Left Wing Nationalists

"What we now have to do is define the future of the world. Dawn is breaking out all over. You can see it in Africa and Europe and Latin America and Oceanea. I want to emphasize that optimistic vision."

"I think there are reasons to be optimistic...because over and above the wars and the bombs and the aggressive and the preventive war and the destruction of entire peoples, one can see that a new era is dawning... the era is giving birth to a heart. There are alternative ways of thinking. There are young people who think differently. And this has already been seen within the space of a mere decade. It was shown that the end of history was a totally false assumption, and the same was shown about Pax Americana and the establishment of the capitalist neo-liberal world. It has been shown, this system, to generate mere poverty. Who believes in it now?"

"But the government doesn't want peace. The government of the United States doesn't want peace. It wants to exploit its system of exploitation, of pillage, of hegemony through war... But what's happening in Iraq? What happened in Lebanon? In Palestine? What's happening? What's happened over the last 100 years in Latin America and in the world? And now threatening Venezuela -- new threats against Venezuela, against Iran?"

"[If] we walk in the streets of the Bronx, if we walk around New York, Washington, San Diego, in any city, San Antonio, San Francisco, and we ask individuals, the citizens of the United States, what does this country want? Does it want peace? They'll say yes."

"They [US officials] say they want to impose a democratic model. But that's their democratic model. It's the false democracy of elites, and, I would say, a very original democracy that's imposed by weapons and bombs and firing weapons. What type of democracy do you impose with marines and bombs?"

"Privatization is a neoliberal and imperialist plan. Health can’t be privatized because it is a fundamental human right, nor can education, water, electricity and other public services. They can’t be surrendered to private capital that denies the people from their rights."

"We have to re-invent socialism. It can’t be the kind of socialism that we saw in the Soviet Union, but it will emerge as we develop new systems that are built on cooperation, not competition."

"Everyday I become more convinced, there is no doubt in my mind, as many intellectuals have said, that it is necessary to transcend capitalism. But capitalism can not be transcended through capitalism itself; it must be done through socialism, true socialism, with equality and justice. I’m also convinced that it is possible to do it under democracy, but not in the type of democracy being imposed by Washington."

"The south also exists... the future of the north depends on the south. If we don't make that better world possible, if we fail, and through the rifles of the U.S. Marines, and through Mr. Bush's murderous bombs, if there is no coincidence and organization necessary in the south to resist the offensive of neo-imperialism, and the Bush doctrine is imposed upon the world, the world will be destroyed."

"Just look at the internal repression inside the United States, the Patriot Act, which is a repressive law against U.S. citizens. They have put in jail a group of journalists for not revealing their sources. They won't allow them to take pictures of the bodies of the dead soldiers, many of them Latinos, coming from Iraq. Those are signs of Goliath's weaknesses."

"When imperialism feels weak, it resorts to brute force. The attacks on Venezuela are a sign of weakness, ideological weakness. Nowadays almost nobody defends neoliberalism. Up until three years ago, just Fidel [Castro] and I raised those criticisms at Presidential meetings. We felt lonely, as if we infiltrated those meetings."

"This Sunday, what’s at stake is not whether a man stays in power but a political model that is confronting capitalism and neoliberalism. This NO is traversing the whole continent from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego."

"This project forms part of a distinct vision more progressive than the capitalist model. Today (Friday) we take a step forward in the economic and social revolution."

"For a long time my country has been divided, but by a minority that lives in extreme wealth with a majority that lives in poverty. This is a dangerous and explosive division. Above this reality that has existed for decades there is a process unfolding. We have improved literacy by 1.2 million people, which is part of an education system that helps eliminate social exclusion. There is a health program that targets 17 million Venezuelans. We have redistributed land, provided credit and created cooperatives. We are heading towards a society that includes people and that is against neoliberal exclusion and savage capitalism."

"We need to leave behind us the horrendous capitalist system that has been installed here, by those who attempted to dominate the people and to throw them into poverty. This why we are here, to put an end to this."

"I give you a replica of liberator Simon Bolivar's sword. For you who, like Bolivar, took up arms to liberate your people. For you who, like Bolivar, are and will always be a true freedom fighter. [Mugabe] continues, alongside his people, to confront the pretensions of new imperialists."

"He was an asshole to believe them."

"In 1989 the Berlin Wall fell, and in 1991 the Soviet Union fell, and then the victorious banner of neoliberalism was raised and the thesis of the end of history emerged, history is over, well, capitalism won, they said back in the early 90's, the end of history, the thesis of single thinking, there are no more alternatives. You see, a whole century has gone by and the Soviet Union is over and socialism is over, and communism is over and long live neo-liberal capitalism and all this fairy tale. Now, in Venezuela almost at the same time, a surprising parallelism, in 1989 the Berlin Wall fell, but in 1989 also in Caracas a people rose up and there was a popular rebellion of very high intensity, thousands and thousands, hundreds of thousands of people, the poor people above all, took to the streets in rebellion. Unarmed but in rebellion What did the people of Caracas rebel against on February 27, 1989? Against the neoliberal package imposed by the International Monetary Fund."

