communism

"The Chinese Communist Party’s drive to revive public faith in its history and values goes well beyond textbooks to include film, television, museum exhibitions — and even ice cream wrappers."

"The greatest successes of Soviet active measures in India remained the exploitation of the susceptibility of Indira Gandhi and her advisers to bogus CIA conspiracies against them."

"India under Indira Gandhi was also probably the arena for more KGB active measures than anywhere else in the world, though their significance appears to have been considerably exaggerated by the Centre, which overestimated its ability to manipulate Indian opinion."

"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)."

"Readers would be surprised to know that we also got books on socialism at government cost. The government thought that they would be able to divert the minds of political prisoners by making them interested in socialist ideas, which they thought were a lesser evil than ‘terrorist’ actions such as the murder of oppressive British officials. Thus, the government had some hand in making political prisoners in the Andamans interested in socialism. They had unknowingly sowed the seeds of communism among political prisoners detained in other jails as well."

"In the early 1970s, the KGB presence in India became one of the largest in the world outside the Soviet bloc. Indira Gandhi placed no limit on the number of Soviet diplomats and trade officials, thus allowing the KGB and GRU as many cover positions as they wished. Nor, like many other states, did India object to admitting Soviet intelligence officers who had been expelled by less hospitable regimes. The expansion of KGB operations in the Indian subcontinent (and first and foremost in India) during the early 1970s led the FCD to create a new department. Hitherto operations in India, as in the rest of non-Communist South and South-East Asia, had been the responsibility of the Seventh Department. In 1974 the newly founded Seventeenth Department was given charge of the Indian subcontinent."

"Nehru’s daughter, Mrs. Indira Gandhi, carried her father’s game much farther. In her fight for a monopoly of power, she split the Congress Party, and made a common cause with the Communists. Well-known Communists and fellow-travellers were given positions of power in the ruling Congress Party, in the Government at the Centre as well in the States, and in prestigious institutions all over the country. The Muslim-Marxist combine of “historians” had already captured the Indian History Congress during the days of Pandit Nehru, and many honest historians had been hounded out of it. Now this combine was placed in control of the Indian Council of Historical Research and entrusted with extensive patronage. The combine took over the National Council of Educational Research and Training also, and laid down the guidelines for producing school textbooks on various subjects. The Jawaharlal Nehru University was created and financed on a fabulous scale in order to collect Communist professors from all over the country, and form them into a frontline brigade for launching all sorts of anti-Hindu campaigns. The smokescreen for this Stalinist operation was provided by the slogan of Secularism which nobody was supposed to question, or examine as to what it had come to mean. Its meaning had to be accepted ex-cathedra, and as laid down by the Muslim-Marxist combine. In the new political parlance that emerged, Hinduism and the nationalism it inspired, became blackned as “Communalism”. Small wonder that the word “Hindu” started becoming a dirty word in the academia as well as the media."

"Indian Marxists have the power but lack the numbers, so they have cultivated alliances with all actual or potential enemies of Hinduism."

"During the 1920's and 1930's young radicals like Jawaharlal Nehru, Subhas Bose and Jayaprakesh Narayan were straining at the leash: they fretted at the patient and peaceful methods of the Mahatma. The Indian communists dubbed him a charismatic but calculating leader who knew how to rouse the masses but deliberately contained and diverted their revolutionary ardour so as not to hurt the interests of British imperialists and Indian capitalists."

"The contrast with the Communists is striking. The Communists stood exposed as traitors in 1942-47, when they informed the British government (a Soviet ally) about Quit India activists and served as a mercenary intellectual vanguard for the Muslim League by propagating economic and other secular-sounding arguments for Partition; once more in 1948-50, when they supported the separatist Razâkâr militia in Hyderabad and subsequently started an armed uprising of their own; and yet again in the run-up to the Chinese invasion of 1962, when they clamoured that “China’s chairman is also India’s chairman” and accused India of having started the war with China. But they were always back on top within a short time, fully respected members of the democratic political spectrum. Better still, they managed even to make other parties implement much of the Communist agenda, from the nationalization of the banks to an unnecessary degree of hostility to the West, upheld by Congress and Janata governments alike. Such are the results when you make it your priority to control the ideological air space, rather than the ground level of work among the masses."

"We have up to now devoted too little attention to agitation in Asia. However, the international situation is evidently shaping in such a way that the road to Paris and London lies via the towns of Afghanistan, the Punjab and Bengal. Our military successes in the Urals and in Siberia should raise the prestige of the Soviet Revolution throughout the whole of oppressed Asia to an exceptionally high level. It is essential to exploit this factor and concentrate a military thrust against India to aid the Indian revolution ... the European revolution appears to have withdrawn into the background we ourselves have withdrawn from the West to the East."

