Revolutionaries

"We do not surrender — we win or die. You've to fight the next generation and the next... and I'll live more than my hanger."

"I never submitted to the Italian government: I only had conversations with it."

"At the time I attributed their attitude to obstinate stupidity, or perhaps some personal graft. But this incident was fully explained by Pyatakov's subsequent confession. The matter was so arranged that Pyatakov could have gone back to Moscow and showed that he had been very successful in reducing prices, but at the same time would have paid out money for a lot of worthless cast iron and enabled the Germans to give him very substantial rebates. According to his own statement, he got away with the same trick on some other mines, although I blocked this one."

"Naturally, I was pleased to make this discovery, and reported to the members of the commission with a sense of triumph. But these men were distinctly lukewarm; they even brought considerable pressure on me to persuade me to approve the deal. I couldn't figure out their attitude. I finally told the commission members flatly that they would have to make such purchases on their own responsibility, and that I would see that my own contrary advice got on the record. Only then did they drop the proposal."

"Among other things, the commission in Berlin was buying several dozen mine hoists, ranging from 100 to 1,000 horse-power. Ordinarily, these hoists consist of drums, shafting, bearings, gears, and so on, placed on a foundation of I or H beams. The commission asked for quotations on the basis of pfennigs per kilogram. After some discussion, the German concerns later mentioned in Pyatakov's confession reduced their prices between 5 and 6 pfennigs per kilogram. When I studied these proposals, I discovered that the firms had substituted cast-iron bases weighing several tons for the light steel provided in the specifications, which would reduce the cost of production per kilogram, but increase the weight, and therefore the cost to the purchaser."

"In the same directive he raised the question – this was in the middle of 1934 – that now that Hitler had come to power it was quite clear that his, Trotsky’s line on the impossibility of building up socialism in one country alone had been completely justified, that war was inevitable, and that if we Trotskyites wished to preserve ourselves as a political force of some sort, we must in advance, having adopted a defeatist position, not merely passively observe and contemplate, but actively prepare the way for this defeat. But in order to do so, cadres must be formed, and cadres could not be formed by talk alone. Therefore the necessary wrecking activities must be carried on now. I recall that Trotsky said in this directive that without the necessary support from foreign states, a government of the bloc could neither come to power nor hold power. It was therefore a question of arriving at the necessary preliminary agreement with the most aggressive foreign states, like Germany and Japan, and the he, Trotsky, on his part had already taken the necessary steps in establishing contacts both with the Japanese and the German governments."

"During the period while I was detached temporarily from the Gold Trust and assigned to work in copper mines, I had an opportunity to observe at first hand the actions of Yuri Pyatakov, the vice commissar executed in 1937, after he had confessed to leadership of a wrecking ring. I went to Berlin in the spring of 1931 with a large purchasing commission headed by Pyatakov; my job was to offer technical advice on purchases of mining machinery. Some things happened on that occasion which I never understood until I read Pyatakov's testimony at his trial in 1937."

"I will not appeal your decision. You have already denied me justice by not letting me have a proper defense in this trial. I have done what you say, but I am not guilty. Ethiopia has been standing still, while our African brothers are moving ahead in the struggle to overcome poverty. What I did was in the best interests of my country."

"I must die so as to see again those who died before, and to tell them the seed we sowed has taken root."

"If I wanted, I could have changed cars on a daily basis. I could drink selected French Champagne everyday. When thousands of people would queue-up to enter the grounds of the Imperial Palace I had unfettered access to the Emperor. I chose to forfeit these privileges and opportunities and decided to free my people and country from darkness, poverty and underdevelopment. I had no other ambition."

"He was preaching socialism long before Marx, Stalin or Brezhnev. He said things would not go well for England until all property was held in common. He was hanged, they cut his stomach out and he was drawn and quartered, his body cut into four pieces. That was the way they treated the Militant Tendency in 1381."

