Communists

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"The revolution itself originates from a dream of the future or from the craving for a new life."

"Socialism is a human ideal, an inevitable course of historical development, and therefore it is perfectly clear that socialism will rise again in the end."

"As fish cannot live without water, so guerrillas cannot live without the people."

"My God is none other than the people. Only the popular masses are omniscient and omnipotent and almighty on earth. Therefore my lifetime motto is: "The people are my God.""

"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."

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

"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."

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

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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!"

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"You must not overlook even the least practices which run counter to our Party's idea. It is all right if the cadre whom the party trusts behaves modestly, sincerely supports our Party, and works faithfully for the party. On the other hand, if he pretends to support the Party outwardly but has an ulterior motive and tries to make himself prominent and win over people to his side, such actions must not be permitted.… We have wiped out the factionalists and achieved the unity of the Party. If we are to maintain this unity firmly, we must not tolerate the slightest tendency toward nepotism, parochialism or factionalism within the Party and must promptly deal with any manifestations of "individual heroism.""

"What is Juche [the subject] in our Party's ideological work? What are we doing? We are not engaged in any other country's revolution, but precisely in the Korean revolution. This, the Korean revolution, constitutes Juche in the ideological work of our Party. Therefore, all ideological work must be subordinated to the interests of the Korean revolution."

"You Repocrat squires in the Farm Bureau,"

"Competition principle does not mean a competitive edge, comrades."

"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."

"Now every day, every hour, everywhere there is mat'rial (material) for meeting demonstrations!"

"Yugoslavia cannot exist without Kosovo! Yugoslavia will become disintegrated without Kosovo! Yugoslavia and Serbia will never give up Kosovo!"

"By the mid-1990s, the original ideological synthesis of communism and nationalism seems to have faded and was replaced by a Serbian nationalism couched in such extreme terms that it barred the participation of other peoples in the exclusive Serbian state that Milosevic and his supporters attempted to construct. Genocide was most likely not Milosevic's original intent, certainly not in 1987 when he began to make his bid for power. As in the other cases discussed in this book, the genocide, in this instance of Bosnian and Kosovar Muslims, emerged at moments of extreme crisis, which were largely self-generated by the Milosevic forces and their counterparts in Slovenia and Croatia. But the genocide also developed because of a set of deeper historical factors, notably, the potency of the ideology of nationalism, the continued commitment to communism on the part of important segments of the Serbian elite, and the typical— certainly by the 1990s—communist reliance on a powerful state to engineer the transformation of society."

"Milosevic, the head of Yugoslavia-become-Serbia, was certainly a supremely opportunistic politician. Nonetheless, he and his followers did articulate an ideology, actually, two ideologies. As the Yugoslav federal state system dissolved and communism collapsed all around Europe in the late 1980s, Milosevic positioned Serbia as the last defender of the communist ideal, the worthy successor to the post–World War II Yugoslavia founded by Josip Broz Tito. He melded this claim with another ideology, one that might have lacked philosophical depth on the order of Marxism-Leninism but was, nonetheless, deeply rooted in modern European history and in the specific historical experience of Serbs. It was, of course, an ideology of nationalism."

"I think you're a damn war criminal and you should be tried as one."

"The 'Butcher of the Balkans', Slobodan Milosevic brought genocide and slaughter back to Europe for the first time since the Nazi death camps. Unleashing a vicious regular army and bands of his personally coordinated militias onto a bemused civilian population, he started a series of wars aimed at eradicating un-Serbian nations from what he regarded as Serbian soil, often ordering wholesale massacre and rape. It was as if the murderous warlordism of the 17th-century Thirty Years’ War had returned to the civilized continent of Europe."

"The relationship between Slobodan and Mira is very strong and quite pathological. Milosevic was intelligent enough, but Mira gave him the love for power, and the ambition. She made him what he is."

"This is a catastrophe for Serbia. This is the worst person who could have been chosen to lead Serbia at this moment and I am afraid for the future... He has no patience, he has all the qualities that will lead us to disaster."

"In fact, many of the old conflicts and tensions remained, frozen into place just under the surface of the Cold War. The end of that great struggle brought a thaw, and long-suppressed dreams and hatreds bubbled to the surface again. Saddam Hussein’s Iraq invaded Kuwait, basing its claims on dubious history. We discovered that it mattered that Serbs and Croats had many historical reasons to fear and hate each other, and that there were peoples within the Soviet Union who had their own proud histories and who wanted their independence. Many of us had to learn who the Serbs and Croats were and where Armenia or Georgia lay on the map. In the words of the title of Misha Glenny’s book on Central Europe, we witnessed the rebirth of history. Of course, as so often happens, some of us went too far the other way and blamed everything that was going wrong in the Balkans in the 1990s, to take one of the most egregious cases, on "age- old hatreds." That conveniently overlooked the wickedness of Slobodan Milosevic, then the president, and his ilk who were doing their best to destroy Yugoslavia and dismember Bosnia. Such an attitude allowed outside powers to stand by wringing their hands helplessly for far too long."

"In some ways the young Milosevic resembled Stalin, a man initially - and how wrongly - categorised by his rivals as so unremarkable, he was dubbed "the grey blur". Like Stalin, Milosevic initially preferred to operate behind the scenes. Both men spent much time studying and mastering the mechanism of the apparat - as the party structure was known - its cell structure, the party hierarchy, and the way the party 'line' was developed, as a prelude to eventually taking power. On a personal level, Milosevic and Stalin also share a history of parental deprivation, together with a whole range of twentieth-century political leaders, including Bill Clinton and Saddam Hussein. Psychologists argue that an absentee father is likely to produce feelings of low self-esteem in a young boy. A child will question why his father has left, or does not want to be with him. The lack of a suitable domestic male role model also means the child is deprived of guidance following relationships in the wider world. In later life this can create a powerful drive to overcompensate. Some will seek to validate their self-worth through sexual promiscuitiy. Others enter politics."