"[Marx thought that Hinduism] “was the ideology of an oppressive and outworn society”; he “shared the distaste of most Europeans for its more lurid features. (…) he was as sceptical as his Hindu followers were to be of any notion of a Hindu ‘golden age’ of the past.”"

"In this context, one should know that there is a strange alliance between the Indian Communist parties and the Muslim fanatics. In the forties the Communists gave intellectual muscle and political support to the Muslim League's plan to partition India and create an Islamic state. After independence, they successfully combined (with the tacit support of Prime minister Nehru) to sabotage the implementation of the constitutional provision that Hindi be adopted as national language, and to force India into the Soviet-Arab front against Israel. Ever since, this collaboration has continued to their mutual advantage as exemplified by their common front to defend the Babri Masjid, that symbol of Islamic fanaticism. Under Nehru's rule these Marxists acquired control of most of the educational and research institutes and policies."

"[This ideology was] “more Eurocentric than regular imperialism. It used radical slogans but its aims were reactionary. (…) Marx fully shared the contempt of the British imperialists for India. He fully subscribed to the theses of colonial scholarship that India was not a nation, had no history and was meant for subjugation. Marxism was Macaulayism at its most hostile. It blackened Indian history systematically. It gave to [the] Indian social and political system its own format, the one it had learnt from its European teachers. It saw in Hinduism not (…) a great spiritual civilization but only communalism.”"

"Ever since, they have supported every antinational cause: the crushing of the Quit India movement (1942), Partition (1947), the Razakar terror campaign to prevent the merger of Hyderabad with India (1948), the Chinese claims to Indian territory (up to 1962: “China’s chairman is also India’s chairman”). As late as 1997, Communist leader Sitaram Yechury refused to admit that China had been the aggressor in 1962. In the 1990s, they have threatened secession of the states they control in the event of a Hindu-nationalist election victory. It is a different matter that by the time this victory took place, in 1998, the Communist movement had become too weak and grey to hazard such action.... This kind of wild allegation has to do with the Communists’ bad conscience about their collaboration with the British against the freedom movement in 1941-45."

"Since some ignorant dupes of these Marxists denounce as “McCarthyist” anyone who points out their ideological inspiration, it deserves to be emphasized that “eminent historians” like Romila Thapar, R.S. Sharma and Irfan Habib are certified as Marxists in standard Marxist sources like Tom Bottomore's Dictionary of Marxist Thought . During the official historians' Ayodhya temple/mosque dispute in 1991, the pro-mosque team's argumentation and several other anti-temple pamphlets were published by the People's Publishing House, a Communist Party outfit. One of the recent textbook innovations most furiously denounced as “saffronization” was the truism that Lenin's armed seizing of power in October/November 1917 was a “coup d'état”. And in early 2003, while they were unchaining all their devils against glasnost , the Marxists ruling West Bengal deleted from a textbook a passage in which Mahatma Gandhi's biographer Louis Fischer called Stalin “at least as ruthless as Hitler”. Such are the true concerns of the “secularists” warning the world against the attempts at glasnost in India's national history curriculum."

"I turned inevitably with goodwill towards communism, for, whatever its faults, it was at least not hypocritical and not imperialistic. It was not a doctrinal adherence, as I did not know much about the fine points of Communism, my acquaintance being limited at the time to its broad features. There attracted me, as also the tremendous changes taking place in Russia. But Communists often irritated me by their dictatorial ways, their aggressive and rather vulgar methods, their habit of denouncing everybody who did not agree with them. This reaction was no doubt due, as they would say, to my own bourgeois education and up-bringing."

"Indian philosophy, Mao tells Kissinger, is ‘just a bunch of empty words’. ‘India did not win independence,’ Mao tells Kissinger, ‘If it does not attach itself to Britain, it attaches itself to the Soviet Union. And more than one half of their economy depends on you...’ In his important study, Garver reproduces a poem of Mao in which India is represented as a helpless cow with a bear—the Soviet Union—astride it. Garver cites the ‘Maoist exposition’ of the poem which explains the reference to India as follows: ‘Chairman Mao’s use of the cow as a metaphor for India could not be more appropriate. It is no better than a cow... it is only food or for people to ride and for pulling carts; it has no particular talents. The cow would starve to death if its master did not give it grass to eat... Even though this cow may have great ambitions, they are futile.’"