"At this time, the commons had as their counselor a chaplain of evil disposition named Sir John Ball, which Sir John advised them to get rid of all the lords, and of all the archbishops and bishops, and abbots, and priors, and most of the monks and canons … and that their possessions should be distributed among the laity. For which sayings he was esteemed among the commons as a prophet — and a fit reward he later got, when he was hung, drawn, and quartered, and beheaded as a traitor."

"Now reigneth pride in prize and covetousness is held wise, and lechery without shame and gluttony without blame. Envy reigneth with treason and sloth is taken in great season. God do boot, for now is time. Amen."

"My good friends, things cannot go on well in England, nor ever will until everything shall be in common, when there shall be neither vassal nor lord, and all distinctions levelled; when the lords shall be no more masters than ourselves. How ill they have used us!… They have wines, spices and fine bread, when we have only rye and the refuse of fine straw; and if we drink, it must be water. They have handsome seats and manors, when we must brave the wind and rain in our labours in the field; but it is from our labour they have the wherewith to support their pomp.… Let us go to the king, who is young, and remonstrate with him on our servitude, telling him we must have it otherwise, or that we shall find a remedy for it ourselves."

"When Adam delved, and Eve span, who was then the gentleman? From the beginning all men by nature were created alike, and our bondage or servitude came in by the unjust oppression of naughty men. For if God would have had any bondmen from the beginning, he would have appointed who should be bond, and who free. And therefore I exhort you to consider that now the time is come, appointed to us by God, in which ye may (if ye will) cast off the yoke of bondage, and recover liberty."

"My fight is for the people. I will not allow my country to be looted anymore."

"This is not the time to sit back and relax. It's time to wake up and save the country."

"Every drop of my blood will contribute to the growth of this nation. I will keep fighting till my last breath."

"If we want to rid the country of corruption, we have to take the initiative. We can’t keep waiting for someone else to do it."

"How can the government stop anyone from protesting? The land is not their 'father's property'. The citizens are the masters of this country and the ministers are their servants."

"True patriotism is not just about waving the flag. It is about giving back to the country and standing up for what is right."

"Syngman Rhee declared the Republic of Korea (ROK) in Seoul after the May 1948 elections. Kim Il-sung followed up by declaring a new state from his northern capital Pyongyang in September. Making it a “People’s Republic” was not enough for Kim; he named it the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), in line with the slogans used at the time. The new governments got the blessing of their respective Superpower sponsors. Ironically, Stalin and Truman seem at the time to have believed that the creation of separate states made war less likely. In any case, both Soviet and US troops were withdrawn from the Korean peninsula soon after the new regimes were set up. As they solidified their governments, the Korean regimes made preparations for confronting each other. In the north, the Communists under Soviet guidance restored much of the industrial capacity that the Japanese has concentrated there. They also carried out a land reform plan that took land away from landlords, most of whom had worked closely with the Japanese, and put it in the hands of those who farmed it. The land reform secured support for the regime among peasants, and improved food supplies across North Korea. But it also contributed, with other Communist political campaigns, to hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing to the south."

"Kim Il Sung not only presided over the birth of a new nation in an old land, he was inextricably bound to the fate of North Korea. Perhaps to a greater degree than any other modern political leader, he may be seen as the full embodiment of the state. Indeed, Kim was more integral to state and society in North Korea than Stalin in the Soviet Union, or Mao in China."

"Despite what others might call disappointments, she never questioned the regime's authority to control her life. Unlike North Koreans who grew up along the border, my mother had no exposure to the outside world or foreign ideas. She knew only what the regime taught her and she remained a proud and pure revolutionary. And because she had a poet's heart, she felt an enormous emotional connection to the official propaganda. She sincerely believed that North Korea was the center of the universe and that Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il had supernatural powers. She believed that Kim Il Sung caused the sun to rise and that when Kim Jong Il was born in a cabin on our sacred Mount Paketu (he was actually born in Russia), his arrival was marked by a double rainbow and a bright new star in the sky. She was so brainwashed that when Kim Il Sung died she started to panic. "How can the Earth still spin on its axis?" she wondered. The laws of physics she had studied in college were overcome by the propaganda that was drilled into her all her life. It would be many years before she recognized that Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il were just men who had learned from Joseph Stalin, their Soviet role model, how to make people worship them like gods."

