf . Reform of the House of Lords in Britain) or alternatively the franchise may be gradually curtailed (cf. the proposals of the British Conservative party for withholding the franchise from persons in receipt of poor relief). At the same time, the habitual regime of police violence will be increased (cf. the present heavy sentences on working-class militants in Britain passed almost openly, not for any specific offence but because the accused were working-class militants, as notably in the case of Arthur Homer; the increasing use of terror in all American wage disputes ; the police regime in France, etc., etc.). This method applies the principle of " the inevitability of gradualness " to the introduction of an open capitalist dictatorship."

"Strachey [was] the most persuasive Marxist who has ever influenced this country's thinking."

"The fascist method essentially implies the attempt to create a popular mass movement for the protection of monopoly capitalism. Its adoption means that the directing capitalist groups consider that the regular State forces at their disposal are inadequate or unsuitable for repressing the workers. Thus, an attempt is made to create, by the employment of skilled demagogues, the expenditure of large sums of money, and the reckless dissemination of propaganda designed to play on every prejudice, a mass party composed of a petty bourgeois nucleus, combined with such backward workers and peasants as can be successfully deceived. This party is then used for the destruction by terror of working-class organizations of struggle, the workers' defence organizations, clubs, trade unions, newspapers and party machines."

"It is almost always impossible to get the fascist party together without using some anti-capitalist slogans, in the early stages at any rate, of the necessary propaganda. And this type of propaganda may have so coloured the minds of the rank and file of the Fascist party as to make them difficult adequately to control."

"The retention of power by the capitalist class by means of the success of a fascist party necessarily implies the scrapping of all democratic institutions. It involves revelation, without any attempt at a democratic disguise, of capitalist dictatorship. And a wise capitalist class will certainly not dispense with the serviceable mask of democracy, which has stood it in good stead, until no other course is open to it."

"We know well that the country suffers. So too do the people, with the inevitable procession of violence which accompanies war. It is necessary however, no matter the cost, for Brazil to once again sustain control of its own fate – whether or not new martyrs must add their blood to the blood already sacrificed by those who have given their lives for the liberation of their homeland. To retreat at this moment would forsake an ideal, for so many dear companions have made this great sacrifice. Indeed, after such an abjuration would there most certainly be a loss of life and liberty to absolute despotism. Despotism which has not once brought honor to Christianity or the tradition of generosity in our people. No one wishes to see, however, a desire to wage war on intransigent whims or ambitions. On the contrary: we want peace, and only for peace would we fight for more than fifteen months. Furthermore, we want peace without opprobrium, rooted in justice – that is, in short, able to restore to the country a peace of mind which it so desperately needs. We will surely repel the dark and tragic peace which masks the vilification of the slave’s quarters. Ultimately, if the finality of destiny must represent itself like the last swig of bitter gall to consume, we would prefer, without any hesitancy, the great anguish of being crushed."

"Fellow citizens: Today, after fifteen months of bitter fighting – marked daily by all of the anguish which darkens the sad situation of a civil war – having arrived at the heart of Brazil and the banks of the portentous Tocantins, we have the happy opportunity to once again remind our homeland that the patriotic crusade initiated on the fifth of July in the glorious city of Sao Paulo and whose ranks were later added to by the brave sons of the South, has not yet died and will not die, or be overwhelmed by the bayonets of tyranny."

"Brazilian People!"