"During the great national upsurge of 1942, the Communists acted as stooges and spies of the British Government… Mr. Joshi (of the Communist Party) was placing at the disposal of India the services of his Party Members… Joshi had, as General Secretary of the Party, written a letter in which he offered ‘unconditional help’ to the then Government of India and the Army GHQ to fight the 1942 underground workers and the Azad Hind Fauz (INA) of Subhas Chandra Bose… Joshi’s letter revealed that the CPI was receiving financial aid from the British Government, had a secret pact with the Muslim League…"

"[When asked in 1963 that "now that there is Communist government in Kerala, what would happen if communists came to power at the Centre?"] - Communists, communists! Why are you all so obsessed with communism and communists? What is that the communists can do what we cannot do and have not done?... Why do you imagine the communists will ever be voted to power at the Centre? The danger to India, mark you, is not Communism. It is Hindu right-wing communalism."

"Indian society has no history at all, at least no known history. What we call its history, is but the history of the successive intruders who founded their empires on the passive basis of that unresisting and unchanging society. The question, therefore, is not whether the English had a right to conquer India, but whether we are to prefer India conquered by the Turk, by the Persian, by the Russian, to India conquered by the Briton.” England had to fulfill a double mission in India: One destructive, and the other regenerating - the annihilation of old Asiatic society, and the laying of the material foundations of Western society in Asia. Arabs, Turks, Tartars, Moguls, who had successively overrun India, soon became Hinduised, the barbarian conquerors being, by an eternal law of history, themselves conquered by the superior civilization of their subjects. [According to him the British were the first conquerors who were superior, and therefore inaccessible to Hindu civilization. They destroyed it by breaking up the native communities, by uprooting the native industry, and by levelling all that was great and elevated in the native society. The historic pages of their rule in India, report hardly anything beyond that destruction.] “The work of regeneration hardly transpires through a heap of ruins. Nevertheless, it has begun."

"The communists ... reject 'Congress dictatorship' but would welcome a strong state which would crush the communalists, esp the Hindu ones."

"Oleg Kalugin, who became head of FCD Directorate K (Counter-intelligence) in 1973, remembers India as ‘a model of KGB infiltration of a Third World government’: ‘We had scores of sources throughout the Indian government – in intelligence, counter-intelligence, the Defence and Foreign Ministries, and the police.’ In 1978 Directorate K, whose responsibilities included the penetration of foreign intelligence and security agencies, was running, through Line KR in the Indian residencies, over thirty agents – ten of whom were Indian intelligence officers. Kalugin recalls one occasion on which Andropov personally turned down an offer from an Indian minister to provide information in return for $50,000 on the grounds that the KGB was already well supplied with material from the Indian Foreign and Defence Ministries: ‘It seemed like the entire country was for sale; the KGB – and the CIA – had deeply penetrated the Indian government. After a while neither side entrusted sensitive information to the Indians, realizing their enemy would know all about it the next day.’"

"The Third World country on which the KGB eventually concentrated most operational effort during the Cold War was India... After the elections of February 1967, the KGB claimed, doubtless optimistically, that it was able to influence 30 to 40 per cent of the new parliament."

"The world revolution will pass through Shanghai and Calcutta."

"To dissuade them from anarchic terrorism against British individuals, the authorities gave them Marxist literature in prison, because orthodox Marxism believes in mass violence once the revolution arrives, but not in stray acts of violence. The British would take care that the great revolution never came, and meanwhile the terrorists-turned-Marxists would remain physically harmless. That is how Bengal as the hotbed of revolutionary nationalism became the centre of Indian Marxism."

"Uncompromising opposition to Gandhi and his cherished Hindu convictions meant that communists were cut off in a considerable measure from the mainstream of the patriotic struggle."

"For those unfamiliar with modern Indian history: the Marxists, already pushy for acquiring as much power in the institutions as they could grab, were handed a near-monopoly on institutional power in India's academic and educational sector by Indira Gandhi ca. 1970. Involved in an intra-Congress power struggle, she needed the help of the Left. Her confidants P.N. Haksar and Nurul Hasan packed the institutions with Marxists, card-carrying or otherwise. When, during the Emergency dictatorship (1975-77), her Communist Party allies threatened to become too powerful, she and her son Sanjay removed them from key political positions but, in a typical instance of politicians' short-sightedness, they left the Marxists? hold on the cultural sector intact. In the good old Soviet tradition, they at once set out to falsify history and propagate their own version through the official textbooks. After coming to power in 1998, the BJP-dominated government has made a half-hearted and not always very competent attempt to effect glasnost (openness, transparency) at least in the history textbooks. This led the Marxists to start a furious hate campaign against the so-called 'saffronization' of history."