"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 remains venerated, and due to the luck of dying in time, has a remarkably good reputation in death. The opposite is very much the case with his unfortunate son, Kim Jong Il, who inherited power in 1994 and reigned for 17 turbulent years, till 2011."

"The Soviet Union, it is now clear, had a similar experience with Kim II-sung in North Korea. He was allowed to build a Stalinist state, with its own cult of personality centered on himself, at just the time when Khrushchev was condemning such perversions of Marxism-Leninism elsewhere. That country became, as a result, increasingly isolated, authoritarian—and yet totally dependent on economic and military support from the rest of the communist world. It was hardly the result Khrushchev or his successors would have designed, had they had the opportunity. They did not, however, because Kim could counter each suggestion for reform with the claim that it would destabilize his government, and thereby hand victory to the South Koreans and the Americans. "[I]n the interests of our common tasks, we must sometimes overlook their stupidities," one Soviet official explained in 1973. Both Washington and Moscow therefore wound up supporting Korean allies who were embarrassments to them. It was a curious outcome to the Korean War, and another reminder of the extent to which the weak, during the Cold War, managed to obtain power over the strong."

"The Cold War’s first hot war began on June 25, 1950. Following almost two years of armed skirmishes between North and South Korea, that day ninety thousand North Korean troops crossed the thirty-eighth parallel. They easily captured Seoul two days later and threatened to overrun the southern part of the peninsula. During the two preceding months, the North Korean communist leader Kim Il Sung had obtained Stalin’s assent and the Kremlin’s promises of military support for theinvasion as well as an endorsement from Mao. But the timing was the North Korean’s alone, and the invasion created a cascade of surprises for all the major parties."

"Kim Il-sung survived in power throughout the Korean War and after and, indeed, for the rest of his life. Because U.S. troops had withdrawn from South Korea in 1949, and because Dean Acheson had declared South Korea outside the U.S. defense perimeter, Kim Il-sung considered America's intervention in the war treacherous and made sure every subsequent generation of North Koreans to be murderous devils. This was an easy sell because the North Korean people had suffered so horribly from American bombs, napalm, bullets, and bayonets. Kim was also humiliated that he had to rely on the Chinese and the Soviets to be saved. He took it out on his own people, purging all members of the military and the government whom he considered possible opponents."

"Stalin and Kim made human idols of themselves because they believed - as utopian idealists always do - in the ultimate goodness of themselves and the unchallengeable rightness of their decisions. There was no higher power and so there could be no higher law. If people disagreed with them, it was because those people were in some way defective- insane, malignant, or mercenary. They could not tolerate actual religion because they could not tolerate any rival authority or any rival source - or judge - of goodness, rectitude and justice."

"In the Soviet zone there was nobody with Rhee’s Korean or international stature. Instead, the Soviets turned to the thirty-three-year-old Kim Il-sung, primarily because they believed that he would be fully subservient to Soviet interests. But they also chose him because of his proven leadership skills and because he had none of the political drawbacks of the more established Korean Communists, who had either been part of 1920s factionalism or joined in the 1930s Soviet purges. Kim showed both his loyalty and his acumen during his first few months in power—though he also made it clear that he and his Communist colleagues aspired to the leadership of all of Korea, not just a part."

"Kim Il-sung, one of the most prominent, bright and heroic socialist leaders of the present day, whose history is one of the most beautiful thing a revolutionary may have written in the service of the cause of socialism."