"A bureaucratic and vindictive despot who, if he survives, will end up in a psychiatric ward one of these days. He is not a communist. He has used the party to climb the ranks. He possesses a vocabulary limited to slogans which nevertheless flow freely and swiftly, having no intellectual impediment or nuances. His sentences are composed solely of four or five words.… He is not accustomed to being contradicted. He can't tolerate opposition. He responds to the first insurrections because he has prepared himself, but he finds himself in difficulty at the second wave, when one must react swiftly. It will be difficult to compromise him. He holds the suggestive force of the fanatical Serbian mentality and, in some way, manages to charm his western correspondents."

"Milosevic did not have quite the psychopathic power of a Saddam Hussein or an Osama Bin Laden. He was that most dangerous of people: the mediocre and conformist official who bides his time and masks his grievances. He went from apparatchik to supreme power, and though he rode a tide of religious and xenophobic fervor, it is quite thinkable that he never really cared about the totems and symbols that he exploited. In office and in the dock, he embodied the banality of evil. In the excellent 1995 book The Death of Yugoslavia, written by Laura Silber and Allan Little, and in the fine BBC TV series that accompanied it, you can actually see the petty tactics and cynical opportunism that he employed like a sluggish maggot at the heart of the state that just keeps eating remorselessly away. He apparently had only one true friend, his adorable ideologue of a wife, Mirjana Markovic, who used to cheer him up about his big-eared and stone-faced appearance and about the suicide of both of his parents. Beware of those resentful nonentities who enter politics for therapeutic reasons."

"A remarkable challenge to Milosevic unfolded in the street of Belgrade in December [1996], led by three politicians who banded together in a movement called Zajedno, or the Together Movement. For weeks, hundreds of thousands of Belgrade citizens braved subfreezing weather to call for democracy. But Washington missed a chance to affect events; except for one ineffectual trip to Washington, Zajedno had no contact with senior American government officials, and the Administrations sent no senior officials to Belgrade for fear that their visits would be used by Milosevic to show support. For the first time in eighteen months, Milosevic felt no significant American pressure, and turned back towards the extreme nationalists, including Karadžić, for support. His tactical skills saved him again, and within weeks, the Together Movement was together no more, as its leaders split among themselves."

"We never fully understood why Milosevic decided to give Sarajevo to the Muslims. Certainly he had many good reasons. But in retrospect, the best explanation may be that he was fed up with the Bosnian Serbs and had decided to weaken their Pale base by giving away the Serb-controlled part of Sarajevo. By giving the Federation all of Bosnia's capital, perhaps Milosevic wanted to weaken Karadzic and stregthen the Serbs in other parts of Bosnia, especially Banja Luka. This explanation was consistent with one of Milosevic's main themes at Dayton: that the Bosnian Serb leadership had become an impediment, even though he had earlier made common cause with them. Milosevic had often talked of strengthening the "intellectuals" and businessmen of Banja Luka in order to weaken Pale; now he seemed to be putting his theory into action."

"I got the impression that he behaved very differently when he was with you, than how he actually felt about you. He is someone who will flatter you, but doesn't care at all about you, a man who will use people."

"Many tyrants have committed war crimes, but Slobodan Milosevic was the first to be put on trial for them. He was a grey apparatchik who would never have attracted international attention had he not exploited the disintegration of Yugoslavia by advocating a ferocious Serbian nationalism. His devastating campaign of 'ethnic cleansing' finally attracted a military response from the West. He ultimately had to face an international tribunal, but died in prison before he could be brought to justice."

"The story of Slobodan Milosevic is the story of a communist appartschnik in old socialist Yugoslavia who saw that the system was collapsing and decided to ride the tiger of nationalism in order to get to and preserve power. He wasn't really much of a nationalist. I dealt with him extensively during a number of years. He had his prejudices, but probably somewhat less than the regional average. He was an opportunist and a tactician. He was a man of power and ambition. He was never much of a man of principles, and history shows that he was an extremely poor strategists. He was extremely keen in winning the small battles – but he failed to see that he was losing the wars … He played on the fears. His was the propaganda of fear and prejudice. His duel with Croatia's Franjo Tudjman brought war first to Croatia and then, most fatefully, to Bosnia in 1992. They both tried to carve out their own pieces of that complex country at the centre of the Balkans. More than 100 000 people are likely to have died in the carnage, and millions had to flee their homes … He will be judged by history. Harshly. He brought disaster to his own Serbia."

"Slobodan Milošević, more than anyone else, caused a division within the Left and Centre Left, dividing the pacifists, anti-imperialists and anti-Americans from the anti-fascists and the internationalists. He reminded too many of us that inaction can be as toxic and murderous as action. He prepared us - for weal or woe - for the new world."

"I know that he was personally very upset and angry, and I think that he was very sincere in his behaviour and conduct, and he even said at one point that that leadership from Pale, that they were mad, if they had actually done that. And I’m quite sure that as far as he is concerned, he could not have issued an order of that kind. I do believe that Srebrenica, unfortunately, is the result of individuals who allowed themselves to perpetrate an act of that kind, and it is my deep conviction that it cannot be placed in the context of any participation on the part of the Yugoslav army at all, and that is why I said that Mr. Milošević, which was exceptionally angry, his reaction was very strong, and he considered that this kind of behaviour and conduct would worsen our positions with respect to preparations for the Dayton Conference. I think he even said that at one of the meetings. Of course, nobody would take on this great burden on the side of the Bosnian Serbs, that is."