"We must confront the privileged elite who have destroyed a large part of the world"

"Marx collects historical currents of an era, reworks them and therein lies his genius, he contextualizes them, theorizes them and launches his thesis that gained strength and traveled half the world. I wouldn't say that Marxism is dead. A model that was tried to be put into practice collapsed and we see the result. Now, as a method of historical analysis of society, as a banner of struggles of social and political sectors of Latin America and the world, it has validity. There are things that I do not share about Marxism, especially in the praxis that was developed, but as an ideological flag I believe that it is valid and that it is still an idea-strength of revolutionary sectors, fighters."

"The Bolivarian National Front would like to count on many Marxists...as long as we do not fall into political radicalism. I believe that the unity of those currents that are revolutionary Marxists, revolutionary Christian Marxists, revolutionary Bolivarians is necessary in order to seek an authentically revolutionary path but proper to our reality, proper to our idiosyncrasy, to our goals and possibilities."

"The model that we are designing, inventing, surely has elements of socialism, of capitalism, of the human being. From that point of view, for example, we have called the economic model humanistic... And it is made up of three broad factors: one, is the State, and the need for an effective State, which regulates, drives, promotes, etc. the economic process; the need for a market, but one that is healthy, where the laws of supply and demand are truly met relatively, not a monopolized or oligopolized market. And the third factor: the man, the human being. That is why we have talked about a humanist economics project. There are undoubtedly different elements there. It is not a pure, new, totally original model but rather it takes elements from the various models, from various currents, that have been prevailing in the world in the last 200 years. But that remains in our projects, in the transition project."

"…We present to our generation and our compatriots [ideas that are not finished] for the design of a long-range project, in which the ideological is fundamental, but it must be developed like all the other facets or lines of the Simón Bolívar project, which accepts experiences from any country, trend, any historical era, etc. The tree has to be a circumference, it has to accept ideas of all kinds, from the right, from the left, from the ideological ruins of these old capitalist or communist systems, and there are elements or ruins that are gigantic and we must take them."

"We do not believe in this paradigm of the Western capitalist, bourgeois democratic world. Nor do we believe in the fallen paradigm of the Soviet Union: communism, the classless society, without the State, of absolute equality. That doesn't exist. So, faced with that reality, we have proposed, after thinking and analyzing it, the need to rescue what is ours."

"...the solutions for Latin America pass through the left, they have to transit the left, but they cannot remain within the framework of the left, they have to go beyond the left. Because we could hardly describe the Latin American armed forces as leftist. Trying to push them to the left (...) I think it would be a utopia. We could classify the Latin American armed forces, many Latin American soldiers, as nationalists, in this time of neoliberal denationalization. Well, you have to go through there too. The solution has to go through the left, through nationalism, through patriotism and achieve a great alliance of all these sectors [bold in the original] (...) The support of the military is vital to make a program of transformation in Latin America (...) Many left-wing intellectuals in Venezuela have not understood it (...) However, we have managed to shake the national soul, as Neruda said, we managed to put Bolívar on the table, with another sign , with a revolutionary sign."

"Before anything else I would like to say good day to all of the Venezuelan people, and this Boliviarian message is directed to the brave soldiers in the Parachutist Regimen of Aragua and the Armed Brigade of Valencia. Friends: For now, lamentably, the objectives we considered were not achieved in the capital. That is to say, we here in Caracas have not managed to take power. You did very well over there, but now is the time to reflect; new situations will come and the country must definitively get on the path to a better destiny. So hear my word; hear Commander Chávez, who sends you this message so that you may please reflect and put down your weapons, because now, really, the objectives that we have brought to the national level are impossible to achieve. Friends: Hear this message of solidarity. I thank you for your loyalty, your valor, your exuberance, and I, before this country and before you all, assume responsibility for this Boliviarian militant movement. Thank you."

"It makes one sad to see the sell-out of President Fox, really it makes one sad. How sad that the president of a people like the Mexicans lets himself become the puppy dog of the empire."

"I hereby accuse the North American empire of being the biggest menace to our planet."

"What they have implanted here, which is really a 'gringo' custom, is terrorism. They disguise children as witches and wizards, that is contrary to our culture."

"Let the dogs of the empire bark, that's their job; ours is to battle to achieve the true liberation of our people."

"The descendants of those who crucified Christ... have taken ownership of the riches of the world, a minority has taken ownership of the gold of the world, the silver, the minerals, water, the good lands, petrol, well, the riches, and they have concentrated the riches in a small number of hands."

"Knowing English is important, but for us Venezuelans I think it would also be important to know Portuguese. For that reason, we should evaluate the possibility of it being taught in our schools."

"That man, the king of vacations... the king of vacations in his ranch said nothing but: "You have to flee." and didn't say how... that cowboy, the cowboy mentality."

"[Pat Robertson] is expressing the wishes of the US elite. If anything happens to me then the man responsible will be George W. Bush. He will be the assassin. This is pure terrorism."

"But Cuba doesn’t have a dictatorship — it’s a revolutionary democracy."

"The grand destroyer of the world, and the greatest threat … is represented by U.S. imperialism."

"I am convinced that the path to a new, better and possible world is not capitalism, the path is socialism."

"The world should forget about cheap oil. [The price] will keep going up and some day arrive at US$100 per barrel."

"If I am assassinated, there is only one person responsible: the president of the United States. If, by the hand of the devil, these perverse plans succeed...forget about Venezuelan oil, Mr. Bush. I will not hide, I will walk in the streets with all of you...but I know I am condemned to death."

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

"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 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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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"

"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."

"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."

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

"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."