"Copies of this already well-established reference tool will be well thumbed this year. But with all revolutionary events in the so-called communist world, the most important parts of it are now esoteric history. Of course, this yearbook never claimed to be more than a meticulous report of the previous year's events. The usual provision of lists of party congresses and parties, and a wonderful bibliography, still make it essential for those who dare to retain an interest in comparative communism. Though the editor notes that 'the world revolutionary process, thus, is still alive if no longer well' (p. xxxiii), he was using ' revolution' in a very different sense from most of his readers, who have since watched the breaching of the Berlin Wall and the coming of political pluralism to most of Eastern Europe."

"This work contains too much factual summary and is somewhat short on analytical propositions and theoretical considerations. However, within the framework and strictures of this probably insoluble problem, Staar and his able editorial staff did an outstanding job in offering us invaluable raw materials for further study of the various facets of the world Communist movement and the current literature of contemporary international Communist affairs. Those of us working in Communist Studies eagerly look forward to the next few volumes of this series."

"There is, indeed, some irony in the appearance of this worthy series two decades after it was most urgently needed. In the years after World War II, when intense anti-Communist sentiment in Western Europe and the United States coloured the reporting of developments in the Communist world scholars, government officials and the public at large would have profited greatly by the dispassionate appraisals which characterize the Yearbooks. Today these appraisals are less crucial to a grasp of world affairs. The world Communist movement itself, wracked by its own internal convolutions, is a less formidable force in international politics than it once was, or appeared to be. Most of the parties dealt with in meticulous detail in the Yearbooks are now almost without significance in their local political setting and are not likely to gain stature in the years immediately ahead; their leverage in international affairs is negligible. The parties that are important – that is, those in power and a dozen or so others which play an active part in democratic systems (as in Italy and France) – are better understood today through wider and more exacting research. The Yearbooks, for instance tell us nothing about the activities of the Eastern European parties or of the CPSU that is not already known through a variety of sources readily available to anyone interested."

"The volumes are, in short, extremely comprehensive and are as well researched and authenticated as the elusive activities of Communist parties, many of them clandestine, can be. The tone of the essays, meanwhile, is detached and impartial. While individual authors may sometimes lean on rumour and hearsay where concrete evidence is lacking, none of them can be charged with gratuitously perpetrating a distorted impression of world communism or of displaying a bias toward individual parties."

"Staar and his able editorial staff did an outstanding job in offering us invaluable raw materials for further study of the various facets of the world Communist movement and the current literature of contemporary international Communist affairs. Those of us working in Communist Studies eagerly look forward to the next few volumes of this series."

"One problem that did not face the analyst until the 1960s was the constitution of the international Communist movement. The parties that belonged to the Comintern were the orthodox parties, and even after its dissolution there was no problem in identifying members of the 'Stalinist international.' Within the last decade, however, the scene has been confused by the appearance of Marxist- oriented-guerrilla and 'New Leftist' movements which also might be designated 'Communist.' The editors of the yearbook have coped with this development by treating as Communist parties only those that describe themselves as Marxist- Leninist and are so recognized by authoritative Communist publications, such as the World Marxist Review. This is not a bad solution for identification of 'orthodox.' Communist parties. What the editors do not face up to, however, is the concept of the 'international Communist movement.'"

"The international communist movement has had a profound impact inupon the modern world. In the half-century since the Bolshevik Revolution the movement has expanded steadily. Communist parties now rule in fourteen countries and are active in some 75 others. At the same time, the movement has become more complex and fragmented, particularly as divergent tendencies have arisen in the past dozen years. For these reasons, the Hoover Institution decided to begin publication of a Yearbook on International Communist Affairs, a project designed to provide an annual compendium and reference work for scholars, teachers, students, policymakers, journalists, and others."

"It is the only comprehensive survey, in any language, of what is happening in the communist world. In this single volume we find the distillation of a year's research by full-time researchers working at the Hoover Institution and by correspondents and analysts located throughout the world."

"[The book series] constitute a scholarly tool of inestimable value for anyone interested in international affairs. As today's events constitute tomorrow's history and as these volumes give an extensive coverage to Asian countries, it was felt that the attention of this Journal's readers should be called to these excellent publications. The amount of useful information contained in these volumes is truly amazing and they are mercifully free from any trace of cold war terminology or polemics."