"To a certain extent, all dictatorships are alike. From Stalin's Soviet Union to Mao's China, from Ceauşescu's Romania to Saddam Hussein's Iraq, all these regimes had the same trappings … But Kim Il-sung took the cult of personality to a new level. What distinguished him in the rogues' gallery of twentieth-century dictators was his ability to harness the power of faith. Kim Il-sung understood the power of religion."

"No modern tyrant ruled as long as Kim Il-sung. For almost half a century he was the only ruler his country knew. His invasion of South Korea in 1950 brought him to the brink of disaster, but he was rescued by his allies and removed internal opposition through bloody purges. He turned his country into one of the most industrialized and regimented on the planet. The personality cult surrounding him reached unparalleled heights. North Korea's economy collapsed with the end of the Soviet Union, but Kim did not live to see the mass starvation that followed."

"A free and peaceful new world without exploitation and oppression was the age-long dream and ideal of humanity"

"War is not only a contest of strength, but also a test of morality and ethics."

"Man is the greatest being endowed with independence, creativity and consciousness and, at the same time, a beautiful creature who champions justice. Man, by nature, aspires to virtue and ennobling qualities and detests all that is evil and dirty. These unique features constitute his human traits."

"If a man who professes to be a communist punishes an innocent person by labelling him a reactionary, he's no longer a communist, but the worst of criminals."

"The Government of our Republic, whose basic ideal of foreign policy is independence, peace and friendship, has established good-neighbourly relations and is developing exchange and cooperation with those countries, which respect the sovereignty of our country and are friendly towards us, regardless of their social system. We believe the DPRK and the US can become friends if the US abandons its concept of confrontation with us and is ready to normalize relations with our country by respecting the freedom of choice. The matter depends on whether or not the United States has such a political will."

"We've always been under sanctions. Even under all those sanctions we have made the growth thus far, so I am not afraid.… If you wish to lift the sanctions then lift them, or if you wish to impose sanctions then impose them. I do not care. We will improve our economy even further no matter what."

"Thanks to our trust in people, we won everything."

"Revolutionaries, believe in the people and rely on them at all times and you shall always emerge victorious; if you are forsaken by them, you will always fail. Let this be your maxim in your life and struggle."

"The people are the masters of the revolution in each country. It is like putting a cart before the horse that foreigners carry out the revolution for them. The revolution can neither be exported nor imported."

"The basis of the Juche Idea is that man is the master of all things and the decisive factor in everything."

"The national assembly of each country, as its highest legislative body, has a mission and responsibility to realise democratic government. Democracy must be not only the basic ideal of state administration for championing people's right to independence, but also a common ideal of world politics for ensuring equality and cooperation among countries."

"When confederation is realized, and the ideologies of North and South are propagandized in the course of free intercourse between the two sides, the Republic [DPRK] will not be affected in the slightest, because it is a unified state. But the South is an ideologically divided, liberal country, so if we extensively propagate Juche Thought and the superiority of our system we can win over at least half its citizens. As of now South Korea is twice our size in population terms. But once we win over half the South's people in a confederation, we will be two parts to the South's one. We would then win either a general election or a war."

"We emerged victorious in every battle with the enemy at all times and in all places, because we were full of confidence in victory, and maintained an indefatigable fighting and self-sacrificing spirit without losing our composure and hope, even in confrontation with an enemy force, which was dozens of times stronger in number."

"In a nutshell, the idea of Juche means that the masters of the revolution and the work of construction are the masses of the people and that they are also the motive force of the revolution and the work of construction. In other words, one is responsible for one's own destiny and one has also the capacity for hewing out one's own destiny."

"While there are still imperialist aggressors, the state that has no defense power of its own to protect its sovereignty against the internal and external enemies is, in fact, not a fully independent and sovereign state."

"Engels once called the British army the most brutal army. During the Second World War, the German fascist army surpassed the barbarism of the British army. No human brain could ever imagine more diabolic and terrible cruelty then those done by the Hitler gangsters at that time. But in Korea, the Americans have far exceed the Hitlerites!"