"If I believed that force would ever build a better world, I would be a Marxist revolutionary. But I have no more faith in poor men's animalism than in rich men's. And I want no proletarian revolution until the proletariat has demonstrated devotion to reason which the rich, with larger opportunities to cultivate that virtue, have so universally failed to achieve. I favor the underdog against the upperdog, but I favor something better than a dog above both of them."

"The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. WORKING MEN OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE!"

"Proletarians of all countries, we do not say that in Germany all the power has really been lodged in the hands of the working people, that the complete triumph of the proletarian revolution has already been attained. There still sit in government all those socialists who in August 1914 abandoned our most precious possession, the International, who for four years betrayed the German working class and at the same time the International. But, proletarians of all countries, now the German proletarians are speaking to you. We believe we have the right to appeal before your forum in their name. From the first day of this war we endeavored to do our international duty by fighting that criminal government with all our power, and by branding it as the one really guilty of the war. Now, at this moment, we are justified before history, before the International, and before the German proletariat. The masses agree with us enthusiastically; constantly widening circles of the proletariat share the knowledge that the hour has struck for a settlement with capitalist class rule."

"By creating the world market, big industry has already brought all the peoples of the Earth, and especially the civilized peoples, into such close relation with one another that none is independent of what happens to the others. Further, it has co-ordinated the social development of the civilized countries to such an extent that, in all of them, bourgeoisie and proletariat have become the decisive classes, and the struggle between them the great struggle of the day. It follows that the communist revolution will not merely be a national phenomenon but must take place simultaneously in all civilized countries. ... It is a universal revolution and will, accordingly, have a universal range."

"In all probability, the proletarian revolution will transform existing society gradually and will be able to abolish private property only when the means of production are available in sufficient quantity. What will be the course of this revolution? Above all, it will establish a democratic constitution, and through this, the direct or indirect dominance of the proletariat."

"We don’t think you fight fire with fire best ; we think you fight fire with water best. We’re going to fight racism not with racism, but we’re going to fight with solidarity. We say we’re not going to fight capitalism with , but we’re going to fight it with socialism. We’re stood up and said we’re not going to fight pigs and reactionary state’s attorneys like this and reactionary state’s attorneys like Hanrahan with any other reactions on our part. We’re going to fight their reactions with all of us people getting together and having an international proletarian revolution."

"Everywhere the proletariat develops in step with the bourgeoisie. In proportion, as the bourgeoisie grows in wealth, the proletariat grows in numbers. For, since the proletarians can be employed only by capital, and since capital extends only through employing labor, it follows that the growth of the proletariat proceeds at precisely the same pace as the growth of capital. Simultaneously, this process draws members of the bourgeoisie and proletarians together into the great cities where industry can be carried on most profitably, and by thus throwing great masses in one spot it gives to the proletarians a consciousness of their own strength. Moreover, the further this process advances, the more new labor-saving machines are invented, the greater is the pressure exercised by big industry on wages, which, as we have seen, sink to their minimum and therewith render the condition of the proletariat increasingly unbearable. The growing dissatisfaction of the proletariat thus joins with its rising power to prepare a proletarian social revolution."

"Big industry has brought all the people of the Earth into contact with each other, has merged all local markets into one world market, has spread civilization and progress everywhere and has thus ensured that whatever happens in civilized countries will have repercussions in all other countries. It follows that if the workers in England or France now liberate themselves, this must set off revolution in all other countries – revolutions which, sooner or later, must accomplish the liberation of their respective working class."

"The abolition of private property is, doubtless, the shortest and most significant way to characterize the revolution in the whole social order which has been made necessary by the development of industry – and for this reason it is rightly advanced by communists as their main demand."

"The proletarian revolution is impossible without the sympathy and support of the overwhelming majority of the working people."

"The Communist revolution is the most radical rupture with traditional property relations; no wonder that its development involves the most radical rupture with traditional ideas."

"The anarchists put the thing upside down. They declare that the proletarian revolution must begin by doing away with the of the state. But after its victory the sole organisation which the proletariat finds already in existence is precisely the state. This state may require very considerable alterations before it can fulfil its new functions. But to destroy it at such a moment would be to destroy the only organism by means of which the victorious proletariat can assert its newly-conquered power, hold down its capitalist adversaries and carry out that economic revolution of society without which the whole victory must end in a new defeat and in a mass slaughter of the workers similar to those after the ."

"The international working class Shall be the human race"